Item: Slack
Rating: 9
Author: Kelsey Wong

Overall Satisfaction with Slack

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Slack for the majority of our asynchronous work-related communication. This includes asking questions for feature development, project management, prioritization, managing customers and business, and more. We use a lot of the integrations as well, like Zoom, Google Calendar, Notion, or Forkable, to integrate with the other tools that we use. Slack helps us to have open communication, keep history of important conversations, track issues and resolution, and support each other debugging. We also have external channels with some of our customers or technical partners for coordination. We typically use Slack for any internal communication, and then we'll use email for corresponding with people outside of the company.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Channels for separating conversations by topics
Integrations with other platforms
Threads for consolidation of messages and to avoid unnecessary notification noise
Activity tab for managing reactions, threads, responses, and DMs

Cons

Would love a better integration with GitHub. For example, notifications when your PR is updated, when review is requested, @-mention in comments, etc.
Improved "Later" tab, for example the ability to create to-do lists or making the "Later" tab into a more powerful to-do list (annotate items with notes)
More powerful integrations, e.g. Google Calendar could render a calendar view within Slack, rather than sending the daily schedule

Return on Investment

Improved communication and coordination to move companies from pre-POC, to POC, and then to paid partnership at a faster pace
Increased observability and visibility, in terms of time to detection and time to resolution of issues on production environments
Reduced friction in scheduling and executing synchronous communication, either directly through Slack huddles for quick calls or through the Zoom integration for longer meetings

Usability

Slack is really easy to use and user friendly! It's straightforward to browse channels, create threads, navigate notifications, etc. A lot of improvements have been made over time so that it's easy to customize the notifications you want and make sure that you don't miss any important messages. I also really enjoy the feature of creating sections in the side panel so that I can organize my channels, collapse certain groups, and make sure that I'm staying on top of everything in my organization.

Alternatives Considered

Google Chat and Discord

I really prefer Slack the most! I appreciate how it's portable and lightweight while still having a rich feature set that isn't overwhelming. I like that it's a separate application on my computer and phone, rather than being built into the browser only. I personally don't like how Google Chat is built on top of Gmail because I feel like email and instant message serve different purposes. I also really like how Slack has customizability in terms of organization with channels and threads that just isn't offered in Google Chat. I haven't used Discord enough to properly evaluate it, but it wasn't as user-friendly to onboard to.

Key Insights

Do you think Slack delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Slack's feature set?

Yes

Did Slack live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Slack go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Slack again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Datadog

Likelihood to Recommend

Slack is really effective for smaller teams to use as an internal communication platform. I think that it's still suitable even for companies of up to 500-1000 employees, but for larger teams it's less appropriate (or would require more aggressive organization, e.g. keeping channels protected and on an invite-only basis). It's really helpful for small team-to-small team communication too (like in our case where we create external channels to support POCs/business partnerships). It's not great for direct collaboration (e.g. it's hard to iterate on a project spec or a document together, directly in Slack) but it's well suited for conversational coordination, like planning meetings or asking informational questions.

Slack Feature Ratings

Comments

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Great team communication platform