Business Challenge
The Covid-19 pandemic made work from home a new normal. This has had a profound impact on businesses and workers alike, reshaping the way we think about traditional office structures and opening up new opportunities for collaboration and communication. While many have found remote work to be liberating, offering greater flexibility, autonomy, and work-life balance, some struggled to adapt to this new way of working.
With all the perks, remote work has also presented new challenges. Among the biggest concerns are feeling loneliness and disconnection from co-workers due to the lack of genuine human connection to other people.
Impromptu wanted to solve this issue and create opportunities for in-person social connection so that remote workers will never feel lonely or isolated again. They asked us to develop a Slack bot for formal and informal activities within the organization that would bring people together.
Solution
We started the MVP development process with the discovery phase. Its purpose was to define the list of priority features and tech stack, create product specification and work on the design concept for the Slack bot. On the last step of the discovery phase we made project estimations and agreed on team composition.
We decided to build a Slack bot on Python using FastAPI for server creation and Google Maps API to bind activities to specific places. The feature set of an MVP included the creation and management of activities and subscription to notifications.
There are different roles in the app:
- Super admin, the person who installs the bot, manages admin rights and pricing (in the future).
- Admins — usually these are HR specialists, event managers, etc.
- Regular users
Super admin/admins can create and manage Events (formal activities organized officially by the company, for example webinars, corporate parties, volunteering programs) and Socials (informal activities organized by any employee, for example boardgames, meeting in coffee shops, Friday’s drink, etc).
Regular users can only create Socials.
To create a new Social or Event, users need to add a cover photo, enter the name, choose a category, the start and end date. Administrators can edit and delete all Socials and Events, while regular users can only manage their own.
Newly created activities are posted to channels for Events and for Socials. Anyone can join it right from the Slack channel. Not to miss the updates, any user can subscribe to notifications in categories and locations they’re interested in and add them to their Google Calendar.
Personalized notifications tailored to your interests & location, invites to join an Event or Social activity, notifications after joining an activity, and an event or social reminder “1 hour before” the activity starts.
Business Result
The Upsilon team has broad experience in providing MVP development services that allows us to deliver products in time and meet all the requirements. We start with the discovery phase, work in sprints, and use the Agile methodology.
In 2 months, we managed to develop an MVP of a Slack bot for social connection and engagement that brings remote working professionals together in-person to foster meaningful human connection.
The developed interface allows users to:
- Create and manage Socials and Events;
- Share, and join activities in Slack and invite people to join from within your Slack workspace;
- Subscribe to locations and categories that interest you to be notified of newly created activities;
- Filter all Events and all Socials by categories and locations;
- Receive personalized notifications from Impromptu.
Throughout the whole development cycle, we were involved in product management and feature ownership to help Impromptu validate product idea hypotheses, reduce time-to-market and deliver value to early adopters quickly. So if you’re looking for a product development team that focuses on matching business goals with customer needs via creating the right product for the right people, don't hesitate to contact us to discuss your project.
