Turn your conversations into work with Slack lists

Today we’re bringing you Slack lists so your teams can manage projects, inbound requests and top priorities. We designed lists to help teams meet their goals by bringing project management to where they are already working—in Slack.

Year after year, business leaders are spending money on tools that promise to help them reach their goals, but those tools often don’t deliver on that promise. In fact, even with all the solutions available today, only 34% of projects are completed on time and within budget. The reason, according to The Wall Street Journal, is it’s challenging to find one project management tool that satisfies employees’ needs.

Our customers agree. They tell us that the project management tools available today get the job done for project managers and team managers, but they aren’t effectively used by the people actually doing the work. This is what they experience:

• People assigned to tasks have their conversations about the work outside of the project management tool.
• Teams across the company use different apps, which creates silos and licensing headaches.
• People spend hours on duplicative work, managing and sharing updates across various tools, platforms and systems.

Now, instead of purchasing a new project management tool that keeps information, conversations and teams separate and siloed, you can bring everything and everyone you need to manage work together with Slack lists.

Keep work flowing by organizing tasks in Slack lists

Millions of conversations take place in Slack daily. Now you can use Slack lists to capture, organize and track the most important parts of those conversations—deadlines, owners, resources and more—where work happens.

Lists give your Slack conversations structure. You can turn ideas shared in a project channel into actionable next steps, or capture requests from direct messages in a list to share with your team.

With lists, you can eliminate context switching between apps, so everyone you work with can collaborate and stay aligned on cross-functional projects, requests and more—all while in the flow of work.

“With lists, you can turn conversations in Slack into actionable tasks that drive work forward,” says Slack CEO Denise Dresser. “Now those loose next steps shared in a project channel can be tracked across a team. With project management in Slack, teams across organizations will have everything they need to complete projects faster and increase productivity using the full power of Slack.”

 

Manage and track projects from start to finish in Slack

Lists make it simple to drive accountability across your team. From planning marketing campaigns and product releases to managing employee onboarding and technology deployments, you can keep work on track in a list.

Here’s how lists work: You add fields (displayed as columns)—such as assignee, due date, status and priority—that provide context to your items (displayed as rows) for your project. Once you’ve added items to your list, you can sort, group and use filters to organize them. Views are a flexible way to group tasks by any field so you can prioritize work, identify gaps or blockers, and keep things moving.

We designed lists to complement how you’re already working in Slack:

• Use Workflow Builder to build automations with lists.
• Embed lists in a canvas brief with project deliverables and timelines.
• Save a message to a list for quick and easy reference.
• Coming soon: Get project recaps and search for information in lists instantly with Slack AI.

Collaborate on tasks where you’re already working together

All the features of Slack work together so you can do your best work. The same is true with lists. Take threads on individual items in a list, for example. Whether you’re a customer support agent needing to pull in an expert for guidance or you’re a sales rep needing management approval before closing out a request, you can easily pull people into the conversation.

Threads give colleagues the context they need to catch up, take action and jump into a conversation. You can use item threads to:

• Add a teammate into a discussion with an @mention to answer a question about a deadline
• Create and share a clip with feedback on a specific deliverable
• Upload files and share canvases that provide more context on an item

Share lists across Slack and invite a teammate, an entire channel or your external partners (via Slack Connect) with one click. You don’t need additional applications, licenses or product training, and everyone you work with in Slack can collaborate on a list.

Automate and triage requests and to-dos across apps

With automations, lists become your hub for managing and triaging work in Slack, helping you get more done, faster. We’ve made it easy for you to build automations with lists using Workflow Builder so you can:

• Collect and triage requests, from legal approvals to help desk requests.
• Set up alerts for tasks. For example, get alerts when new items are added to a list, the status of an item changes or when you’ve been assigned to an item.
• Build your own custom workflows to manage tasks across apps using plug-and-play connectors.*

* Note: Native integrations with third-party apps are limited today. Functionality will be expanded in future releases.

Simply put, lists save you time. According to customers in our lists pilot, 77% say lists have improved their ability to get work done. Marriott Digital Services is one of these customers.

“Our team was offered the opportunity to participate in the lists pilot and jumped at it,” says Lori Drake, the director of system strategy at Marriott Digital Services. “We’re excited to use lists to manage projects and track requests, and think lists could unlock significant time savings for our team.”

With lists, teams can focus on what’s most important: doing their best work, faster—all in Slack, the AI-powered platform for work.

Slack lists is rolling out to customers on paid plans over the coming weeks, starting today. Contact sales to learn more and join us for a webinar about Slack lists on June 20.

The above is intended for informational purposes. Please do not rely on this information in making your purchasing decisions. The development, release and timing of any products, features or functionality remain at the sole discretion of Slack and are subject to change.