What a year this has been. A roller-coaster ride does not even begin to describe it. The outbreak of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, followed by months of political unrest and the most heated U.S. presidential campaign in a generation. Needless to say, these events affected the lives of every single one of us. They have also left their mark on GreetBot and our mission to help teams build great working relationships online.

Even prior to the first round of lockdowns last spring, we started seeing a steady uptick in new GreetBot sign-ups. One by one, companies in Silicon Valley, and then…

I wouldn’t be able to do my job without Slack. Yet it isn’t Slack’s ease of use, its versatile communication features or the vast number of integrations that made me invest in Slack Technologies, Inc., a.k.a. WORK.

Yes, the polished product design combined with its funky, playful branding have undoubtedly given the company an edge thus far. But these are also the aspects of the product that competitors can most easily imitate and that most swiftly get axed by shifting trends in the society and technology alike. …

GreetBot has passed a number of milestones recently. We are now serving more than 10,000 workspaces worldwide, delivering an average of 50,000 greetings per week. Somehow, in the course of the last four years GreetBot has delivered over 2.5 million welcome messages to more than 2 million individual Slack users. Wow!

As GreetBot continues to reach more people we wanted to make it easier for Slack admins to keep an eye on the onboarding activity within their own workspaces. This can be tricky. A large proportion of GreetBot’s messages is delivered privately, making it difficult for admins to see whether…

Racism is not a biological disease transmitted by invisible, airborne viral particles. But it spreads in surprisingly similar ways. Like microbes, racist ideas can be passed on from person to person, carried by word of mouth. Left unchecked they can also grow exponentially: the more people they reach, the more they multiply. As such, racist ideologies can influence the behavior of a large proportion of the population, causing unthinkable pain and suffering along the way.

Given those similarities, wouldn’t it make sense to approach the issue of racism like an infectious disease? Much like when we try to get to…

We were driving for nearly an hour, making our way through hills covered in thick, sub-tropical forrest. All of a sudden the trees cleared, letting blinding beams of light in. My eyes were still adjusting to the intense, Thai sunshine when the valley below us revealed itself. There, on the mountainside stood a group of half a dozen elephants. It was the Elephant Nature Park — a sanctuary to orphaned and injured elephants set up 40 miles north of Chiang Mai, Thailand.

I’ve been waiting to get to the park for months. The last time I saw an elephant in…

The hardest thing to do is to resist easy work. To steer clear of the softball tasks like checking email, starting your washing machine or placing an order on Amazon whenever you have better things to do. Things like training, learning, thinking, creating, innovating. The bare-knuckle, take-no-prisoners, hard work, you know.

That’s not to say easy work should’t be done at all. We all agree it is a good idea to do your laundry or answer email. …

Designing Slack apps can be an equally great and daunting experience. The free form, natural feel of chat, along with Block Kit, Slack’s built-in UI framework, allow you to create simple yet robust user workflows. Knowing how to combine these two, very different beasts, into a single, coherent unit is not at all that self-evident, though. Before you end up with that new, snappy Slack app, what do you do?

I’ve been wrestling with this question for a while. As in any design process, exploring and iterating on different paths and scenarios is key. But mixing plain text messages with…

There is a lot of talk of saving the economy these days. Understandably so. Nobody wants to see people loose their jobs, their income, their livelihoods. Even those who ultimately do keep on working don’t want to see the economy wrecked. Yes, we are all in this together.

That being said, is this economy really worth saving? The economy that pollutes, that abuses, that corrupts, and hijacks our collective psyche into a mindless orgy of consumption? Is the smog-filled air, the plastic-filled oceans, the usesles-crap-filled garages and the anxiety-ridden rat race really worth it?

As I inhale the unbelievably clean…