What is Slack, and how is it disrupting the way people work?

“Whatever work you do, you can do it in Slack” is the first thing to greet you when you go to Slack’s website. It's a bold, exciting, intriguing, and perhaps ambiguous claim. According to its S-1 filing, the company is on a mission “to make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive.” Let’s discuss this without the distraction of financial numbers and operating metrics. So, what is Slack, and how is it disrupting the way people work?

Communication Tool

Slack is first and foremost a communication tool. We have witnessed how quickly consumers tend to adopt the latest communication tools. It was IRC in 1988, followed by email in 1995, and AIM in 1997. In the early 2000s, text messaging took over as cell phones became mainstream. No conversation about communication would be right without giving credit to the iPhone, which burst onto the scene in 2007 and changed the consumer electronics industry forever. Within a couple of years of the iPhone launch, chat apps became mainstream. Fast forward to 2019, and consumers around the world have a wealth of chat apps to choose from, WhatsApp, iMessage, WeChat, and Facebook Messenger being only a few examples.

However, if you take a walk through any office in corporate America, instead of employees collaborating seamlessly on their computers or digital dashboards, you’ll see exactly what you would have seen a decade ago—employees reading, drafting, and sending endless emails. Corporations still use email as their primary channel of communication! It is incredible that the remarkable progress at the consumer level has failed to trickle into the business world.

Many companies have tried to solve this problem and failed. Google, for example, had many attempts with Google Chat, Wave, and Hangouts. Microsoft and Facebook both had their shots as well. But Slack would be the company to solve the problem. In 2013, Stewart Butterfield and his team launched Slack, and users loved it.

"[Email] created fragmented silos of inaccessible information, hidden in individual inboxes. When new members joined the team, they were cut off from the rich history of communication that occurred before they arrived. Transparency was difficult to achieve, and routine communication had to be supplemented with status reports and stand-up meetings in order to keep the team coordinated,” as noted in Slack’s S-1

Slack was invented in response to the fragmentation of the information contained in conversations, decisions, and data in the workplace. The solution came in the form of “channels.” Channels are similar to group chats where conversations, documents, and application workflows remain available to all channel members, as opposed to concealed in one’s inbox. As employees leave or join a channel—as they would for a project—they have access to the entire history accumulated in that channel. With Slack, organizations finally have a better option than email.

However, Slack is more than just an email replacement. It was designed to integrate with third-party applications, providing notifications and actionable workflows. For example, if you need approval for an expense report on Concur (an expense management application), you can simply send the request through Slack, and your manager can approve it with a single click of a button. The alternative would be to send an email, log in to Concur, find the expense tab, and then locate the specific expense report. Does this functionality sound familiar? If so, it is because we use it regularly on our phones every day.

 

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Slack is an open platform that makes it extremely easy for developers to integrate with. Slack can currently integrate with over 1,800 applications. In addition, Slack has recently launched a visual editor for non-developers to build workflows on the platform, bringing the power of Slack’s system to everybody.

“For whatever tools our customers already use...we want to make their experience of those tools better because they use Slack,” says co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield.

Slack’s open platform is not all that different from the apps on your phone – they make it work better, which is what Slack does with business software. Once you understand this, it is easy to see how helpful Slack could be in the workplace.

Collaboration Hub

Finally, the glue that brings everything together is collaboration. Everything on Slack was designed with collaboration in mind. For example, the open platform that allows different workflows to be integrated with Slack can be accessed across several departments and by different employees. This means the customer support team that works with Zendesk can share tickets with the engineering team that works with Github. Or the sales team that works with Salesforce can share information about the customer with the other departments. Everybody, from customer support and engineering to sales, is in the loop—all in one channel, all in Slack. Besides, with the launch of shared channels, two different organizations can now collaborate in a single channel—each with its own software stack.

“Slack is a more human way of communicating,” as noted in a Slack usability study

The importance of collaboration to Slack cannot be overstated. Every design choice Slack implements is meant to make collaboration easier. On average, companies use over 163 software applications, and juggling them can be frustrating and challenging. Slack was specifically designed to ease this pain.

Marc Andreessen once famously said, “software is eating the world,” more recently amending it to “software has eaten the world.” Software is great because it provides considerable increases in productivity, but it has its downsides. People and data become siloed into specialized roles. But here comes Slack—a new layer of the technology stack that brings people, applications, and data together, ready to change the way people work.