There was once a time when people got excited about office parties and gathering around the water cooler to talk with their colleagues. But in the past few years, we’ve been challenged with cultivating a work culture that relies heavily on asynchronous communication, largely through Slack. And as our conversations become more digitized, personality, clarity, and fun can get lost in the fray. Here at Postlight Labs, we’ve been revitalizing some of our handiest products for Slack, providing more features to continue a culture of fun and effective communication. We hope you try them out, and let ..read more

Well, it’s that time of year — summer and fall snuck by once again, and we’re headed toward a new year. While endings inevitably lead to a time of reflection, we figured we’d offer you a lighthearted reprieve in the form of bird facts, code hacks, and etymology. Here’s our collection of the best “Today I Learned” snippets from our day-to-day Slack operations in 2022. 1. GCal “Find and Replace for Google Calendar?! Yessssss.” — Ben Judy, Director, Product Design 2. Chrome dev tools “Very upset that I am just learning about how to make it so that clicking on Chrome dev tools doesn’t take focus ..read more

Slack is a river, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the deluge of information. We here at Postlight use emojis, Slack channels, bots, Dash, threads, Textmoji, and other tools to help one another navigate those fast-flowing waters. In that sense, we all take responsibility together for being both knowledge explorers and guides. One of those tools is our custom :TIL: emoji. In case you missed our June roundup, #TIL is a Slack emoji (a reacji, to be precise) that we use at Postlight to tag Slack a post that you learned from. I think of it as a fun way to live out this xkcd comic: xkcd Ten Thous ..read more

The Postlight team is a curious bunch. Every day, all sorts of interesting links float across Postlight’s Slack channels. Sometimes these are useful tidbits such as sharing how you can right-click on meetings in Google Calendar to quickly edit your attendance status. Sometimes they’re silly trivia (Ciabatta bread wasn’t invented until 1982). We also have a :good link: reacji for content worthy of sharing beyond Postlight. A little less trivia and tools, a little more think-y — and every week the best links make their way into Postlight’s newsletter. What can I say, we enjoy our Pleasant Intern ..read more

Paul Ford It’s nice, it’s polished, it’s fit and ready for the world, and it is not a catastrophic failure, so Preston’s happy.  Preston Richey Yeah, very happy [music fades in, plays alone for 18 seconds, ramps down].  PF Hey, Rich?  Rich Ziade Yo!  PF Let’s talk about a cool Labs project. You know, usually when we are on this show we’re talking about building products for clients cuz we like to market.  RZ Mm hmm.  PF And we do that. We go, we sit with you, we’re your product partner, we help you with your strategy and we get you all the way [music fades out] th ..read more

One of the things I love most about working at Postlight is our culture of communication. Postlight employees are spread out amongst at least ten different states (and two continents!) so even prior to recent events, much of our communication happened online. Nowadays, tools like Slack are absolutely indispensable for keeping in touch, and we’ve developed lots of ways to further enrich the time we spend collaborating even when we’re not physically together. One of those ways is Dash, our Slack tool to timebox discussions. With a Dash channel, teams can accelerate decisions with deadlines. Whet ..read more

Now that we’re apart, how do we get things done? Plenty has been written about how to optimize working remotely. But few are acknowledging the irreplaceables of office culture. There are tons of tools, apps, and tricks out there to help you be productive from home (or wherever you are). Still, what’s the remote equivalent of this all-too-common scenario? Bill walks over to Sally. He mentions a task that’s cropped up and he needs the help of Diane and David… today. “Not a huge deal, but time-sensitive.” Sally pushes back but ultimately makes David available. Diane is busy. Working togethe ..read more

Paul Ford It’s a set of oils that you use in the bath, that lets you sort of [Rich scoffs] smell like Salesforce.  Rich Ziade That’s—what does that smell like?  PF Like regret. [Music plays alone for 19 seconds, ramps down.] RZ Ok, Paul?  PF Yes! Richard.  RZ We pay a bunch of money every month to a bunch of different services that pretty much make the company run.  PF Oh. Like all of our money.  RZ A lot of our money!  PF I wanna talk about that 360 review tool that we have.  RZ Yeah. So we have a— PF Which I’ve never seen. [Music fades out.]   RZ We have a to ..read more

Peter — 11:33: “Often times with product management you’re figuring out confusion, where there’s ambiguity, and oftentimes things are blocked because people don’t know how to move forward.”  Peter — 13:42: “I think a lot of times in product management the initial reactions might be to react … but if you pause and you think about it, there’s probably a solution that’s going to be a win-win for everyone that you’re not thinking about straight away.”  Rich — 16:24: “All you’re trying to do is move 5 different colored marbles down an inch a day. Email has lost its luster because of other to ..read more