[alistairSH]

In my experience, Slack doesn’t differ a whole lot from email. A lot of crud, some useful nuggets, and overall not great for making hard decisions.

Within the team, we use daily stand-ups. Start out with the normal “I did X, working on Y” stuff, try to get that done in 10 minutes (for a team of 6 + manager + occasional BA or tech fellow dropping in). The rest of the 30 min block is open to whatever the team needs - stuff that if left to Slack would end up being a multi-day game of telephone.

Outside the team, Slack is ok for starting conversations, but generally anything important or hard needs a live meeting, even if it’s only for a few minutes. We have a few channels that are exceptions, where the team that “owns” the channel is better than average at making well reasoned responses. But, that’s the exception and those teams are always a pleasure to work with. And this is in a reasonably well functioning mid-sized company. I hate to think what it’s like at a large company.