Salesforce brings Slack Lists, a new feature that aims to make collaboration across teams efficient

The new feature from Slack is likely to help organisations that rely on multiple project management tools and frequently run into licensing issues.

The Lists feature comes with a cool user interface that makes managing workflows effortless. (Image: Slack)

On Thursday, Salesforce announced the general availability of Slack’s new List feature. The latest offering from Slack brings project management and task management directly into Slack, the popular AI-powered platform for work. The company claims that the new feature will bring structure to conversations in Slack and enable teams to manage projects, inbound requests, and top priorities, right from where they are already working. This comes as a huge relief to teams as they will no longer have to jump between multiple applications.

This is a significant development, as according to Salesforce, business leaders have been spending massively on tools that promise to help them reach their goals, however, they fail to deliver. According to a report, only 34 per cent of projects are completed within the predetermined timeframe and budget. There are several reasons for this such as employees assigned with these tasks moving their conversations about work outside these tools, different apps being used across teams leading to silos and issues with licensing, and employee frustrations with hours spent managing and sharing updates across various platforms and systems.

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The Lists feature comes with a cool user-interface that further makes managing workflows effortless. Explaining the ease of use of Lists and its efficient UI, Katie Steigman, senior director of product at Slack, said, “We built Lists UI lightweight because we wanted it to be simple to start. Usability and simplicity are at the forefront of our design. We want working in Slack to be pleasant and productive. This design thinking is at the heart of products like Lists and everything in Slack.”

How does Slack Lists help?

The new feature from Slack essentially eliminates context switching between apps so teams can collaborate and coordinate on cross-functional projects, requests, approvals and more right at the centre of the workflow. When it comes to managing and tracking projects, Lists makes it easy to prioritise tasks or deliverables, progress work from one to stage to another, and drive accountability across teams. The tool enables teams to track almost everything, from planning marketing campaigns to product release timelines to employee onboarding and managing technology deployments.

“The most important part is that every list item has a message thread, allowing you to have a conversation with your teammate about the task right there. This makes it special and different because you don’t have to leave the project management tool to have a conversation over email or in Slack; you can have it right from the task,” Steigman said.

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The most important face of Slack Lists is that it allows teams to collaborate on tasks. Lists enables teams to add people into conversations with message threads on list items. Moreover, these threads also help teams to organise discussions on specific requests or deliverables. The feature also brings together tools to efficiently get work done. Lists bring tools together and efficiently. The company said that teams can use Workflow Builder, a no-code automation tool, to automate routine tasks.

“We built Lists because we believe there’s still a need for simpler and easier-to-use tools. Many existing tools are complex. Additionally, collaboration isn’t central to most of them. Finally, we want to keep everything within Slack,” Steigman said.