Ask HN: How do you manage notifications in your company?

[mrngilles]

Working in a company with more than 500 people, I get a ton of notifications, of which about 5% are actually useful / actionable.

At the same time, there are documents everywhere, a lot of them related to the same topic, jira tickets, notion pages, slack threads...

As an individual contributor in a similar situation, how do you manage that ? As a manager (up to C-level), what do you do to improve this situation ?

I feel like such communication "messes" are what blocks most of the progress, especially in big companies.

[tkiolp4]

As an individual contributor:

- Among the Slack channels I’ve joined (maybe 30% of the total amount?) I mute most of them, except the ones on which I actively participate.

- I don’t even try to understand/make a mental model of the thousands of pages of “documentation” we have in Confluence

- I usually mark most emails as read (mainly because my company communicates through Slack). I receive ton of automated emails

The trick is to know how to search for stuff. I extensively use Slack to search for past info (e.g., If I encounter an error while working on project X, I first check on Slack to see if someone has dealt with it before). I use Confluence search as well and GitLab search for snippets of code. Most of my colleagues don’t know how to search for stuff and get overwhelmed by the massive amount of docs/messages/notifications/repos we have.

[tacostakohashi]

This is actually something that I have really never seen done in a good way anywhere ever, but always imagined / seemed inevitable.

It seems like it would be natural to have a single notification platform that all applications feed into, with basic functionality like filtering, aggregation (i.e., you have received 100 'disk is full errors' in past 6 hours, starting at 10pm' instead of a screen full of all hundred errors), muting (Dave has promised to clean up the disk by the end of the day, ignore 'disk is full' messages on that particular disk until 9a tomorrow morning), notifications that expire/disappear when they are no longer relevant, and streaming/syncing to a desktop app, mobile, etc, etc.

I have seen decent implementations of notifications with aggregation/muting/etc as part of monitoring applications or embedded into sophisticated applications, but it seems like it would be good to just enforce this org-wide, make all the apps feed into it, make vendors integrate, and give people a single inbox.

To some extent RSS was a primitive version of this, but there was a time when many apps provided RSS feeds (and many still do), and you can collate a lot of it into a single inbox with some effort.

Unfortunately... it always seems to boil down to involve email notifications, which are woefully inadequate due to the lack of the obvious features above, and drown out actual human communication.

[bryanmillstein]

What does a single notification platform look like to you? Is it a web, desktop or mobile app? Would you use a separate application just for keeping track of your notifications? I can see how it would be useful but also it seems like it could be a pain to add another app you have to give attention to.

[corytheboyd]

I am an IC. Mute all channels except the one or two you want to be notified on all messages for. Create good email filters to catch all the notification spam, but organized so that you can still scan over it. Setup reasonable boundaries with people instead of the classic passive-aggressive fallback because nobody ever did.

The rest will still be chaos but you can at least do a few things on your end to make it 5% more manageable.

[lbhdc]

I have been thinking about this, and wondering if there is a different way to organize everything that needs attention in a way that doesn't drown out that channel in noise.

I feel like I want something like social media where I can subscribe to notifications and alerts that are important to me. I wanna be able to browse a high level "news feed" of my events where I can easily drill into related data or documents. In the case of application metrics or alerts it would be extra nice to have some visibility into metrics and alerts that have no subscribers to validate that we have coverage.

[fragmede]

If you work at a big enough company, all the really important stuff gets leaked to the press and you'll be able to use CNBC as as source for company news! (Not sure if that's a good thing or not)

[groffee]

Funnily enough this was mentioned on Twitter yesterday [0]

So much time and thought is given to 'doing things at scale' but zero thought to the user experience as their notifications scale.

[0] https://twitter.com/ZubyMusic/status/1590073315011751936

[bryanmillstein]

Have you tried anything to solve this? Are there any products you've come across that try to solve this? I also have this problem but I'm not aware of any companies that are trying to solve it.

[saasxyz]

I am an indie dev, I have an idea for a product related to this for days now. Do you have some time to talk about this? where can I reach you?

[beckingz]

5% signal to noise ratio is decent.

In seriousness though, knowledge management and communication cultural design is so valuable. Managers ought to model effective communication.

[gardenhedge]

Mute most things. Set some things to high priority.

[bryanmillstein]

How do you set things to high priority? Are you flagging emails after you read them?

[gardenhedge]

I set some rules