Digital HQ Slackathon: Meet the winners!

In November, we challenged the global Slack community to build impactful solutions for your organizations, and dozens of entrants responded. While we weren’t surprised, we were impressed by the ingenuity and technical skill behind the projects, which pushed the boundaries of imagination and user-centric design.

With solutions solving both simple and complex processes, across a wide variety of organizations and departments, it’s easy to see how the common problems we deal with on a daily basis can be addressed with creativity. Some highlights include:

• Making engineering stand-ups more productive
• Simplifying shift scheduling and work management in service-oriented teams
• Reducing the headaches of finding ideal meeting times with external teams and partners

Thank you Slack developers

We want to say thank you to everyone who participated and shared their valuable time and effort to create such amazing solutions and provide feedback on the Slack platform. And it didn’t hurt that $47,000 worth of prizes was given out to the many winners!

Now that the judging is complete, check out the winners and all of the impressive submissions for inspiration. You can get ideas on how to improve your organization’s productivity and employee experience in your digital HQ by breaking down silos across teams, embracing flexibility across preferred working styles, and automating as much as possible.

Here are some of the top winners:

1st Place: Get Together

Get Together is the fastest, easiest way to schedule directly in Slack.

2nd Place: AccessOwl

Save time and money, and make tool requests easier for you and your team while keeping track of all your apps and accesses.

3rd Place: Daily Scrum Supporter

Get your time back and unleash your team’s productivity with Daily Scrum Supporter.

What we learned

Instead of just looking at the solutions, we were able to hear from participants on the problem-solving process and what they learned from the experience. Here are a few key takeaways you might consider as you think about creating value for your own organization:

1. Automation and productivity for all. We were pleasantly surprised that the majority of submissions solved problems for not just a single team, but for entire organizations. Whether it was automating access to tools, connecting sales and product teams or meeting team goals, it was great to see Slack developers think outside of the box and scale productivity to everyone.
2. Business impact over technical complexity. The best solutions are not always the most complex. While building a custom application isn’t always easy, many of the winning solutions were not reliant on complex architecture or custom AI/ML. Instead, many participants focused on real-world problems with the average user in mind—one who simply wants to remove obstacles and complete important work.
3. Don’t reinvent the wheel. While the majority of solutions uniquely addressed our everyday issues at work, most also leveraged existing technologies and services. Using services from AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, combined with open source and various APIs, enabled participants to recycle existing technology and create innovative, high-value user experiences that positively impact our daily work.

While this Slackathon has ended, we look forward to doing it again next year! In the meantime, here’s how to learn more and get involved:

1. Join and participate in the Developer group on the Slack Community Forum
2. Read the Slack Developers blog to stay updated on the Slack Platform, tips and tricks, and success stories
3. Be sure to attend our many events including Slack Frontiers, TrailblazerDX and Dreamforce to hear directly from our experts and executives