So a couple months ago (1st of feb) I joined a new company, BookThat Group.
When I started I was surprised to see that they had very little processes in place. Internal communication took place via email and WhatsApp, we are talking about work and personal data being shared through these apps. Not the best practises I would love to see. So I suggested using slack for (faster) internal communication.
Why Slack?
For me Slack is the obvious choice for (internal) team communication, especially in a fast paced environment like ours. It keeps conversations organised and in one place, in my opinion it’s 9000 times better than emailing back-and-forth.
WhatsApp and email may have worked when the team was smaller, but they quickly become chaotic as more people join. Tracking important messages becomes more difficult, work and personal conversations blur and privacy becomes a concern when using personal apps for professional communication.
Not only does Slack allow us to organize channels by department and project, but it also ensures that conversations stay within the company, even if someone quits. No more worrying about work-related data sitting on a personal device.
How I implemented Slack.
Setting up Slack is a super easy straight forward task. First I created our environment and added all the team members. In hindsight I should have spend more time on onboarding, especially for the less technical team members.
I created some basic channels:
#generalfor company-wide announcements.#dev-bookthatA place for dev team and PO to collaborate.#team-heyudedicated to the Heyu team.#meld-hier-je-ticketsA channel to report bugs and create feature requests. - this channel was a game-changer#uptimerobotfor monitoring uptime#slack-tipsan introduction to Slack for the team.#boodschappenA place to add lunch items to the groceries list. Believe it or not but this used to be a handwritten list in the kitchen, and every week someone had to snap a photo of it to send to the person ordering food.
Once we got the channels in place it was time to encourage our team members to use the DM’s of slack rather than WhatsApp.
Quick Benefits
With Slack our communication became more structured and the team got used quickly to channeling discussions into the appropriate spaces. For our PO this was amazing. Instead of getting WhatsApps, emails, phone calls and people telling her about bugs and having to create, track and give status updates about all these bugs/features she now had one channel to rule them all 🤓. This also prevented duplicated bugs because now the whole team could track them in one place.
Integrations to boost productivity
One of the biggest reasons I advocated for slack was integration capabilities. Tools like Google Calendar, GitHub and Jira directly into Slack, allowing us to work from one single platform without constantly switching. For example the Jira plugin posts updates about our assigned tickets.
And let’s not forget the fun stuff - We added Giphy and created some custom emoji’s.
Challenges and Lessons Learned
Of course, there were a few bumps along the way. Not everyone was thrilled about leaving WhatsApp initially, especially since it felt comfortable and familiar. It took a bit of time for some team members to adjust, but I found that regular check-ins and reminders to use Slack helped reinforce the shift.
In the end, Slack didn’t just change how we communicated — it laid the groundwork for more organised, efficient workflows.