#415 – Foundations of Sand

This week, we began re-implementing Slack Workflows that stopped functioning after a new Slack release.

Last year, I wrote a letter to my colleagues at Parabol, included with a set of bound volumes containing the first several years of Friday Ship posts:

At Parabol, we make software. Most of our customers buy our hosted SaaS. Fewer pay us to manage a private instance or license our software to host and use themselves. In those latter cases, users have control over when upgrades are applied. We live in an age where control and ownership are increasingly being traded for the convenience of leasing: the music we listen to, the movies we watch, the cars we drive, the homes we live in, the bicycles we ride, games we play, and applications we build our business upon.

Years ago we shared a post of how we implemented a Slack Workflow to make decisions asynchronously at Parabol. Since our workforce is fully remote and distributed across time zones, enabling our business to propose and make decisions about how we operate and structure ourselves is vital to staying responsive and scaling our culture. We’ve standardized our communications on Slack and naturally using Slack’s Workflow was a convenient choice for initiating and shepherding decisions from proposal to conclusion.

This week we were a bit surprised to find that our workflow simply stopped working. I’m sure this is partly our fault: the Workflow feature as it had been expressed for years had been deprecated for quite some time. However, we missed Slack’s communication about it. Suddenly, a feature our business relied on was gone. Few things make you feel more like a renter than when a room is demolished while you’re still living in the house.

As of this writing, we’re still working on re-implementing our async decision-making workflow, once again using Slack’s new Workflow feature. We’ll make sure to share this new version (the old one is available via GitHub). One day, we’ll look forward to implementing this flow completely in a future version of Parabol and bring more of what’s core to us, core to the product, and more within our own control.

Metrics are nearly flat over last week. Since September, there has been healthy growth in the number of new weekly signups, one we’re hopeful will yield growths in usage as users onboard their teams.

…proposed a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant for mission and base operations planning with the Air Force.

…completed developing a set of marketing materials for a defense-focused trade show we’re attending called AFCEA TechNet Indo Pacific in two weeks. This will be the first physical trade show we’re housing a booth in several years.

…continued migrating away from RethinkDB to Postgres. This week we hit a bit of a snag where a change we shipped made production fail for a few minutes during the early morning hours UTC. Luckily our incident response procedures worked and we were able to get things fixed before too many users were affected.

…made improvements to our post-signup automated onboarding email flows.

…added the timer feature to more meeting types and meeting phases. This has been an oft-requested feature. We’re glad we’re delivering it in an upcoming release!

conclude Shape Up Cycle 4.

…begin executive strategic planning for the last trimester of 2024.

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