Speed up your processes with good Slack Notifications

Slack makes a powerful tool for eliminating communication bottlenecks. Here are a few practical examples from our experience:

This is one obvious application for working with applications like Hubspot and Pipedrive.

Most companies need certain things to happen with for onboarding new clients. Slack can be a very helpful tool in prompting people towards key actions in your process.

See Automated Crash Reporting to see how we use Slack to give real time notifications anytime a crash happens with Iguana anywhere in the world.

See our Build system. In our company if you push a commit which breaks the build of IguanaX, within minutes you are going to be notified by Slack that there is a problem.

Some key ideas to use Slack effectively:

See Boy that cried wolf - false positive. It’s easy to get carried away with notifications and make them too noisy and chatty. If something is everyone’s responsibility then it is no one’s responsibility.

Staff will swiftly ignore notifications which are always bleeping for no good reason.

This is really big - you only do it there is a specific action required by someone. If it’s just a general up date then it’s better for it to go into a general slack channel. This is how we do it with our Build system:

If a developer gets tagged (see Tagging individuals with Slack notifications) if and only if they broke the build - i.e. there is a real action for them to perform.

Try making one change at time, get feedback. Iterate, rinse and repeat. Learn.

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