Ask HN: How do you ensure everyone on the team is heard on Slack?

One important practice to keep daily standup snappy is to decouple the high level context (“I am blocked on X” => “you should talk to codeowners Alice and Bob”) from the actual solve for the problem, even if there is a quick answer.

It’s natural to answer “I am blocked” with a dive into the solution, but really you should just use the standup forum to figure out who you need to talk to, and circle back to discuss immediately after the meeting.

If you already know who you need to deep dive with, you should proactively sync with them before standup; that meeting is really just there to provide a cap on the amount of time anyone can spend blocked.

If everyone self-organizes to resolve blockers before the next standup then congrats, you have graduated and perhaps you don’t need that meeting daily any more.

It’s worth noting that in the “yesterday, today, blockers” format, the first two aren’t really needed if you just radiate context passively. The main value of the meeting is syncing on current/future blockers/impediments.

Finally I’d say a document-centric workflow can help here, because if you are all collaborating on design in a doc, then it’s easy to follow along async and see the latest state of the discussion, rather than having to read and understand every comment in Slack to keep up with the situation.

Perhaps it's a solution that does better at a large scale than at a smaller scale.

At a smaller company, it becomes much more evident that the contributions are being made more for self-promotion than for anyone's benefit. Either because you know the person making them and their personality, because the volume:quality is out of alignment, or because the person posting the question/answer wasn't actually having the problem and were just posting it for points.

Also the volume of organic questions is on the lower side, and could get easily drown out by what amounts to astroturfing. So in my experience, it never really gained adoption, and withered shortly after it's introduction.

At my place of work, our internal chat rooms (not Slack, but a similar product) are automatically wiped of messages older than two weeks, to actively discourage anyone from using it as a knowledge store.

Instead, we have a company-wide BookStack instance that's the primary store of documentation, split into different sections for project information (per project) and rough notes (per employee). Everyone is expected to contribute to the former, and may also add to the latter if they wish to share something that may be useful to others.

Usually, helping someone else out with the information they need involves pointing them to the right page where it's already documented, or writing something up for them. Perhaps also talking them through it one-on-one if it's complex.

This works for us because we're required to provide reports to our customers every few weeks, in regards to what we've been working on in the each contract - in addition to any actual deliverables. Keeping everything well documented internally makes it much easier to document for our customers.

This is a small company of around 40 employees. Not sure how well this will scale as we grow, but it's been working well so far.

S.A.Q.s

Self-answered-FAQs

We typically call that "Documentation!" :-)

Yeah that sounds like a positive pattern to me: it means people are contributing to an internal persistent knowledge base. Sounds like it should be actively encouraged.