This blog post is different from my previous posts. In this post, I want to analyze a product and discuss how it can evolve in the short-term to deliver even more value to its users. The underlying assumption is that if it is able to deliver a lot of value to its users, then there would be a significant impact on its business growth.
The motivation behind writing this post is that I have never done a detailed exercise like this in the past for a product that I’m not involved with professionally. Therefore, I thought it would be interesting to select a product, analyze the vision of the product and then explore disruptive and expansive features it could build to deliver on its vision.
I’ve chosen Slack as the product I want to focus on. I’ve been a user of Slack for the last 3 years. I love the product and I’ve often thought about how Slack can evolve its product to add more value to its users. Based on my experience with Slack, I have a number of ideas on how Slack can enhance its functionality.
Approach
To set the context, I will cover the following topics in this order:
- What is Slack, who are the users of Slack and why do they use Slack
- The target segment I want to focus on
- The problems that the target segment faces
- Slack’s vision for the target segment
- If Slack delivers on its vision, how do we measure the impact
- List of features that Slack can explore
- The feature I want to focus on and why
- The core problems that my proposed feature aims to tackle
- Solution details of my proposed feature
- Negative consequences of my proposed feature
What is Slack, Who are the users of Slack & Why do they use Slack
Slack enables employees in an organization to communicate and collaborate with each other. It is used by organizations of various sizes and in a variety of industries such as technology, manufacturing, real estate etc. In each of these organizations, Slack could be used either by all the employees of the organization or in one or more groups of employees. Slack is used by people across varied job functions such as engineering, design, sales, marketing etc. to communicate and collaborate.
The target segment I want to focus on
While Slack seems to target organizations of all sizes and across industries, I want to limit the scope of this essay by focusing on a specific segment of Slack’s users. I will consider the needs and use cases of only those users who work in organizations that are:
- 10 to 200 employees in size
- In the SaaS sector
- Co-located in any part of the world or work remotely
- Everyone speaks and understands English in the organization
The reason I have chosen this segment is because I understand this segment deeply based on my experience of working with SaaS startups of this size. Therefore, I will be able to expound on the problems that this segment of users face in great detail. I have not used Slack in a large SMB or enterprise (say >500 employees) so I don’t know the challenges that users in large SMBs or enterprises face with Slack.
The segment I have chosen may or may not represent a large percentage of the entire user base of Slack. However, given that Slack targets the most common problems of users across industries, company size etc., my assumption is that the suggestions I have made in this write-up might be applicable to a large set of Slack users across industries, job functions, organization size etc.
The problems that the target segment faces
Slack uses many of these tag lines to describe its value proposition: Where work happens, Whatever work you do, you can do it in Slack etc. However, you actually can’t do all your work in Slack. It’s likely that your email tab is always open so that you can check your emails at any time. You still use a calendar app to schedule your meetings. You still need to use Microsoft Office or Google Drive (Docs, Sheets etc.) to create and share documents. You still find yourself scheduling video conferences in Zoom even though Slack has that functionality.
We have become used to using so many different tools that most of us don’t even consider this to be a problem anymore! But this is a huge problem for three primary reasons:
- Information in Different Silos: You will often find that information about a particular topic (say a product feature) is present in many different places: some in email, some in Slack, some in Confluence and some in Google Docs. It’s painful to have to trawl through so many different sources to gather information on the same topic. And you’re never really sure if you have all the information.
- Wastage of Time: It takes a lot of time to go through and relate together information in different sources. When I am building a product feature, I often find myself looking into generally three different sources of information — Google Docs, Email and Slack — to get the complete context of what we’re building. I might discover that the customer feedback is in an email, the detailed specs are in a Google doc, and some other questions and answers about the spec are in Slack. This leads to an unnecessary wastage of my own time and that of my organization.
- Loss of Productivity: Time I could have better spent in doing other important things gets spent in switching between different tools to dig for information, duplicating information from one place to the other, collaborating with colleagues in multiple software tools often for the same issue, and switching contexts very frequently.
Slack’s vision for the target segment
Slack needs to deliver on the promise that it makes to its users. It needs to ensure that it is the platform where all collaboration and communication happens. Users should be able to send emails from Slack, schedule meetings in Slack, create and find documents in Slack etc. If Slack is able to achieve this vision, users in this target segment would think only of Slack for a majority of their use cases for collaborating and communicating with others.
If Slack delivers on its vision, how do we measure the impact
If Slack is able to become a single platform for a variety of use cases in the communication and collaboration space, there would be a direct impact on all these metrics:
- Increase in DAU/WAU/MAU
- Slack can even start measuring HAU (Hourly Active Users) and how that would increase
- Increase in expansion revenue from existing customers
- New sales as more prospects would start seeing a lot of value in Slack
- Increase in size of ACV (Annual Contract Value)
- Wider adoption within organizations leading to increase in retention
- Increase in number of messages exchanged with individuals, groups and channels
List of features that Slack can explore
Given our objective of making Slack a single platform for communication and collaboration, there are a number of features that Slack can explore to achieve this objective:
Slack Email
Email is still as popular as it used to be. Slack is used for communicating with people and so is email. While email might be a more formal method of communication compared to the informal conversations on Slack, there’s no strong reason for the two to exist separately. Slack and email should be intertwined together to deliver one seamless experience for communicating and collaborating with people.
Slack Buddy
There’s a lot of information being exchanged in various channels and groups in Slack. Consequently you have way too many notifications vying for your attention. It’s difficult to understand what information is relevant and what is not, what items need your input etc. Slack could use machine learning to understand these messages, ignore the chatter and display only the most relevant ones neatly classified under different sections such as important information, actions and follow-ups.
Slack Office
Most projects have people collaborating on documents and spreadsheets. Currently, the most common way to create these documents is by using Microsoft Office or Google Drive. Slack should explore the possibility of building a new generation of Microsoft Office equivalent tools that is closely knit to its core functionality of communication and collaboration.
Slack Document Organizer
This is an alternative to Slack Office as this does not require as much investment as Slack Office. Documents in an organization tend to be spread across multiple places. Some documents are in Google Drive, some in Microsoft Office, some in Confluence etc. Even if the organization uses only one of these software tools, keeping the documents organized across teams is almost impossible. Think of the time when you needed to find a document that someone had shared with you. Wasn’t searching on Google Drive almost ineffective? Slack should create a functionality so that users only think of Slack for organizing and finding their documents across various tools.
The feature that I want to focus on and why
Most of the features I have suggested above would deliver a large amount of value to the target segment. In turn, there will be a strong positive impact on Slack’s business metrics such as MAU/WAU/DAU, revenue etc. Having said that, let’s analyze these features on the following three parameters to understand which one should we pick to implement first:
- Urgency: How urgent is the problem (or feature) for your customers? Is one problem more urgent than the others?
- Impact: How much value will this feature bring to the customers? The value that users are able to derive is closely linked with the impact on Slack’s business metrics. More value for customers would mean more positive impact on Slack’s business.
- Effort: How much time (and money) would it take Slack to implement the feature?
To make things simple, let’s assign a score of 1, 2 or 3 to each of the parameters above — 3 representing most urgent or most impact or most effort and 1 representing least urgent or least impact or least effort. Once we’ve determined these values for each of the features, we can then calculate the total score of each feature by using the formula: 100 x Urgency + 10 x Impact — 1 x Effort. The objective behind this formula is to focus on the most urgent, most impactful and least effort features first before we get to the others.
As you can see from the scores in the table above, Slack Email is the feature I want to focus on. I’ve given Slack Email the highest urgency because Slack’s primary purpose is to help users communicate and collaborate. Currently, users collaborate on both email and Slack. Blending the two is of utmost importance right now compared to the other features given that email and Slack are the two primary sources of communication and collaboration. As far as impact is concerned, Slack Email and Slack Buddy will add the most value to a majority of Slack users for communicating and collaborating with each other. In terms of effort, I believe that developing a machine learning based system such as Slack Buddy or building Slack Office from scratch would take the most effort. Taking these factors into consideration, Slack Email is the feature I would like to focus on.
The core problems that my proposed feature aims to tackle
In the previous sections, I briefly covered some of the problems that a user of Slack faces when collaborating and communicating with others. Before I delve deep into my solution, I will discuss the problems in detail that my proposed feature Slack Email aims to tackle.
Information in Different Silos
- We tend to share some information about a particular topic in Slack and some in email (and at times, multiple emails on the same topic). In order to get all the information on a topic, we’re then forced to go through emails as well as Slack messages.
- If I have to explore the history of my discussions with a colleague, I have to look into my Slack chats as well as email. I might even have exchanged files with this person on Slack and email. Currently, there’s no way that I can get a unified view of my conversation and collaboration history with this person.
Wastage of Time
- People send many emails because it’s easy to send emails. Information that could easily be slotted under common channels and groups on Slack is currently sent over multiple emails. It becomes difficult to keep up with an overflowing email inbox.
- Among some of the group inboxes that I’m a part of, I tend to specifically go through support emails regularly to understand the features that are being requested. It would have made my life simple if I could consume this daily on a Slack channel as opposed to going through multiple emails.
Loss of Productivity
- Not all discussions need an email to be sent to a larger group. We often run polls on emails or ask for meeting times on emails. If only people could respond to the original message by clicking Yes or No, it would save us from the email deluge.
- It’s not possible to edit your emails. So if you’ve specified some tasks in your first email and you want to add more tasks to it, you end up sending another email. There’s no way you can delete certain tasks that are done or add new tasks to the original email.
- I have been part of threads where there have been multiple inline replies. Where chat would have sufficed, we ended up abusing the inline reply functionality.
- I’m unable to forward important emails to a channel or group on Slack seamlessly. I might have to use a plugin or copy/paste the content which is just not effective.
Solution details of my proposed feature
I’ve covered the detailed functionality of Slack Email under different sub-headings to make it easy to understand.
Blending Slack Messages and Emails Into One Seamless Experience
- Emails from others should appear as a message (tagged as email) in my Slack chat with them. I can then choose to respond to these emails from within Slack itself. This is also applicable to group emails that should automatically appear on group chats.
- If there is a Slack channel that caters to a specific topic, I should be able to easily add relevant email threads to this channel so that I’m only looking at one source of information at any point in time.
- Any attachments or files exchanged or meetings scheduled should also start appearing in the Slack chat with that individual (or even in groups or channels). Each time I have to look at the history of messages exchanged or files exchanged or meetings that have happened, I only have to look for this information in Slack.
- Slack messages can be edited but emails can’t. If the two are blended together, then you could possibly move from email mode to chat mode in Slack and convert an email to a Slack message in order to collaborate better on tasks.
- Running internal surveys or getting quick Yes/No responses to questions can move completely to Slack which will then help prevent exchange of multiple emails.
- Instead of forwarding emails (eg. customer inputs) to individuals, I should be able to drag & drop emails directly in an individual chat, group chat or channel in Slack to ensure that all the information is available in one place.
Group Messages on Slack
- Any email sent to an internal group (eg. marketing group, design group etc.) should automatically get added to the relevant Slack group. This will ensure that all the individuals in the group are always in sync with what is being shared rather than tracking some things in email and some in Slack.
- Any email that is sent to a particular group with certain predefined placeholder text (eg. feature requests) should automatically show up in a new channel (eg. feature-requests channel) on Slack. This will make it very easy for everyone concerned to go through these messages on a daily basis.
- Sharing group emails on Slack would also enable one to quickly assign tasks to relevant individuals within Slack itself leading to better collaboration.
- A number of times you find people sending emails to the entire group asking an individual to reply. This could easily be prevented by blending emails with Slack where you can mark that individual on Slack so that only that person gets notified and not anyone else.
Email Tab in Slack
- There should be a dedicated section in Slack to access just emails. This would be similar in functionality to Superhuman etc. This will then enable a user to see all emails on Slack itself than switch to a different tool. Lastly, this separate section for emails is also required to communicate and collaborate with external people.
Negative consequences of my proposed feature
So far I’ve explored the positive scenarios of how my proposed solution could help users communicate and collaborate better. We should also be aware that there are two main negative consequences of my proposed feature:
- Increase in Chatter: If you get too many emails already, your Slack would likely explode with messages after emails are blended with Slack. Deep work would be difficult unless Slack adds more controls to its Notifications settings.
- Less Meaningful Replies: Emails help you draft meaningful replies. If emails are blended with chat messages, maybe the email replies will stop being as detailed and meaningful which would then lead to more chat messages being exchanged.
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