Introducing bidirectional Slack notifications

We recently rolled out our integration between Focal and Slack, allowing teams to stay in the loop on project updates and help improve visibility for the wider organization. An efficient way to notify your team on Slack has come up in most customer interviews and having used several other Slack integrations ourselves, we started this project with a clear view of the main challenges we wanted to solve for.

Pitfalls to avoid

Slack is a powerful tool that allows for many possibilities to enhance the workflow within a team. However, as teams and companies grow, the once so manageable Slack environment can get a bit overwhelming. When discussing other Slack integrations with our pilot customers, the main challenges raised were:

• When a comment gets sent to Slack and the discussion is continued there, conclusions and next steps rarely make it back to the original source
• As the number of Slack channels grows, it can be hard to know where to start looking for the follow-up conversation and final decision
• Slack notifications often lack context - the notification typically contains a link back to the original source, but if you are on the move and want to be able to act quickly, you can’t always get everything you need from the notification alone

To Slack - and back

The Focal Slack integration is bidirectional, meaning that when stakeholders reply to the notification in Slack, we sync the discussion back to Focal. Mirroring the thread in Focal and Slack means that you have one less information silo to worry about, as both sides contain the full discussion.

More context through asset previews

To minimize the time designers need to wait for comments or approvals, we also wanted to enable a good workflow for creative comments through Slack. When you leave a comment on a creative asset in Focal, we include a thumbnail of the creative asset in the notification. The thumbnail of the asset is generated from the frame that was commented on, allowing stakeholders to easily understand what is referred to.

If you’d like to try Focal and our bidirectional Slack integration, request alpha access here. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

- Andreas