Why Communities Use Slack Better Than Companies 💬
And what we can learn from them to improve our own.
Hey 👋 this is Luca! Welcome to a 🔒 weekly edition 🔒 of Refactoring.
Every week I write advice on how to become a better engineering leader, backed by my own experience, research and case studies.
You can learn more about Refactoring here.
To receive all the full articles and support Refactoring, consider subscribing 👇
I have been using Slack every day for several years now.
I am member of ~10 spaces, a couple of which are directly related to my job, while others are either professional communities of various kinds, or companies that kindly keep me in their Slack because we chat every once in a while.
I can tell you that companies' workspaces are always harder to use than community ones.
Always.
It's harder to find information, harder to keep track of conversations, channels are messy, and so on. And to make things more embarrassing, we are often talking of companies of a few tens of people, vs communities of several thousands.
How is this possible?
I spent some time looking at Slack spaces from successful communities I belong to, and tried to distill some lessons for building better workspaces for our companies as well 👇
