When I tell people we didn't use an issue tracker at Slack, I typically get one of two reactions, either "oh thank god" or "how tf did you stay organized?" Here's the thing: we were incredibly organized. Here was our system: Use a document (and checklists) to track your work. We used a tool called Hackpad, which Dropbox acquired and became the bones of Dropbox Paper. With Paper we could keep the product brief, designs, and engineering tasks in a single spot. This was immensely helpful for keeping everyone aligned -- there was just one place to check, and no risk of things being out of sync across multiple tools. We'd project the doc during team meetings, and the whole team worked out of this document throughout the day. (This was so effective that it motivated us to build @Balsa to implement the patterns we used at Slack.) Use a spreadsheet to track status. We used a simple Google Sheet, with a row for each project, the PM/EM working on it, launch date, project status (red/yellow/green), and a column for comments, which contained a weekly note on how things were going. We reviewed this spreadsheet every Monday in an all-PM/EM meeting with the CPO, CTO, and VPs of Eng and Design. Use your issue tracker as a bug database. Issue trackers are great at remembering, but they suck for keeping track of what's happening now. Eng tasks related to a project we were actively working on, including bugs caught in QA, were all kept in a checklist in the project document. Things we knew we weren't going to fix, or that needed to be done by other teams would go into an issue tracker we built ourselves. (We eventually migrated this to Jira.) The issue tracker was helpful for cataloguing things and giving Customer Support a place to search for known defects, but we never worked out of it for active project work. Closing thought: Most of the time, you just need a document. Lightweight product process is not anarchy. As an industry we've been brainwashed for 20+ years by giants like Atlassian telling us the only way to stay organized is to use Jira (or issue trackers like it). This is outdated advice. Issue trackers are designed for a bygone era. Nowadays projects change daily or hourly as designers, engineers, and PMs adapt in real time, tweaking designs, running experiments, and incorporating feedback between research sessions. When your whole team is coordinating in Slack, chiseling tasks into your bug database slows you down and makes you less adaptable. A doc and checklists. It's all you need. (We're building @Balsa as a builder-focused, dedicated tool for this workflow, but you can do this with Dropbox Paper, Notion, or even Word or Google Docs.)

The biggest reveal in the #TwitterFiles is that employers have access to your Slack DMs.

Can your project management tool do this? @Balsa puts key launches in your Google Calendar automatically, so you never forget. As a PM, I’m pretty happy about this feature! 🚀