How to write Slack messages that get results
When you're trying to get a response from the team, make sure your Slack post is clear, actionable, context-filled, and relevant. Read: "Everything Starts Out Looking Like a Toy" #244
Hi, I’m Greg 👋! I write weekly product essays, including system “handshakes”, the expectations for workflow, and the jobs to be done for data. What is Data Operations? was the first post in the series.
This week’s toy: local action (like hosting a morning coffee) can lead to community resilience. It’s always a good time to get to know your neighbors (and what is happening in your neighborhood).
Edition 244 of this newsletter is here - it’s March 31, 2025.
Thanks for reading! Let me know if there’s a topic you’d like me to cover.
The Big Idea
A short long-form essay about data things
⚙️ How to write Slack messages that get results
What makes a perfect Slack message? No, I’m not talking about a dunk, reaction gif, or pranks like faking a typing indicator with a bot so that people are typing… appears constantly. I mean the practice of improving your communication so that people in your remote team see your messages more often, interpret and understand when you are asking for help or assistance, and get the context of the message.
Let’s talk about messaging to a public channel in Slack.
A great message is concise, actionable, clear, and easy to scan. The content stands out from a wall of text and informs your team how to read it and acknowledge, respond, or collaborate.
Breaking down core messaging elements
Public channels are noisy places: messages are easily lost in the stream of information. Keep it simple and readable, and you’ll get more feedback.
Here are a few axioms for creating great messages in a public channel.
Great messages are:
Clear: they indicate the type and priority of the message at first glance
Concise: they provide short, readable descriptions with minimal jargon
Actionable: the next step or request for input is explicitly stated
Contextual: there is enough context to answer or read the message, including links to resources
Outcome-driven: they state the impact in neutral terms
This is not intended to be a one-size-fits-all list.
The intent here is to focus on the characteristics that make it easier for people to scan, acknowledge, act (if needed) and move on.
Winning this game means lowering the context switching needed to read your message and applying a heuristic like this decision matrix —> do I need to do or delegate something?
What does a great message look like?
Unsurprisingly for those of us who have ever worked in support and operations teams, a great message in Slack looks a lot like a great support ticket.
Here’s a hypothetical message using this template to demonstrate a breaking issue in a consumer application.
Why each part matters
Emoji and type - this quickly lets team members know what type of problem it is and gives them a reference point to look it up on their own. Common other types might include ❓QUESTION or 💡 IDEA
Title - a short, clear message helps the reader to know what this is about
Priority - it is important to share how urgently you need help. In many organizations, P1 = URGENT, P2 = ACTION NEEDED, P3=LOG ONLY
Relevant links - make it easy to jump directly to external resources needed to provide context like a CRM, Ticket management system, or a customer application record
A brief description - don’t write a book; instead, think about a single sentence description that can be understood at a glance. If you need more context, link to additional docs
Next step - lets the team know how they can help
The more often you model this pattern, the more likely the team will pick it up and emulate it. The format doesn’t need to be perfect —> the point here is to embrace kaizen (continuous improvement) and to build a way of communicating that works better for a distributed team.
Yes, this helps everyone
There will be some pushback (gentle and otherwise) from people who don’t like a strongly typed messaging system.
How can you respond?
I’d remind them that a standard reduces confusion because everyone sees what’s needed. I’d also say: we’re doing this as a team because it saves time and improves the ability to answer team questions.
Clear asks tend to get quicker and more complete responses.
It’s not just about getting a fast response, but also an effective one. A strongly typed question and answer set makes it easy to scan and analyze the content in a public channel. It also clears the way for future analysis with LLM tools.
What’s the takeaway? Everyone benefits from a clear ask. Adopting a standard for Slack messages by putting the bottom line up front makes it easier for the team to scan, analyze, and respond more effectively. It’s also a way to build visual continuity in your team’s Slack channels and avoid the “wall of text".
Links for Reading and Sharing
These are links that caught my 👀
1/ Avoiding the 4 o’clock Friday afternoon freakout - When you write code for a living or release improvements, there’s a moment when you need to deploy. Hopefully you’ve done all of this sort of testing in advance. The reason you shouldn’t deploy on Friday afternoon? You probably haven’t done all of the testing you needed to do. (But don’t wait forever. You also need to know which kind of bugs are the ones that stop a release and which ones are “fast follow.)”
2/ Don’t build bad bots - I really appreciate this concise story on building human-centered user experiences (even when you are using bots) by Des Traynor of Intercom. Bad bots? They look like the ones pictured here …
3/ Be yourself, be more human - It’s easy to think that AI is inevitable, and perhaps more informative to consider “there are some things that computers do better than humans, and should do most of the time” — thinking here about complex calculations where computers show their work and humans QA the result.
But there are other things where we really need to lean into being human. Anna Burgess Yang thinks high quality work will stand out from the AI slop: I agree.
What to do next
Hit reply if you’ve got links to share, data stories, or want to say hello.
The next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” - Chris Dixon