The Arc of Collaboration - kwokchain

In the last few decades we have seen tremendous technical breakthroughs in the latencies and tooling possible to remove these constraints. Across the world, whether in productivity apps or in national governance, there will be a transition period as our norms and processes adapt to this tightening of the collaboration feedback loop. But perhaps I r... See more

Active users of Discord have it on all the time, even when they are not playing games. It’s a passive way to have presence with your friends. And when your friends start playing games it makes it easy to with one click go join them in the game. Bringing your actual social graph across all games. Finally, voice chat makes it possible to talk with yo... See more

This isn’t to say that there cannot be a horizontal collaboration app that is core to the productivity workflows. But it likely cannot be blocking to productivity. It can’t be a peer level app that is standalone. Instead it must work across and within each productivity app. Standalone messaging is not what ties all apps together. It is a peer level... See more

And Figma is not alone. More and more apps in all categories understand that collaboration should and must be built in as a first party if they want to best serve their customers. Notion, Airtable, etc all understand this. The feedback loops of collaboration get so short that they become part of the productivity loop.

Figma has collaboration built in natively as a first party. This means the ability to comment on designs. But it means much more too. It means the ability to design together at the same time. To be able to send a live demo to someone frictionlessly and then be able to make live changes as you talk to them. It means being able to build design system... See more

Slack’s importance is inversely tethered to the rate at which functional workflows within companies become legible and systematized. Both at an operational level, and long term at the meta-strategic level.

- **Meta-coordination.** Slack is the best place for meta-levels of strategy and coordination that don’t have specific productivity apps. This is really a type of ‘else statement’, but one that could persist for a while in unstructured format.

- **Watercooler.** Slack is a social hub for co-workers. This is very important, and full of gifs.

- **Else statement.** Slack is the exception handler, when specific productivity apps don’t have a way to handle something. This should decrease in usefulness, as the apps build in handling of these use cases, and the companies build up internal processes.