The backlog didn’t look as pretty as it did in Trello, but the crucial part was there — it was 100% up-to-date again! The team loved the fact that they didn’t need to switch systems and move things back and forth anymore — everything was contained to Slack. Later, we realized that instead of deleting messages, we could’ve used emoji reactions to simulate statuses.

The new approach worked well during the bug-hunt, but longer-term planning was still challenging. There was no way to filter the feed by emoji-status, and older messages got out of sight very quickly. It’s not easy to answer, “what all needs to be done here?” by looking at the emoji-saturated channel history.

ToDoBot v1

Slack recently released the new App Home Tab, and we’ve discovered a perfect use-case for it almost accidentally. In a three-day hackathon, we’ve built the ToDoBot — an app that can manage all your to-dos right in Slack and display them in the App Home. We did not plan for ToDoBot to become a massive project, rather, a small satellite of OneBar. However, it turned out convenient, a lot of people signed up, and our team started putting all their work-items in the ToDoBot naturally. The v1 wasn’t meant for multi-person project management and didn’t have a lot of essential features. All you could do was a) create a to-do and b) share a to-do with somebody else. The crucial part, however, was the App Home — at any moment, you could see the list of currently open items in the ToDoBot’s Home Tab.

ToDoBot v2 (Channel to-dos)

As we joined a startup accelerator, the time to properly manage projects reduced drastically, but the amount of work has only grown. Our Trello stayed untouched for more than three months at this point, and all the work was already happening in Slack, just unorganized. ToDoBot v1 was the first baby step towards better management, and we decided to build upon it. We already had the experience of using project-specific channels, and everyone on the team was using ToDoBot privately. How could we combine the two? What if there was an App Home, but for a channel?

Unfortunately, Slack doesn’t yet have a surface-like App Home in channels. However, it has pinned items — a static place in the channel info sidebar where you can show any message(s) from the channel.

In addition, Slack API allows you to edit any message as many times as you want. Idea!? We can emulate a per-channel Home Tab by pinning one message and continuously updating it with current to-dos. A few more days of coding and the ToDoBot v2 was ready! It now could: