What the Missions acquisition means for Slack developers
A note from Slack’s General Manager of Platform
This morning we announced our acquisition of Missions, a tool that makes it easy for anyone in a company to automate processes and tasks in Slack. Our developer community is already extending what Slack can do for their own companies — 15,000 new internal integrations are written every week to simplify common tasks. We’re excited to bring Missions into our core developer toolkit so people in any department can do the same, from marketing and sales ops, to business analysts, and others who are charged with improving their team’s productivity.
Here’s what this means for you, our developer ecosystem.
What’s on the roadmap?
The Missions product will grow and evolve as we integrate it into the core Slack offering. The first release will focus on enabling people to make Slack itself more useful to our customers, like the ability to manage approvals and share notifications.
For instance, a recruiting coordinator could create a simple app to manage candidate approvals and rejections between their HR team and the relevant hiring manager.
Missions for Developers
Missions will deepen our 3M+ paid users’ understanding of, and engagement with, the Slack platform. As a result of this, we will enable more teams to build simple approval processes and notifications in Slack as well as the use of Missions by Slack developers.
Our aim is to make interactions between software and people delightful — and we know it can be difficult and time-intensive to build these services from the ground up. That’s why in addition to providing Missions to our customers, we also see the acquisition as part of our broader roadmap – enabling partners and developers to make their own development process easier.
Our longer-term vision for Missions is to enable developers to trigger workflows with less overhead through an extended API. Hooking into Missions will make it faster for developers to integrate their Slack app with third-party services. For example, the developer of a team lunch coordination app could programmatically launch a “mission” to coordinate settling up costs between lunchgoers. You could trigger a mission to extend your app functionality in Slack. Or, you could allow Slack users to customize a mission, triggered by your third-party service, to suit their team’s unique needs.
As plans develop, we’ll represent the Missions roadmap on our public developer Trello board. Sign up on the Missions homepage to be notified when the next evolution of the product is ready.
We’re looking forward to seeing what you build.
Have questions, comments, or ideas to share? Tell us what you want to see next @SlackAPI.
