Introducing SOTU

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how challenging it’s become for an outsider or manager to get a sense of how a project is going by just visiting a Slack channel.

The problem is fairly straightforward: the day-to-day chatter that happens in a Slack channel isn’t useful to me as a manager. It would take a lot of time and energy to read through chat transcripts and surmise how a project is going. My colleague Paul Ford put it best:

Brady Dale on Twitter

Scanning Slack is like listening to a conference call backwards. –@ftrain at @PostlightStudio

Now, of course you can have your weekly status meeting or your status report of some sort, but who wants to be subjected to that these days? Everybody is connected always. There’s got to be a better way.

Enter: Postlight Labs and SOTU

Instead of just sitting around and complaining to each other (and the world with a Medium post) we at Postlight decided to do something about it. This is the latest project from Postlight Labs and it’s called SOTU.

SOTU stands for State of the Union. It’s a Slack add-on that makes it incredibly easy to request, add, and share a summary for how a project is going.

It’s incredibly easy to setup and use. Once you’ve installed it onto your slack instance, anyone from within a channel can post an update — ideally a high-level summary of how things are going — to SOTU.

Once an update is posted, anyone can ask SOTU for display all the updates right from within Slack or you can visit a web page that displays all the summaries in one place. SOTU collects summaries across any number of channels within your Slack instance.

If you haven’t gotten an update in a while, you can even use SOTU to ping the channel to request an update:

SOTU is the very latest from Postlight Labs. It’s free and available now. Just visit getsotu.com to install it. Once it’s installed your entire team can share what’s going on in an open, transparent manner.