Kevin K Chen

My biggest issue about Slack is that it really doesn't live up to its mission:  "Where work happens."  Work may happen, or it may not happen in Slack. As an Engineer, I find it distracting. Between having to go to meetings and coding, I also have to stay on top of conversations within Public and Private channels. (Sometimes, there are a lot of channels.) So how can we improve Slack to make it more useful?  One way to quantify "useful" conversations One metric to measure our solutions against is "meaningful engagement" in a given week. Assuming we have access to great Data Scientists, I'd look at all the conversations Engineers have. Specifically, I'd count a conversation as useful if it has certain words like "feature", "JIRA", "ticket" and more. From there, we can gleam:    # of useful chats in a week         total # of chats in a week With this metric, let's see how we can crea...

Tell me about a product that was designed poorly. Slack. Slack is useful... I know a lot of people love Slack. It's no doubt useful. Sometimes, you have a quick question or announcement that might turn into a conversation; you don't want to send an email because the email will get lost; you don't want to click on a bunch of emails. As a programmer, Slack is also great for sharing quick code snippets in a formatted way. I don't have to make a commit, share a GitHub link, and share the line numbers for me and my colleagues to discuss code. As a non-programmer, Slack is also a great way to share quick links to Google Docs or (ir)relevant news throughout the day. Slack is also useful as a digital water cooler. But it's still digital -- obtrusive. Slack does not live up to its motto: "Where Work Happens". Two reasons - combined - make their mission hard to achieve: (1) Slack disincentives human interaction As a digital water cooler, Slack...

How would you improve Google Hangouts? Before jumping in, I want to clarify everything that Google Hangouts does. It: helps you text, call or video chat with people on the desktop and on mobile app lets you send emojis and pictures maintains a contact list of all your GMail contacts lets you save favorite contacts lets you group chat It looks like Google Hangouts has a pretty exhaustive list of features already built out. I think it might help to identify for who we want to improve Hangouts -- we can figure out more features from there. For who do you want to improve Hangouts? Let's look at a few different groups. At a high-level, we can look at either the Consumer or Business markets. For Consumers, we can look at how to improve this product for: Families Friends connecting with friends of friends For Businesses, we can improve Hangouts for: Salespeople - as a salesperson, I need a chat application that better organizes all my sales leads Offic...