Communication Tools

During your first few days, you’ll want to become acquainted with all of the following communication and collaboration tools. Some you will use more than others, but you should have a foundational understanding of what each is used for.

We use Gmail for client and external communications, not for internal communication. You’re welcome to use another platform that works for you so long as it doesn’t complicate the work life of other team members.

Additionally, we use some of the Google Suite products — notably Shared Drives (with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides) and Calendar. These are major communication tools for our team.

Slack is ideally reserved for communication that is necessarily synchronous. We try to avoid using Slack for conversations that hold some evergreen value (e.g. figuring out how to troubleshoot an analysis) so that the contents of the discussion can be codified into documentation that other team members (current and future) can benefit from.

Any project-related conversations over Slack should take place in the respective project channel, not over DMs.

We’re still trying to find the right balance, but the ideal is to use JIRA to preserve questions “in the record” that can be attributed to a specific task or question, rather than a nebulous Slack ether.

Nobody is a stranger to Zoom anymore. We use it for our daily standups, sprint planning, pair working (e.g. to write a survey or code together) and for most external meetings. Please be sure to include a Zoom link for any meetings you request.

There are a few ways to get a Zoom link in a Google Calendar invite. Two common ones being the Zoom Chrome Extension, or the Zoom for Google Workspace add-on. We have historically had fewer glitches with the Zoom Chrome Extension, so if you are using the add-on and have trouble, we recommend switching to the Chrome Extension (if you use Chrome).

Please refer to our Communication Hierarchy guide for more details on when and how you should communicate with your team members, in order to give everyone a healthy work-life balance.