This week, I sat in on a webinar hosted by Slack where they stated multiple times that Slack is a knowledge base. Using Slack as your knowledge base (KB) is a rookie mistake. There, I said it.
I’ve worked for several startups where this practice was disclosed to me as early as the interview process. “We use Slack to store our knowledge and search for it in there when we need it.” This is usually followed by “…and we have a really hard time finding anything.”
Slack search is only as good as the messages your past selves sent. Think about the last long, live conversation you had in Slack. You and a few other people probably went back and forth, working through a problem, to get to a solution after 50 messages (which were hopefully threaded🤞). In three months, when a new hire needs to know about that decision, you’ll be asking them to wade through all 50 of those messages, plus whatever else has accumulated before or since that convo about that topic, to make sense of it all. And that’s assuming that they knew about the conversation or could find it at all-what if the conversation involved a project that had since been renamed? A product that was now built around entirely different terms or code? The potential for misinformation or misunderstanding is decent.
I’ve seen companies try to solve these problems with an abundance of channels. “We’ll make so many channels that the content of each will be streamlined and super specific. That will help with search!” Okay, maybe. But do you have faith that all of your employees will a) know about every Slack channel, b) remember/be held accountable for reading and digesting each Slack channel as it updates? I do not.
All of this also ignores the possibility of Slack deletion and retention policies, which some companies adopt as a safeguard against potential future legal actions or audits. If your project needs a conversation from January to reach its goals in October, but your retention policy deleted that message after 6 months and took no additional steps to back up messages…poof. You’re left fumbling around in the dark.
By this point, you might be wondering “What About Slack Canvas?“ Slack rolled out this feature last year to encourage users to store more information outside of channel discussions and threads. Each channel and each user has its own Canvas, a small notepad-like space for collaboration and info sharing. I have most frequently seen it suggested as a place to put high level current updates, like project charters and notes between colleagues. In a traditional development shop, it would be on the project managers to make sure a Canvas’ content is current, with the assumption that they and any other hired documentarians would be updating their larger KB in conjunction.
My question here is why. If Canvas is too small to hold all permanent knowledge, and you need another tool to fulfill that requirement, why make your project managers update information in two separate spaces rather than link employees out of Slack and to the one, tried and true source of truth–be it a KB or a task tracking/management tool? The cardinal sin of documentation management is failing to keep documentation updated. Expecting that updates will happen regularly, in multiple places, increases the likelihood that something will get dropped, and out-of-date information will be read by someone who takes it at face value and acts as if it’s gospel. Keep Canvas for personal to-dos and channel and tool directories, not duplicitous knowledge snippets.
Slack is a great tool for collaboration and discussion. But when that discussion concludes, leaving your key takeaways floating around in the ether is both lazy and dangerous. Instead:
- Come to your conclusion or arrive at your answer.
- Pull that answer out into permanent documentation which lives somewhere other than Slack–Confluence, Google Drive, Guru, Notion, whatever particular flavor of KB speaks to you and your team’s needs.
- Copy the link to that documentation and add it as a bookmark to relevant Slack channels. This allows readers to get to the single source of truth from multiple touch points.
- Sit back and let the knowledge flow ✨.
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