[daphneokeefe]

What I most disliked about using Slack on a dev team was that there was no way to locate the information later. Suddenly, a discussion about the project requirements or technical implementation would take place. That decision became embedded in the project. But if you weren't there for the discussion, you had no input. And later, when you wanted to review the decision and the underlying facts, there was no way to find it.

So I would spend a lot of time reading back through the discussions in the various channels. And sometimes those micro-decisions were later contradicted with no acknowledgement.

[notduncansmith]

This seems like another case of using Slack outside it’s appropriate scope.

While you may have impromptu meetings and make decisions on Slack, any company’s most important directives should be codified and accessible outside that medium. You don’t send executive meeting minutes to the whole company and have them parse our what decisions are made: decision-making meetings result in memos and other documentation.

Likewise, if a team’s decision-making process leaves out important stakeholders or makes it difficult to have influence, that’s another management problem that has nothing to do with the use of Slack. You would have the same problems if meetings are held spontaneously at the water cooler, and in fact I’ve seen this very thing happen without Slack’s influence.

[barberousse]

This is the biggest danger IME for my team as well and everyone from QA to Dev to middle-management is guilty of it. Worse, my job also has Confluence, OneDrive, and JIRA, and not a one of them is the final source of truth.