Slack Frontiers 2020: Better together: Workflow Builder and Slack apps

good morning welcome to today's session where we'll be going deeper on an announcement that we heard yesterday that more steps are now available in workflow builder and specifically those new steps are going to help you connect other apps and services to your workflows my name is angela kirchoff i'm a senior product manager at slack leading workflows over the next 50 minutes we're going to take a closer look at what's happening with workflow builder slack's no code tool for automation first we'll take a look back at the past year of workflow builder and the way it's transforming teamwork and channels and we'll hear stories from slack customers that are using workflows today we'll also take a closer look at how slack apps can now offer workflow steps and how that exponentially increases the flexibility of workflows next we'll hear directly from our partners who've been building alongside us and learn about why they are investing in workflow steps for their slack app and finally we'll show you how to get going with workflows whether you're a developer or a novice slack user so let's get started so we launched workflow builder almost a year ago to help you automate your work inside of slack and for anyone learning about slack for the first time slack is a channel based messaging platform that replaces email inside of your company channels provide you and your team a shared view into the work that's being done because everyone in the channel has access to the same information they can work in lockstep and when new members join it's much easier to get people up to speed so that they can start working the shift to using channels as a way to keep people informed and coordinated in and of itself can transform how you work but when you combine teamwork and channels with simple workflow automation you can make slack even more powerful and that's what i'm here to tell you about today using workflow builder you can automate tasks specific to your team without writing a single line of code builders can create channel specific workflows that automatically run through a sequence of steps when triggered and this comes in handy for things like onboarding new members of your team handling requests team stand-ups and more creating workflows within slack allows you to simplify coordination and communication across teams and channels workflow automation helps you unlock more value from your tools and processes it does this first and foremost by saving you time as you streamline your daily tasks in slack you can automate reminders messages requests and the process of getting new employees up to speed second workflow automation reduces the back and forth by standardizing processes and this allows your teams to get to set expectations around requests by automatically communicating next steps or timelines through slack messages and it also helps your team collect all of the right information up front when collaborating and finally workflow automation helps you customize slack by creating workflows that are unique to your team and the tools they're using these benefits tie together enabling your teams to get the right people the right information at the right time so that your team can spend less time on the coordination and more time on the important work so you can set up a workflow to kick off after a particular event that we call a trigger triggers can include events like a new person joining a channel someone adding a reaction to a message or someone clicking on the shortcuts menu in the message composer you can also set up triggers that are based on the time of day or events fired from other services using a web hook once a workflow has been triggered you can add custom logic about what happens next whether that's sending messages or using forms to capture more information you might want to use workflows to run a daily stand-up to report status to the team collect information after a customer phone call or like docusign did to onboard new employees but docusign isn't the only customer that has adopted workflows to transform the way their teams work in channels since the launch of workflow builder a year ago we've seen more than 175 000 people create more than 515 000 workflows and those workflows have been launched more than 25 million times we've also discovered that 77 of our builders are non-technical and that means that every one of you listening to this has the ability to automate your work using workflow builder right now but don't just take my word for it let's take a closer look at some of the workflows that slack customers have built to do just that when technology security company mcafee transitioned its entire organization to work from home in response to covet 19 executives wanted to keep communication between employees and leadership open and active so they used workflow builder and using workflow builder they designed a solution to have an ask me anything session or an ama hosted by the vice president and general manager of the consumer cloud division the ama workflow they built resulted in a high degree of engagement between employees and executives and most importantly it was easy to build and use it was so easy according to mcafee that their executive was able to self-moderate the entire session another example that illustrates a common way customers are using workflows comes from new a health and lifestyle company noom used workflow builder to automate new higher onboarding in a way that decreases each new higher orientation by 30 minutes and that saves its coaching operation team two hours a month using workflow new hires get access to material prior to the first day on the job and they're able to review key content and complete pre-work in a self-paced way this not only results in time saved for the coaching staff but it also fosters connection among new employees who are 100 engaged with the workflow and plugged into a support network in the new hire channels easing their transition into the company and finally we're going to learn about how snowflake a data warehousing company uses workflow builder to automate surveys for their employees using an emoji reaction triggered workflow that asks someone to complete a survey members can share feedback without having to context switch or flip between different tools or applications they used a form that included mandatory fields in order to standardize the kind of feedback they were looking for from employees and this helped provide consistency across feedback categories and it moved work forward since a workflow automatically sends the feedback in real time there's no additional action needed from an employee or a manager so now let's hear directly from one of our earliest adopters of workflowbuilder welcome joe the associate director of devops at hearst who's going to talk about how his team is pushing the limits of what's possible with workflows hi i'm joe lodato i'm the associate director of devops for hearst magazines media um and uh we've been using the slack platform for roughly five years now we have um all our releases deployments um adding or removing users from uh different sas products uh tons of tons of uh slack bots uh in our our in our catalog um slack has been it's been great because we've been cutting out the need for email and everything's just right in chat for us so it's uh it's it's um it's real good uh a tool for us in our company um some of the current stuff we do is basically all releases and deployments so we have people creating releases as you can see in the screenshots over here we see when people are pushing to the master branch on github um we have different bots deploying to different environments running load tests so you know basically you're merging and and things are going through the ci pipeline um it's uh it's it's really nice it's everybody sees everything everything's happening things are rolling back if they're failing automated tests things along those lines you can even set variables in slack through some of the tools we have secrets are set in a different window as you can see on the bottom left slide here you can see as you're deploying things variables changing things along those lines um another tool we have is a user management tool which is great for onboarding and off-boarding uh users to different sas products um as you can see in this example here we're adding somebody to github so um we have github datadog slack um tons of different tools that we can add through the three to these bots um but we we knew about workflows at hearst but we never really looked into it we found ourselves asking for information from users uh over and over and over again it was wasting everybody's time we were wasting time with you know what is your email what's your github username should it be read should it be right access and then every different pro different product needed different information from the users so there was um email github username the list goes on and on um and we didn't realize it was a chance to automate our automation so it was kind of sitting around but here's one of the things we did instead of having to run that um that command that uh needed all that information we basically have a slack workflow here on the left on you can input what's your team what organization you you need access to um if you need read or write your github username and then your email and then the slack workflow pops up with a thing a message that says is this approved um somebody clicks approve which fires off this message says okay we have an approved github access request with the data we need and then we have a bot running in the background that basically processes the slack event and automatically adds the person to the api which adds a person to the different sas products we have um so basically this auto reply bot here is in the slack channel processing events we use it for tons of different um a ton of different uh offerings um just anytime somebody asks for something that maybe they shouldn't need to do or this or that we just process a message so somebody doesn't have to be on call and say oh no we don't do that it's this bot is doing it so we repurposed this bot order reply for this we're triggering off this approved github access request and sending sending it along to the api um it's not only saving the devops same time but it's even the whole organization in time um we have it for a bunch of different workflows jira datadoor github the list goes on and on um so basically the people aren't waiting around after they submit the form somebody on the devops team just clicks that approve button and they have their access there's no back and forth um we haven't saved the the same amount of time that we have saved with the bots obviously because people aren't um requesting access a lot all day you know we have hundreds of micro services for the slack ops that's you know constantly being used so we're saving a lot of time there but we could be saving you know about an hour a week which is 52 hours uh a year which is really nice um you know anytime we can get time savings and automation in our in our tools it's it's a win for us um but we did kind of reach the limits of what slack workflows can do um since we're parsing all the events in the channel it's not optimal um slack did just release uh steps or apps which is basically going to be able to cut out our middleman bot so instead of the auto reply bot uh parsing the specific events it can we can have the workflow sent right to our other api which processes the user um which should be nice because you know this sort of replied rod is processing events in a ton of different rooms so it's it's totally not it's not the the perfect scenario but we're excited for steps for apps um and we're excited for you know as for slack workflows to continue um so i'm going to send it back to annual so she can talk a little bit more about steps wraps thanks joe we just heard that hurst is starting to see the benefits of workflow automation even with a focused set of capabilities but yesterday we announced new steps available in workflow builder steps from apps developers can now add custom steps to their slack apps when those apps are installed in your workspace your workflow builder step library transforms finally workflowbuilder is no longer stuck in slack steps from apps allow you to create workflows that connect with your external tools extending workflow automation beyond channels in your workspace and the value that you get from extending automation with workflow builder presents itself in a few ways first steps from apps bring disparate tools together into the flow of work that happens in channels giving you even more ways to increase the return on investment on not just slack but the rest of your software stack as well second apps are now more flexible in workflow builder since they can live within any desired workflow driving greater utility for you and your teams integrations are no longer defined solely by the developer but now they offer building blocks for deeper customization and third you no longer need to think of apps as their own separate entities you can build a workflow that combines multiple apps into one streamlined and automated process so there's no now more compatibility and apps can work together within a single workflow so developers of both custom apps and directory apps can create steps that will drive deeper automation of your work we're going to look at an example of each so first this is a screenshot of one of my personal workflows which utilizes a custom step that was created for our slack workspace the custom step updates my slack status every weekday at 11 am which is when i sign off and take over my daily child care shift for a couple of hours i no longer have to go through those extra few steps to change my status before i close my laptop i let workflow builder handle the pesky context switching so i can stay focused on my most important work so you can build these kinds of steps too you can create a step that randomly selects a member of a channel or maybe a step that adds an emoji reaction to a message or maybe even a step that spends up a new slack channel these are all custom steps that are available to start building today now we're going to take a look at the type of steps you might find from your favorite services in our app directory so one of the most basic and common workflows you can build is gathering information through a form and now you can use a step from the google sheets app to send information from the workflow directly into a spreadsheet this could come in handy for any ongoing information you're collecting that you want to store outside of slack for easy filtering analysis and queries so we saw how i use workflows with a custom step in my personal life but for my day job i'm a product manager and something i'm always doing is triaging product feedback we use workflows in our channels to gather customer feedback and all of that feedback is posted into the channel for visibility and transparency but when it comes time for quarterly planning i spend a lot of time exporting formatting and cleaning up csv files in order to remove duplicates and ensure i've captured the right details and that time would be doubled if i had more than one form that i needed to merge into a single spreadsheet so now there's a better way to find and analyze that information i can use a workflow step from google sheets it's the perfect way to store filter and query the collective feedback in order to inform my roadmap with steps from google sheets i can send the data collected in the form directly to a spreadsheet using the add a row step as a builder i'll connect my google account select a destination spreadsheet and map the information i've collected throughout the workflow to specific columns in my sheet as the workflow runs the information is piped into my spreadsheet automatically no more continuous csv exports and data cleanup required saving me a ton of time doing tedious work in addition to google sheets you can check out more apps with steps available in workflowbuilder in the workflows collection in the slap slack app directory and now i'm excited to let you hear from some of the developers with slack apps in the directory who are here to tell you about their journey building workflow steps first i'd like to welcome bellal the cto and co-founder of poly who's going to talk a bit about why they chose to build workflow steps hi i'm bilal jazi and i'm co-founder and cto at poly poly is an engagement app purpose built for slack to help teams get feedback from their peers users can quickly and accurately capture information in real time and it's dead simple so that anyone can send a poly in just a few clicks customers use this from scenarios ranging from stand ups to pulsing and i t ticketing feedback when we started building for slack more than five years ago we did so because that's where the most innovative users in enterprise were they were people who wanted to try new things had a taste for good products and were willing to evangelize a better way of working slack had a different logo and was clearly early on the adoption curve and poised to grow the zeal and enthusiasm of those early users is what led to product growth for products like ours that were leveraging the platform to build experiences that were built from the ground up for slack those users had a lot of guts considering the app ux pretty much didn't have any of the features we know and love today like block kit modals and even emoji reactions thank you so much to those users for trying out new things and keeping innovation going fast forward to the present and slack is a much bigger ecosystem serving a wider umbrella of users the innovators like those are still around and still pushing boundaries on better ways to work which in many cases has led them to workflows you can think of the slack customer journey as a graduation of steps users start with messages and jump into apps as they encounter them more recently as a simple way to automate routine processes at your company workflows helps unlock wins for those users and helps them make them not just themselves but also their colleagues more productive those early adopters and evangelists are still the types of users we want to be building for as a startup living on slack and so we were really excited to build for the next step in the journey and get a workflow step together for poly at poly we're long on the power of workflows generally poly is most powerful when people are collecting feedback in response to a process at the company which is exactly what workflow builder enables as we were thinking about how to approach our implementation of a workflow step we stopped to look at the parts of poly that made the most sense to tie into a step for us it was the concept of a template namely the ability to save off a version of a future poly that you would like to send templates enabled us to capture feedback on the same type of question over time to produce comparable results and allow trend analysis looking at that data over time is fundamentally what helps drive better business outcomes after all what is measured can be optimized templates also happen to be a huge driver of our core value prop at poly because they enable sticky use cases that lead to a more engaged user base ultimately when deciding to build on a new feature that's what platform partners should be looking at how to align value with their user base to that of the platform our goal was to broaden the base of poly users that could use templates we did this by making it possible to select not just a user's existing template but also templates out of the pali global template library where we've accumulated the most popular and valuable templates across our user base the library has the shared best practices across millions of users that make it easy for say a comms professional looking to increase employee engagement to pick up our anonymous all hands meeting prep template and tie it to a dedicated channel where topics and questions are triaged ahead of each meeting the anonymity afforded by this experience fosters a culture of open feedback while still providing a safe space for moderation tie this to the action button on all hands channel and anybody in the company can visit and share their feedback ahead of the next all hands super simple circling back the adoption curve mentioned earlier still applies it's just occurring in a different part of the ecosystem the most excited users the ones who are willing to try new things and push boundaries are now looking at workflow builder this is a fundamentally creative space and the story is yet to be written here i'm looking forward to what users and developers built together in this exciting new service back to you angela thanks bellow now we're going to hear from maya a product manager at pagerduty so we just talked to bilal about how important it is to build where your users are and maya is going to talk about how they invested in workflow steps in order to help minimize context switching thanks angela hi i'm maya a pagerduty integrations product manager and i'll be sharing patriotis workflow step trigger incident and some helpful tips for choosing the best steps for builders and end users an always-on world requires a proactive and preventive approach to managing your digital operations system pagerduty gives you real-time visibility into your critical apps and services right where you work and when business impacting issues do strike pagerduty ensures the appropriate teams are notified in slack with incident management actions at their fingertips pagerduty identifies incidents by collecting data signals from anywhere and interpreting those signals using machine learning however many incidents are created by internal teams during investigation and collaboration pagerduty's new workflow step trigger incident connects slack's channel collaboration to pagerduty's incident resolution slack's workflow builder plus pagerduty provides customers with streamline incident initiation now let's dive into pagerduty's trigger incident step for workflows after the slack workflow builder adds pagerduty's trigger incident step to a slack workflow and connects their pagerduty account the builder will be prompted to configure incident variables builders can select the impacted pagerduty service and assign variables for incident title and description these variables can be pulled from slack messages or a previous slack form lastly our step will share pagerduty's incident title description url and other details for use in the remaining workflow developing this workflow step was quick and easy but deciding what to build was a small challenge here's some food for thought when determining what steps is best for your customers when brainstorming what workflow step would bring the most value to a builder and in slack user we try to answer these four questions what customer actions are key for your platform this action will always be needed by end users and can be easily plugged into many workflows by builders can this action be completed without interruption and in that instance slack workflows are designed to be reliable streamlined processes that improve in user productivity if a single step is error prone the workflow cannot be depended on and have drastic downstream impacts how can this action be packaged in a byte size step smaller configurable steps give slack workflow builders more flexibility and control when building a workflow and lastly once the step is complete what information can the workflow share between steps and thus tools collaboration is key and this is not just for slack users communication between slacks apps increases automation enables data sharing and ensures a process can be fully completed without end user input using these helpful hints and questions slack workflow development teams will be able to build steps that are easy to plug in by developers and widely used by inco consumers now i hand it back to angela thanks maya we know that for developers there's more to your day-to-day than reporting incidents a key follow-on activity is monitoring dashboards throughout the duration of an incident so we're going to hear from natalie a product manager at datadog about a workflow step that would help you do just that thanks angela i'm natalie i'm a product manager at datadog and today i'm going to be telling you a little bit about building your slack workflows with datadog it's 2am and my phone starts paging about increased errors from payments on the checkout service on my web app as an engineer it's my responsibility to quickly figure out what's going on fix it and get back to sleep as soon as possible every minute matters especially when delays on checkout can lead to decreased number of purchases made and when the support team starts getting messages about customers unable to complete their purchases it's time to start acting fast the first thing i do is open my dashboard for the web app during the day my team and i use this to make sure the system looks stable these are benchmarks for how we expect the app to perform but right now this dashboard will also show how bad things are how many users are affected how widespread is this incident do we need to escalate to any other teams customer impact has been identified and an incident has already been called by the time i'm woken up but since i'm the on-call engineer i'm now the incident commander and need to quickly get up to speed i start messaging a few other teammates in a channel about the degraded service at datadog copy and pasting dashboard widgets into our channels is a crucial part of troubleshooting an incident it allows us to make sure our teammates know how the service is performing throughout the incident and helps others dig deeper into related issues they might be chasing down and make sure everyone is aligned during this particular incident since its customer facing and millions of dollars are potentially on the line we share our main service level indicator this measures the difference between how we want the service to perform against its actual observed performance right now we have service level agreements with our customers for the general uptime of the service and while service is degraded we're in breach of this contract this is why it's of utmost importance for the team to always know how long our customers have been impacted and continue to sprint to mitigating the issue and resolving customer impact as soon as we can with the new datadog workflow step we can now automate this a snapshot of our sli can automatically be sent to our incident channel every five minutes until we resolve the incident this is a custom escalation flow specifically for how we do incident management at datadog we went from a page in the middle of night in pagerduty to calling an incident and using our new custom workflow allowing us to share key performance metrics that include all the important information my team and i need when we need it specifically tailored to our own workflow let's walk through what setting this up might look like in another scenario each week on monday morning my team and i sit down and go through how our services performed over the last week we can now automate this process to automatically send a new message to our team every monday morning with the new information that we need first we'll want to create a new workflow we'll call it web store team slo then we'll choose a trigger since we care about this workflow once a week on monday morning we can choose the workflow to trigger on a schedule now starting next monday and every monday after that the workflow will trigger at 9am now let's add the datadog workflow step first we can select the channel we want this message to go to and the dashboard that we want the widgets from then we can select a saved view filtered specifically to the context that we care about and then the widget from that dashboard then right before we hit save we can preview a snapshot of this widget right now before it's saved as a new workflow and sent to any channel and that's it we've now successfully created a new slack workflow that includes all of the contacts from your datadog dashboards right into your slack workflows and on monday morning when you wake up information about how that service is performing is waiting for you in a message in your team channel with these new steps you can now customize your slack workflows to exactly the way you and your team already work with more time spent working and less on process you can minimize the time to repair and spend more time focusing on the things that are important get started today by building steps from datadog as part of your slack workflows now available in workflow builder thank you and i'll hand it back over to angela thanks natalie and of course i know that not everyone will need to automate an incident workflow so next i'll invite ryan a product manager from zapier to show you what a preview of what's possible for other workflows using steps from zapier thanks angela hey y'all ryan from zapier today i'm going to talk about how the app we created gives slack users access to more than 100 steps from over 20 different apps but for those of you that don't know zapier is a tool that moves info between your web apps automatically so you can focus on your most important work our platform has more than two thousand apps and we integrate with facebook active campaign google sheets salesforce and many more zapier shares a similar mission to the workflow team at slack we both want to save workers time by automating those tedious tasks so by putting the power of zapier directly into slack we're moving both our missions forward if there's one thing i want the builders to take away today it is any use case is possible if you're wondering if slack workflows is flexible and dynamic enough for you trust the team that's happier it is now any knowledge worker can attest that there are not enough hours in the day to get your work done we all need to accomplish more with fewer resources that is the problem my team set out to solve when building steps by zapier we enabled steps for some of the most popular ways users can save time this includes apps from task management project management spreadsheets email and crm we learned a lot during this process and here are a few tips for the builders out there on how we did it for the designers get creative with slacked ui framework known as block kit our app relies on heavy usage of images to achieve our ideal user experience with so many apps and steps supported this means a lot of images so what you're seeing here is an image service we built that automatically generates all the images our design requires therefore as we add more steps to slack our app design will scale tip number two is make it interactive there are plenty of components to add interactivity to your app in order for zapier steps to dynamically populate fields what you're seeing here we use select menus from the component collection to pull in data directly from zapier's apis and finally feel free to go off script these are some designs we shared with the team at slac around enhancements that could one day be made to the ui framework the team has been very receptive to that feedback and we continue to see them iterate on the platform so let's see steps by zapier in action i'm going to share two example multi-app multi-step workflows that allow users to work smarter not harder in this first example workflow a manager has requested some analysis be done by a stakeholder the workflow is started with a user reacting to the message with an emoji then zapier creates a todoist task to perform analysis for the stakeholder and finally zapier creates an airtable record to monitor this work in the team's project tracker let's take a look at another example in this one a sales rep is made aware of a new opportunity the workflow starts with a rep activating a custom shortcut zapier then creates a deal in pipedrive and adds the manager as a follower to the deal and lastly zapier creates an asana task to remind the rep to follow up in a week on this new deal this is only a taste of what's possible with steps by zapier but it goes to show how slack's workflow steps can accommodate any number of use cases i encourage all of you to explore steps for maps and help users remove those productivity roadblocks all right angela back to you thanks ryan so now you've seen what's possible when it comes to building steps for workflow builder before you let you lose to start creating i want to share a few best practices when it comes to building your workflow steps first plan ahead and think through the builder's experience when it comes to step configuration and always communicate as much as possible with builders design and experience is easy to understand for people building workflows who are relying on a no code tool that's easy to understand next unbundle actions in order to make your step as specific as possible and make your step flexible it's impossible to think of all the ways in which your step could be combined with others in a workflow so make sure your step can work with any trigger and step and one of the best ways to do this is to utilize inputs and outputs from the workflow make sure your step can accept workflow specific information as inputs and provides new information to be used later on in the workflow as outputs so if you are ready to build custom workflow steps you can join us later today where you'll actually get to build along with a workflow builder designer and engineer to code a workflow step check out our api documentation and you can even jump start your own workflow step using our sample code now if you're not a developer and you want to get up and going with workflow builder please join us for our session next where you can learn the basics of building workflows you can also see which steps are available in workflow builder through slack apps at our directory and you can get inspired with pre-built workflow templates that's all for today thanks for joining us and we can't wait to see what you build

Channel: Slack

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Id: I3iw59EY72M

Length: 35min 55sec (2155 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 20 2021