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Ask HN: How to turn a sprawling Slack nightmare into a productivity machine?

3 points by dgzl ↗ HN
I joined a company recently that's going through several corporate mergers and our sprawling Slack environment has pretty much zero standardization. I've been given reigns to a portion of the environment and I plan on turning our jungle into something truly productive. What tips have you found to be exceptionally helpful for large sprawling corporate structure? I haven't looked into apps or bots much yet, but I'll be insisting on channel prefixes such as (alert-, team-, proj-, triage-, event-) going forward.

2 comments

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keyle
Corporation at the base are people. I'd let people organise themselves, potentially with a deadline, and prune the dead branches. Enforcing structure might be going too far, however providing guidance is a good idea, as you pointed out, for the sake of consistency. You can always rename later once people have found their shoe size.
andrewfan
Agree, it is quite hard to impose a new habit to people (you can check "The Power of Habit" book). In some cases, it is better to see how people are doing things and adapt tools. I'm working on the knowledge base app for slack. When we started building it, we thought that all users would interact with our bot using slack mention `@`; (primary interaction is asking bot a question); however, in reality, it did not work. But instead of spending time trying to produce more/better docs to force people to use `@`, we decided to adapt it to the way people ask questions now; they do it without mentions, so we did this https://onebar.io/learn/setup-a-slack-autoresponder