A tool that helps us, well, NOT "Slack"
The enterprise collaboration software that changed talking in offices
Why are we talking about this?
Slack is hands down my favourite “enterprise collaboration” tool. In human speak, what I mean is, if I could have it my way, I would use only* Slack to speak to people at work.
💡 Contrary to my misleading title, Slack actually is an acronym for Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge.
*In this post I briefly touch how upon how Slack prevents me from doing so.
The Inception
Slack’s story is a story of a great pivot and a classic example of how products that are built customer-first succeed. (Shoutout to the iterative builders and fans of the continuous feedback loop!)
Stewart Butterfield, CEO & Co-Founder, is a former video game designer. Back then, he wanted to build a game.
💡 Flickr (Butterfield’s past product) was actually a massive pivot from a failed game attempt called “Game Neverending”. Flickr was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005 for close to $22 million.
So before Slack came along, they (Butterfield and team) built Glitch - an online game which focussed on collaborative crafting and gathering activities. Some features of Glitch might ring “Slack” bells for you:
When a user first logged in, they were brought to a one-time street area where a staff member (called greeter) would briefly explain the game and show them features. (Slackbot, Greetbot)
There were “Groups” in the game which were basically like modern chat rooms. All the basic CRUD operations apply to these groups. (Think private, public Channels)
Then there were “Guides” which served as Knowledge Transfer sessions for the new joinees by seasoned players. (Think Channels with specific missions used for onboarding or solving common issues/debugging)
Game features illustrated above were rewired into Productivity features in the beloved Slack App. The Glitch characters today exist as Slack emoji.
The game was shutdown in 2012. The company then pivoted their in-game chat features (between players and staff) into Slack now. The inspiration being
“Giving people the same sandbox as Glitch - but where they would work”
Fast forward to actually building Slack-
In the initial phases of product development, in order to perfect the user experience, the High Agency folks onboarded Beta test customers for feedback.
“We begged and cajoled our friends at other companies to try it out and give us feedback. We had maybe six to ten companies to start with that we found this way.”
-Stewart Butterfield in a First Round Review article
Armed with the observations that came from insights from teams of varying sizes, the Slack squad made a bunch of changes to the product- nearly restarting their development process altogether.
This principle of taking customer feedback to heart and following up on it are what make Slack the wonderful product it is today (more on this later).
Slack’s launch strategy was also very interesting- back in August 2013, when they released their first beta*, they welcomed people to request an invitation to try Slack. They gained 8000 people on day 1.
*they called it preview not beta, because beta == buggy for so many
Why I ❤️ Slack
All aspiring PMs (APM?) prepare the “What is your favourite product question?”. Usually fresh-faced candidates (like yours truly) go for revolutionary products like Slack, and end up digging their own graves. Why, you ask? Because the interviewer almost always follows up with, “So how would you improve it?”
1. The Offering
What sets Slack apart from most collaboration software is the Team Workspaces concept.
While organisations are offered central control by limiting access to their workspaces to only employees, employees themselves are free to create private and public channels that can be used to communicate with anyone across the workspace.
Slack also offered everyone in the Team to now see what everyone else was working on. Along with the ability to trace the history of communications surrounding teams and projects.
If this doesn’t seem too impressive, remember this was back when IRC was the alternative (with no logs) or Lync (now Skype) with peer to peer communication at best.
2. Customer First-ness
Slack has been a customer first company since Day 1. They take all forms of feedback very seriously. In October 2016, a Twitter user asked Slack why do they encourage users to use the self-messaging option and then delete the chat for the free tier?
SlackHQ responded and released a 1-day fix winning hearts globally.
When I tweeted out my observation (slight self-marketing segue), they obliged me in a similar way. See the following thread:
3. Personalisation
Slack took “reaction”ing to another level. They allow users to react to messages using custom GIFs or emojis for quick communication.
I tried testing the limit of the number of reactions you can add to a message (in my personal chat window obviously) and I discovered the upper limit on reactions to be 23.
The microcopy (tiny pieces of text which make it seem like you’re talking to a human being, not a machine) in various screens which inform you of what went wrong, or if you have finished things, enhance the user experience ten fold.
The release notes with every Slack update are not just your usual list of bug fixes or feature descriptions.
If you are liking what you’re reading, consider sharing this with a friend or on social media!
Measuring the Success of Slack
Slack had perfected user experience through iterative feedback loops and simultaneously were on the lookout for how to measure their growth quantitatively.
It did not take the founding team very long to gauge what the North Star Metric for Slack would be:
The number of messages sent- in particular- 2000 messages
The team found that it took close to 2000 messages for the customer team to understand the value and potential of Slack. This was also what retained them from churning.
Backtracking from how their Freemium plan is posed, it makes sense now. For very small teams of 3-10 people, the cap on 10,000 messages is enough time for them to fall in love with Slack. But as the team sizes grow, the need for message storage also increases, thereby leading to conversions to the Premium plans.
okay Manshi, such a rosy picture till now…
What’s the problem then?
A problem arrived in the form of Microsoft Teams. <cue suspenseful music>
Early 2016, there were rumours that Microsoft wanted to acquire Slack, but instead decided to invest the $8 billion dollars into their homegrown app Skype.
Late 2016, Microsoft launched Microsoft Teams- which looked and functioned very similarly to Slack.
In response, Slack published a full page letter to Microsoft in the Times: (Web version of the letter)
The challenges brought forward by Teams or what MS Teams does wonderfully well:
a) seamless calls (video & audio) (Slack limits it to 15 users per call)
b) in-app integration with 3rd party apps and with the Microsoft Suite which gave users the freedom to make changes to their work without switching between apps
But arguably most importantly, the sales strategy:
c) Microsoft is selling Teams as part of their market dominant Office productivity suite. And now recently, also selling Microsoft Teams with SAP’s intelligent suite of solutions.
(A deeper analysis of how this is a direct threat would be a whole new article ofcourse.)
But, let me just say that this is also why most people speculate that Slack was acquired by Salesforce (for a whopping $27.7 Billion!).
Butterfield defended this and went on record to say,
All the talk about competing with Teams is “overblown”
Which of course, reaffirms the fact even more.
phew! That was one of the long ones…
To conclude
Is the future using multiple apps for communication ? Or will we have one app to rule them all?
I am really excited to see what the battle of office communication will look like, given the pandemic and the proliferation of remote working teams. While Slack had first mover’s advantage and arguably created a niche space for itself as far as communication apps go, competitors have not been slow to catch up.
Are we getting Zoom integrations in our communication apps or a more Discord-like experience? Personally, I’m game for a more immersive experience maybe a sort of Virtual Environment where I can hangout with my colleagues.
Only time will tell.
That’s All Folks! Please reach out to me for feedback and/or comments.
Disclaimer: Opinions are my own, images are open-sourced and I tried making the article as link intensive as I could to get my citations right.
For those of you wonderful folks who stuck with me till here, here are some links for
Further Reading:
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Loved the read. Oh, and slack!
Great post.