Blog

Field notes from inside Slack.

Automation patterns, product deep-dives, and the thinking behind Viably, written for teams obsessed with achieving more work while staying lean.

CultureProductJul 14, 20267 min read

The five attributes we recognize work by

Supertype publishes eight values, but a person giving a point in Slack has about two seconds to choose. Here is how those eight values compress into the five medal attributes I import into every workspace I set up, and why the attribute list is capped at six.

Read post

PaymentsStripeCart RecoveryJul 8, 20268 min read

How Supertype recovers lost sales with Slack webhooks

A failed Stripe payment is your warmest lead, a customer who chose the plan and tried to pay in the last few minutes. Here is how Supertype recovers those lost sales by sending charge.failed webhooks straight into Slack, with the product, amount, decline reason, and customer contact ready to act on.

Read post

WebhooksAutomationOpsJul 7, 20268 min read

A webhook for Slack to ground work on real signals

Sending a webhook to Slack is the easy part. The harder question is which events deserve a channel, who owns the follow-up, and how you keep the noise low enough that people keep reading. Here is how to turn event-to-Slack delivery into a habit the whole team trusts.

Read post

WebhooksAutomationEngineeringJul 6, 20269 min read

Webhook to Slack: building an event-driven workforce

A signup, a payment, or a failed deploy is worth far more when your team sees it the moment it happens. This is a complete guide to sending any webhook to Slack, with reliable delivery, automatic follow-up tasks, reporting, and logs, all set up from a single slash command.

Read post

ProductOpsJul 5, 20266 min read

Most teams have more tools than they need

The real cost of a new tool isn't the subscription, it's the context switch and the fragmented record that comes with it. Here's the case for building capability into the conversation your team already has open, instead of handing them a new login.

Read post

EngineeringWorkflowJul 3, 20265 min read

Bug triage that never leaves Slack

Every bug reported in a support channel pays a tax before it becomes a tracked issue: copying error text, guessing severity, remembering to link back. Here's how a single 🐞 reaction turns a Slack thread straight into a GitHub issue, kept in sync both ways.

Read post

ProductAutomationJun 30, 20266 min read

Automating away our daily standup in Slack

Our daily call had stopped surfacing new information and started repeating what Slack already showed. Here's what we replaced it with: tasks that follow up on their own, issues with visible owners, and a weekly pulse digest instead of a meeting nobody wanted.

Read post

ProductCultureJun 26, 20266 min read

Peer recognition dies the moment it needs its own app

Kudos channels and points programs quietly go quiet within a quarter, while the real thank yous keep happening in reactions nobody's counting. Here's why recognition only sticks when it lives inside the moment it's rewarding, and how Viably's medal leaderboard turns an existing habit into a running record.

Read post

EngineeringAIJun 19, 20265 min read

Why @Via reads with a fast model and acts with a careful one

A single model that's both quick to read intent and careful enough to take action is expensive and slow. Here's the two-tier routing behind Via — a fast model classifies what you want, a capable one does it — and why it makes multi-step requests more reliable.

Read post

ProductAutomationJun 12, 20266 min read

Your team's operating system already lives in Slack

Tasks, decisions, and recognition already happen in Slack — they just evaporate the moment the thread scrolls away. Here's how Viably turns those everyday reactions into a system of record without adding another app to learn.

Read post