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Show HN: Bring order to Slack channels
Hey there,
You are an Engineer or Engineering Manager, your team has a Slack channel where people come and:
* ask questions about product
* ask for code reviews
* one-off requests to help with a bug
When there are >30 people distributed across time zones, you get lost in incoming requests, code reviews get delayed, people ping your team again and again to review the PR they created 10 days ago. You lose visibility on what's already responded, what is not. You scroll through the messages and try to respond them or assign a someone in your team. Now multiply this with number of channels you are in and you have bunch of your own open requests waiting to get resolved.
Let me introduce you to a "@work" bot: https://slack.com/apps/A04KSRC0606-work
"@work" creates a virtual queue in the Slack channel. Every request can be added to the queue as a task. You can assign task to someone in your team and eventually mark it as completed.
Best thing is, every morning, engineer in on-call rotation can get list of all open questions/review requests, quickly navigate to the thread and go one by one to resolve them. No need to scroll through messages and trying to figure out which requests are still open.
For some use cases, you can even replace Jira. How? For each project create a new channel, add tasks as you go and you have visibility over the tasks across channels
Would love to hear your feedback!
[0] - https://slack.com/apps/A04KSRC0606-work
- getworkbot 3y agoClickable link: https://slack.com/apps/A04KSRC0606-work https://slack.com/apps/A04KSRC0606-work
- codingdave 3y agoYour use case feels like a stretch. Code reviews are handled via your source control system, one-off request to help with a bug are likely to be DMs or discussions... no idea why a manager would get involved in that, and questions about product go to... the product team, not the engineers or their manager. Even if you do pick out some better use cases, anyone who is swamped by micromanaging Slack conversations has a problem with how they use their tools. They do need a solution, but doubling down on letting everything land in Slack by turning it into an input queue for a bot, and thinking about replacing other tools with that bot/queue... that is not the answer.
- getworkbot 3y agothanks for a critical feedback, which is always valuable and opens up different perspectives. > Code reviews are handled via your source control system Indeed, but from my experience working for small startups and Big Tech, a lot of times I have seen people not checking which PRs are assigned to them. Part of the reason how noisy source control systems become (every commit triggers notification). > questions about product go to... the product team, not the engineers or their manager. Some systems get so complex that even Product doesn't have full picture, think about 300 A/B tests running currently in your system, without checking which experiments are enabled for a particular customer, it is difficult to exactly tell how experience looks like to the customer, so you need help from engineers. > micromanaging Slack conversations has a problem with how they use their tools. not sure, I follow this part. This is not to help with micromanaging people, but to help teams who are responsible for the product and project to resolve requests in a timely manner. Even if manager never looks in incoming requests, accountable teams want to get visibility on what's not answered yet. Appreciate your feedback, which helps me to think more deeply about the product I am building and how to help teams
- tuyguntn 3y agoNice! I was looking for something similar recently to organize our slack channels, gets messy quickly. Does it support labeling the questions and have statistics generated on a weekly/monthly basis?
- getworkbot 3y agoWe don't have this capability at the moment to label tasks, then show some type of statistics for it and this is something we can prioritize for upcoming releases. Thanks for the idea.