How we use Slack when building digital products

Our best practices using Slack — the modern platform for team communication

Working for Bauer Xcel (digital branch of Bauer Media Group) I’m involved in building different digital products: on-line services, websites, mobile applications and APIs.

End of 2013 we started using Slack, to tweak our communication, make our lives easier and boost up productivity. We were extremely impressed by the quality of the platform, and how fast it was picked up by everyone in the office (and people usually resist change).

I’m currently a part of 4 teams of different size (15–50 people). We are located around the world (mostly in the same time zones). We are working in parallel on several big, medium and small projects. We have multiple products that are not under active development, but still need attention and maintenance. I use Slack desktop application to switch between teams.

I’ve pointed out some principles we are following, that are working for us. It’s not one-for-all solution, and not all of teams I’m part of follow exact same principles:

• We have one #general channel for everyone, to write about everything work related or not, this is where the most kitten gifs get posted in.
• #general channel is where people greet each other when they start their work (letting others know they are available) and say “Bye!” when they finish.
• Since we don’t seat in one office, we use #general to inform others that we are leaving our desk for a longer time (coffee, bank, commuting, whatever). Emojis server great purpose: ☕, 🍝, 🍕. Simple “brb” is great as well. We also say “/me is back” once we are back (for some reason we did not pick up Slack’s away status feature).
• For each project (let’s take project Love Food as an example) we have one main #love-food channel where the project related discussions take place.
• Most of the notifications coming from integrated services are going to the main project channel: #love-food. Those could be: newly created user stories/issues/bugs, successful deployments, release notes or critical production issues/incidents.
• Some teams would also have one extra channel #love-food-dev for some detailed tech chat and integration with some tools that might be irrelevant for other people involved in the project, like detailed and frequent notices from GitHub or CI/CD tools.
• In the #love-food-dev channel we would usually see notices like

• For discussion related to different areas of our business we have separate channels like #seo, #audience-development, everyone can join, everyone can contribute.
• We would also create a channel for one time or reoccurring events (like #research-day for IT department), where we get to chat for the whole day about particular ideas/post results/ask questions — and not everyone from #general channel could be interested.
• We integrate Pingdom.com notifications into #general channel (as soon as the product is released) since when something goes down, it has highest priority.
• We value open channels over private groups (there are no secrets, so everyone can join the conversation). Keeping the communication open is one of the best things that happened thanks to Slack.
• We have a Google Hangout integration. Typing /hangout starts a Hangout and posts a link to the channel (we use it for most of the meetings).
• For our stand up meetings, and other regular meetings we use same Hangout rooms, so we made Slackbot to respond to food-hangout with a hangout link that we use.
• We use /giphy integration intensively (it posts random gifs based on given keywords) — to make our chat even more fun. Usage decreases over time though.

• We were experimenting with subscribing to Twitter/RSS feeds — but so far nothing useful came out of it.
• We had channels like #jira-notifications, #pingdom-alerts, #newrelic-reports where all the notifications from those services were sent to. For most participants this was too much information about events that were irrelevant for them, they were unsubscribing. We sent those notifications directly to product channels now.
• We follow and often laugh a lot reading Slack’s release notes/change log (i.e. in the AppStore for iOS and OS X) — apart from being entertaining and honest they reveal great hidden functionality gems.
• E-mail usage within our projects was decreased by around 80% thanks to Slack — which is AMAZING with capital letters.

We are currently considering switching to one big Slack team (merging 4 teams together), as one and two years ago Slack was picked up independently by local departments to improve their communication — and that’s how we end up having several Slacks/teams.

Slack is an awesome tool, that made our work easier, more efficient and definitely more fun! It’s hard to imagine building digital products with remote teams without Slack now.

I have also written an article describing my favourite Slack shortcuts and how I use Slack on a daily basis: How I use Slack.