Slack Best Practices

Public vs Private Channels

Aim to keep all discussions in public channels unless it definitely has to be private. This ensures others on the team can follow discussions, decisions and have context that they can search for in the future.

Channel Naming Conventions

As the teams grow, so do channels. Keep them consistent and ensure members follow the topic of the channels.

One structure I follow for my products (lets assume the product is called "Mango"

#mango - general channel for all PMs, engineers and stakeholders. Anyone in the org can join and follow along.

#mango-engineering - only for engineers and engineering related discussions. You could either keep this private or only allow engineers to post

#mango-monitoring - pipe all monitoring related alerts to this channel (more on this below)

#mango-logs - only info/debug messages from services. These are set to 24 hour retention

Signal vs Noise

People wrongly assume that pushing all the monitoring alerts to a channel means engineers will have the info they need to make decisions. Monitoring channels need to be free of distraction and any alert that comes up on that channel should be actionable.