I had always evaluated Slack from the point of view of “Does it make me more productive?” and “Does it help my team ship a better product?”. And often, the questions people had could be answered by more than one person, which resulted in less stress overall. The motto was, everything that doesn’t have to be discussed by only two people should happen in the main channel that everyone could see. To counter this, we began to push people toward using public channels, even when they just wanted to talk to one person. This caused a lot of interruptions to my day-to-day work, because people treated it like a chat and expected a fast response. Initially, our public channels were very silent, as most communication took place in DMs. It took a good while to get the most out of Slack. And while we offer annotating PDF documents in real time on all platforms, it’s not really a Slack competitor ) However, we knew we needed to finetune our processes to make it work well for us. We understand some of this reasoning, but ultimately, we decided we want to keep using Slack. But The Atlantic and Vice have also transitioned. The honeymoon phase is long over, and many companies have moved away from Slack - AgileBits (1Password) is a famous example with their “Curing Our Slack Addiction” blog post. But it’s also bad because it feels like an office, with all the noise, distractions, and interruptions. It’s great because it really does feel like an office and makes it easy to see what everyone’s up to - that’s especially important as a remote company. The second part is about Effective Remote Communication and focuses on everything that’s not inside Slack. This is the first part of a two-part series on communication at PSPDFKit.

But eventually we moved - like so many other companies - to Slack.

As we grew, we progressed to a single room in Campfire (now retired). For a long time, we were small enough that email worked well. We currently have 40 people at PSPDFKit, and because we’re spread across many countries and time zones, it’s a challenge to keep everyone in the loop.

Communicating well is one of the key attributes of highly effective teams.

Slack away message