Jordan – Engineering Manager

Meet Jordan. He's an Engineering Manager at MoneyMe, a web-based classifieds service. Jordan is responsible for building and maintaining the codebase for the company’s iOS app. Six months ago, his team adopted Slack. Explore below to see how it changed the way they work.

🔍  Finding answers

Support reps at MoneyMe regularly need engineering help to diagnose and fix customer issues. 

Before Slack

After Slack

Before Slack, when a support rep would receive a complaint about the app, they would:

• Ping whatever engineer was online and hope they were familiar with the code.
• Provide the customer a response to the best of their knowledge without engineering input.

Often, something that could have been fixed easily would go unresolved, resulting in a negative experience for MoneyMe’s customers.

📂  Next up: Click the 'After Slack' tab 

Using Slack, Jordan’s team is able to centralize bug reports from MoneyMe’s users, resulting in faster, more accurate responses:

• They have a rule to  search first before asking a question in Slack.
• They have a  public channel called #triage-ios, where reps can raise customer problems.
• When an engineer is looking at a problem, they  emoji react with 👀 , to let the rep know they're looking into it, and a ✅  when resolved.
• Team members use  mentions to call attention to subject-matter experts.

🎉 You're done! Move onto the next workflow.

👥  Reducing time in meetings

Jordan’s team works in two week sprints, and they need to stay aligned each day.

Before Slack

After Slack

Before Slack, the team held a daily standup to touch base; however, Jordan found these meetings tended to drag on and eat into his team’s productivity:

• The team was remote and it was hard to find a time that worked for everyone.
• Team members would have their heads buried in their phones when others were speaking.

Jordan needed a way to keep everyone on the same page, without burdening his employees who were in different timezones.

Using Slack, Jordan’s team is able to provide their update at the beginning of their day, and are able to focus more time on writing code:

• For daily standups, the team has a weekly  Slackbot reminder that triggers every day at 9am.
• When it's necessary to meet in person, the meeting lead shares an agenda as an  editable Post in the #ios-team channel ahead of time.

🎯 Clarify expectations

Jordan’s team works closely with Design, and they often need to ask designers for clarification about desired behavior.

Before Slack

After Slack

Before Slack, when one of Jordan’s engineers needed clarification, they could:

• Send them an email with their question.
• Try to find them and have an in person discussion.

Because conversations lived in silos, it would be extremely challenging to gain context if the project had to be passed off to a new engineer.

Using Slack, Jordan’s team is able to work cross-functionally with ease, while keeping everyone in the loop.

• They have a  public channel called #design-eng where the teams can quickly ask questions of each other.
• When engineering poses a question, a designer  emoji reacts to the requests, to let to let them know they’re looking at it.
• Back and forth conversation happens in  threads, keeping things organized and easily to reference.

📰 Keeping the team informed

Service interruptions to the tools Jordan’s team relies on can be a huge disruption; it’s important that his team can plan around them. 

Before Slack

After Slack

Before Slack, service interruptions seemed to get buried in the mix of daily communication at MoneyMe. They were sent:

• Via an email sent to a large distribution list.
• Through updates to the service status site on MoneyMe’s intranet.

Jordan’s team would often miss updates surrounding service disruptions, and thus get hit with them at inopportune times.

Using Slack, service updates are clearly communicated and targeted to the right audience:

• Each department has an  #announcements channel for important updates, with a strict reactions only policy.
• Service alerts are  pinned to the channel for easy reference, and then unpinned when complete.

🙇 Centralizing information

Jordan likes to know what his team is up to in case they need support, but doesn’t want to add any friction to their workflow.  

Before Slack

After Slack

Before Slack, in order to get a handle on the work his team was doing, Jordan had a couple of options:

• He could jump around in the different tools his team uses, and check on the status of different projects.
• He could ask the team to provide regular status reports.

Jordan lost a great deal of productivity because of all the context switching he was doing between tools.

Using Slack, Jordan’s team feeds all status updates directly into Slack:

• The team has a dedicated channel to track commits, pull requests, issues, and deploys, with they set up using the  Slack App Directory.

🏆 Get Certified

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