Question
What tools do you use to collaborate remotely in a distributed team?
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Other tools from a previous discussion
In How does your company communicate/collaborate remotely?, two teams mentioned Slack and two mentioned Microsoft Teams, then other tools that were mentioned included: Trello, Zoom, Google Docs, Taskade, Skype, GoToMeeting, WhatsApp, Quip, and WordPress.
Slack, Zoom, Notion
At Capiche, our core trio of collaboration tools are Slack, Zoom, and Notion:
- Slack is for general conversations and notifications. We have a number of channels to discuss current work and ideas, share interesting things we find, list stats and important team data, and more. Then we have a handful of notification channels used to let everyone keep track of errors and other things on our platform.
- Zoom is for meetings. When we want to talk about something in-depth, hold our weekly meetings, talk to users and partners, and more, Zoom is what we reach for. You could do video calls in Slack, but Zoom generally works enough better that it's worth using for calls.
- Notion is for records and collaborative work. Things that get decided in Slack and Zoom get written down for record in Notion. We use Notion to keep track of all of our core team info, list our ongoing tasks and projects in it, and even work on shared wording and copy in Notion docs. Anything kept for the long term goes here.
Yac, Slack, Asana, Slite
Obviously our team is huge on Yac. Day to day conversations happen over voice messages there as well as almost all our feedback and tasking.
We use Slack for links and notifications like GitHub commits and Invision comments. It’s basically become Yo for our team at this point. Asana is for project management and bugs, although I’m pretty task management system agnostic at this point. SoFriendly used Hubstaff Tasks for example.
I’m the odd man out here and not a fan of Notion. We use Slite, and Slab is also a really awesome alternative that we loved.
Oh also recently dumped Superhuman for Missive and really enjoying that although I badly want to redesign it.
Slack has so many integrations that it basically becomes our notification hub. We know when a client comments on an Invision, when an Intercom message comes in for Yac, we see each commit for GitHub and we even know when new code is pushed to the server. All this typically goes to our email but definitely gets lost in the noise. It’s much easier to mute Slack channels too and then skim real quick to just get an idea for what is happening in all our systems. I doubt anyone is reading the notifications but it just kinda lets us know the company is alive and kicking.
That definitely resonates. We've got some channels that fill up automatically with notifications that we never check per se, but it's a quick way to get the pulse of the things and a great record if we need to go back and search through stuff.
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I've also really enjoyed reading the Basecamp team's Guide to Internal Communication which shares the best practices and habits they've developed to make remote communication work well (which for them happens almost entirely inside Basecamp, but the same strategies can work with a variety of tools).