I won't work somewhere without Slack -- a manifesto

It was December 2015 and I was sitting with others members of our solutions consulting team at Adobe's annual Worldwide Sales Conference in Las Vegas.

I think it was about hour three of a four-day affair confined to ballrooms at Aria and Bellagio where thousands of members of the Adobe sales field from around the world gather to receive marching orders for the new fiscal year. With most of us having been through the rigamarole of the sales kickoff a few times before, we needed an outlet for us to discuss and, let's be honest, snark about the many presentations.

I'd recently heard about this tool called "Slack" that was "like IRC but modern" and saw that it could be used for free, so I spun up an instance and invited my team members, and instantly we started communicating in a new way that, at that time, I had no idea would change the trajectory of my life.

By the end of the four-day conference, our workspace had about 200 members, and as an aside, this is where I would like to use an "em-dash" but am fearful because I don't want you to think this is AI writing this but here goes nothing – some of those 200 were director-level or senior directors, many were from outside our solutions consulting organization (people like product management and product marketing) and instantly we had a direct, more personal, more human line to our co-workers who previously lived mostly behind email addresses.

Slack rapidly evolved and the opportunity to create workflows, integrate third-party apps, automate processes, and work together in new ways developed, and every time a new feature was released, I was quick to jump on board and ask myself how it could be used to make my job easier.

Flash forward a few years to 2021, and I find myself working at Slack as a solutions consultant, and once again, my view of how Slack can impact a business was completely transformed. The way that Slack themselves use Slack to manage sales opportunities, as well as internal and external collaboration, is nothing short of magic. My time working at Slack was a relatively short two years (I left to join SAP where a director-level role awaited) but my love for the technology grew exponentially, and as I made the move to a new company, their use of Slack was a key sticking point in my desire to move.

So it has been the move to SAP – where I still work today – that everything clicked for me, but not in a way that you might think. My colleagues use Slack every day, but through no fault of their own, they're not using it in an optimal fashion. That magic of how Slack used Slack is not present. Most people use it as a chat tool – a DM tool, even. Folks are hesitant to have conversations publicly in channels, adoption of advanced features lags, opportunities to collaborate are missed.

These things are not the fault of my colleagues, who are very capable and hard working. The fault lies on there not being a proper structure for helping individuals and organizations succeed on Slack. Yes there are consultants, and Slack/Salesforce has customer success managers for accounts, but those roles are largely not focused on the success of the individual in Slack. They're not focused on the person who says they are overwhelmed by notifications or who thinks it is too difficult to find information in Slack.

This is where my passion aligns with opportunity. I want to help people love Slack more. I get giddy when I can show someone a great feature in Slack and then can see the gears start turning in their mind about how the capability will enable them to do amazing things. I get thrilled when I can help a team improve a process by implementing a workflow that lives in Slack instead of multiple external systems. My initial idea was to start a consulting organization – called Blown Mind – to help organizations implement and design Slack in a way that would work best for them. But after spending the better part of a year working with organizations and the market, I identified that there is a more atomic-level need and that is training and best practice guidance. So that is where Slack Zen comes in.

On this site, and in this newsletter, I will explore best practices with Slack, work to demystify some of the complexities that most often frustrate users, and for those people – whether you're individuals, teams, or full companies – who want more structured, personzlied training, I will be able to provide that as a service as well. Ultimately, I want to help people see the true value of Slack, using it in a more ideal fashion, and doing so in a way that can improve the way they work and collaborate with others, to get more work done in a shorter time period, and to have a great time doing that.

I freaking love Slack, and I am excited to share that love with you.

Tyler