Three Reasons You Should Try Stride
Over the last 3–4 years enterprise messaging has completely disrupted the workplace and truly paved a new road for the possibilities of the future of work.
Given that we’re “in the space” the team and I at Obie.ai have tasted all of the flavours (sp: I’m Canadian) of enterprise messaging platforms. To be honest, they all have their pros and cons. We’ve done a deeper dive into the new Atlassian Stride over the past few months while bringing Obie to Atlassian customers. Our goal of partnering with Atlassian is to enable companies to access their company knowledge and documentation right within Stride. We wrote how we built this here. So, I wanted to share some things I personally noticed when using Stride.
1. You Get More Done
Since starting to use Stride the one thing that stands out to me is focus mode. Focus mode is a feature, but so much more than that. It actually helps me get more done.
Reducing the noise from someone’s workflow is definitely something we’re familiar with at Obie.ai and something that is becoming increasingly topical in the modern workplace. An influx of emails, DM’s, pings — that damn notification spark in your dock! While teams inhabit messaging tools more and more and attention shifts deeper, disruptions and distractions have the potential to significantly chip away at your productivity — the exact problem these tools promise to solve for us. To me, Atlassian has done an excellent job at designing Stride with this in mind. By enabling focus mode, with just one click you can mute all incoming notifications AND eloquently communicate that with the rest of your team. Not only that, but I feel that the Stride team has been very thoughtful of when, even out of focus mode, they are sending you that notorious notification spark and push notifications. I have found a great balance when using Stride of “being in the know” of the happenings with the team, but not getting sucked into the productivity loss abyss.
2. The Sidebar (and the apps)
If you’re not a Stride user, you likely have no idea what the “sidebar” is, but it’s wonderful! Of course, from a biased designer standpoint the sidebar (seen below) offers endless possibilities to create rich experiences right in Stride. But from a user’s perspective, I’m really enjoying some of the new apps that leverage the sidebar in the Stride Marketplace like: Polly the team polling bot, Standbot for team standups and, I can never get enough of Trello in my life, so why not bring more of it in Stride!
The sidebar really helps apps go that “extra mile” past just conversational experiences by more utility to solutions integrating with Stride. To me, from a design perspective, the sidebar is a way less invasive way to use my favourite app or feature no matter where I am in Stride.
3. Meetings That Work!
Speaking of the sidebar, you can easily start Stride meetings anywhere with one click in the sidebar. Video conferencing isn’t a very novel concept in 2018, but that doesn’t mean we are flooded with excellent choices. We have a Telsa floating in space, but we haven’t cracked the code on team conferencing? Maybe Stride has. Honestly, it just works. Of course, you have to have the standard prerequisites (like a stable internet connection), but really, it works!
You can pop in and out of meetings with ease via Stride rooms and DMs. You can even invite people from outside your organization to join a meeting! I’ll be honest, I stumbled across that beautiful feature by accident last week and it made my day. Now we can do client calls right from the comfort of Stride and have comfort in knowing we’re going to have a stable call!
And that’s all for now folks! I’m really bullish on enterprise messaging as a whole, so it’s always exciting to see updates from Slack, Cisco Spark, Microsoft Teams and the recent launch of Google Hangouts Chat, but wanted to take some time to share what’s really special about Stride since I’ve started to use it.
I would love to hear what your experience has been like with Stride, so please reach out or sound off in the comments if you have something to share.
And if you do end up taking Stride for a test spin make sure to try out Obie for your team.
