David vs. Goliath
When a Silicon Valley giant embarks on a mission to make your app obsolete
I’ve been expecting this to happen for close to a year now. That one day Slack would launch their own onboarding tool, pulling the rug out from under GreetBot’s feet. “Why wouldn’t they?” I kept asking myself. Introducing teams to their new colleagues is a fundamental part of any organization. Even more so whenever people collaborate online. It would be foolish for Slack to just sit there and do nothing about it.
And yet, months went by without as much as a clue as to what the folks at Slack were up to. Until last week, that is.
The news, as it is common these days, came in a form of a tweet. “Slack acquires Robots & Pencils’ Missions to make it easy for non-tech teams to streamline work,” read the headline. Before the page loaded I already sensed what it meant. By acquiring Missions, an IFTTT tool for Slack, they were going to tackle onboarding head on.
It’s a brilliant move. In one fell swoop Slack gets a single, consistent and streamlined way of automating a host of tedious, repetitive tasks, empowering their customers and helping developers get more efficient along the way. It’s hard not to be impressed by Slack here. That they had the instinct for doing this, considering the million other things they are working on as well.
It is a bittersweet news for GreetBot, though. The primary use case for Missions mentioned in the announcement is, predictably, onboarding. Not an edge case, not an accident, not a “nice to have.” According to the company itself, the most significant, the most central use of Missions as of today is to onboard new hires to your workspace.
What that means is that we are no longer competing with other bootstrapped, indie developers in this space. As of last week we are competing with the juggernaut of corporate productivity, an impeccably funded and staffed enterprise as well as the platform host, the mothership itself, Slack Technologies, Inc. To say it feels like a battle between David and Goliath is an understatement.
We are not going to throw in the towel quite yet, though. Onboarding after all is so much more than a combination of “if” statements. To really, truly, work it should feel fun and personal, not mechanical and automated. Especially among teams separated not by office floors but thousands of miles and multiple timezones. It will take more than generic automation tools to help them build genuine, lasting connections online.
So while this acquisition puts us at a significant disadvantage, it does not in and of itself mean the problem of onboarding among digital teams has been solved. If anything it helps underline how important it is to get this right, how much more there is to be done to help teams connect in this brave, new world of digital collaboration. And that, my friends, has always been and always will be, our mission.
