Lets first callout whats the problem slack solves

• Office collaboration and communication
• Messaging app for business teams to work together effectively
• Provides information required for the user in an Organization

Now lets understand the Users

• Only adults
• Technology adoption will be high for these users
• Both Enterprise and SMB orgs can be users of the app.
• Frequency of usage will be medium to high as an Organization will not have multiple tools for communication at the one point of time.

Goal

• For this discussion, lets discuss about improving Engagement or Retention of existing users
• The need for moving out of slack to different other apps should be reduced.

Metrics to measure the progress of the Goal

• Retention refers to improving the return rate of the users to the app.
• Return rate can be measured by the number of sessions per user
• Our goal is to increase the number of sessions per user.

Pick one user persona

• Lets consider the Enterprise org users
• Frequency of usage will be high
• Teams and number of users in the org will be high
• More automation tools required to manage the processes followed in the Org

Painpoints

• Communication from contacts outside the Orgs and certain official communication is still retained in Emails. To discuss and close email queries user has to move out of slack
  • Solution – Email integration to view and send replies from slack
• Meetings are scheduled and managed in calendars. Moving out of slack for pre-scheduled meetings and conferences.
  • Solution – Slack integration with Calendars that supports scheduling huddles from calendar
• Repeated queries on the same issue from different channels and DMs will have the same answers to be sent. How do I save and use the same replies when required?
  • Enterprise teams have to communicate the same update to many different teams
  • Support response templates that can be saved and used from the compose box
• Set SLAs and Escalations to managers for certain messages
• Read receipts of messages that can be turned off
  • for individual DMs but can be turned on for channels
  • turned off for reporting managers but can be turned on for reportees

Priority

• Email Integration
  • Impact/Customer value – High
    • Why?
      • All slack logins are already a valid email id
      • All enterprise orgs use email communication heavily
      • Collaborating and closing emails from slack increases the dependancy on slack and slack sessions per user.
      • Data check – Number of gmail vs office365 email ids used for logins. This prioritizes which integration has to be built first.
  • Effort – Medium
    • Already supports addons for email
• Calendar Integration
  • Impact – High
  • Why?
    • Meetings are effective ways of collaboration
    • But meetings are conducted in Google meets, Zoom or Teams
    • Moving out of slack for meetings can be checked from the existing data
      • the number of zoom integrations installed
      • Number of Gmail integrations installed
      • Avg number of huddles per user
    • Effort – low
• Response templates
  • Impact – medium
  • Why?
    • Save for later can be used for saving repeated responses
    • Data check – Number of messages forwarded from Later section
  • Effort – Low
    • UI to mark a subset of messages under Save for later to be shown under Compose
• Read receipts
  • Impact – Low
  • Why – Users might not turn on this for privacy
• Set Slas and escalations
  • Impact – Low
  • Why – Customer communications mostly require strict slas more than internal peer to peer communication

Solutions for High Imapct painpoints

• Email Integration – Gmail or office365 email email integration
  • On click of a contact or DM, show emails CTA is available
  • Show Emails will list all emails sent from the contact or the contact one of the recipient
  • Emails are listed in chronological order
  • Emails are paginated to have have better performance
  • Click on an email to tag and collaborate on the query
  • Draft and Send a reply to the email from Slack
  • SSo login with email which auto connects the email and authorizes slack to read/write data
  • Metrics
    • Number of Email logins via SSO
    • Number of Emails clicked
    • Number of Emails sent from slack
• Meetings
  • Meetings are created, cancelled and rescheduled in Calendars
  • Slack has the support for video calls which supports recording, annotate and sharing screens
  • The gap lies in the support of scheduling from calendars
  • Slack integration with Calendars that supports scheduling huddles from calendar
  • Join with Slack CTAs inside Gcal and Office365 calendars
  • Metrics
    • Number of Meetings scheduled from calendars

I’m going to structure my answer like this so it is easy for both of us to follow up and grasp them easily. Let’s first clear out some of the grey areas and make them black and white. Also, decide what are in-scope and out of scope. Second, let’s understand what is our goal for improvement – is it the customer experience or any specific feature in mind? for a group of users? Third, I will brainstorm what are the pain points for user personas and solutions to improve them. Fourth, I will prioritize the feature solutions and check the tradeoff and do final recommendations along with the metrics to define success.

Clarifying questions:

1. My understanding of Slack – this is an IM communication tool. and I have used the desktop version and not used the mobile version much. As mostly used at work, most of the users have experience in desktop.
2. What do we want to improve? – is there any issue in mind or just the customer experience or any particular feature? customer acquisition or retention? => let’s do customer experience

When I look at the user personas using slack,

1. working professionals
2. students

Let’s focus on working professionals as they make most % of our customer base.

When I look at the issues/pain points for working professionals, I could think of the following:

1. more distractions and unable to have a focussed time during work and meetings
2. lots of channels, threads, and workspaces
3. If unattended for some time, there are loads of notifications in the channel and threads
4. cannot message someone if they are not in slack. this requires to use of alternative communication tools.

Of the 4 pain points, I would like to take pain points 1 and 3 together- more distractions and unable to have a focussed time. And hence when we choose to snooze the notifications we are overwhelmed with loads of notifications from the threads and channels.

Quickly brainstorming the solutions.

1. Snoozing notifications should be personalized. Even though there are features to set the snooze period, our work wont be exactly like the snooze period every day. So an AI bot that can integrate with our calendar should snooze the notifications. Additionally, it should also snooze them during voice/video calls or meetings in the slack. Notifications during the meeting will be a distraction.
2. Give priority to a particular channel or user or enable the sender to mark a particular message as high/low priority.
3. A virtual Assistant bot could interact with the sender and collect all the messages. In this way, the sender is not annoyed and gets acknowledged.

Of the above 3 solutions, I think I would like to spin solutions 1 and 2 together. Because there could be a really urgent/important message during a meeting that needs the person’s attention. So a high-priority message will pop up even though a person is in a meeting.

This solution will be a better customer delight. From Engineering feasibility, it should be a moderate difficulty.

Metrics that I would define for success.

1. the number of users installing this APP/bot to integrate with their calendar.
2. Number of hours the notification snooze happens in a day
3. Number of high priority messages are shown during the notification snooze time
4. Number of messages the user interacts with these high priority messages