About the project
My responsibilities

UX design
User research
Service design

While on the IBM Whitewater team in 2017, I played a significant role in making Slack Enterprise available to all IBMers. My team launched Slack Enterprise on January 31, 2017 and saw adoption grow from 0 to 170K users (100K active) within the year. I worked with senior executives in 15 business units and 3 communities of practice to smoothly onboard their teams to Slack Enterprise.

Slack Enterprise at IBM

My team

1 Team lead
3 UX designers
3 Front-end developers

Problem statement

Globally dispersed teams at IBM didn't have a way to talk and collaborate asynchronously, other than email. They looked to solutions like Slack, that allow for lightweight asynchronous communication. Without an officially sanctioned version, teams at IBM used the free version or paid for Slack on their own, which posed a huge security risk. The Whitewater team set out to work with Slack Corp to create an enterprise version of the tool that was safe for IBMers to use.

Key outcomes

  • Influenced the design of an enterprise offering for Slack that is safe for IBMers to use

  • Migrated existing Slack teams to the enterprise instance

  • Advocated for IBM business units to adopt Slack

  • Taught best practices for teams as they adopted Slack

My contributions

  • Communication strategy, copywriting, and overseeing communications for the product launch

  • Establishing & maintaining relationships with senior leaders in significant business units across IBM as we onboarded their employees to Slack Enterprise Grid

  • Updates to the Whitewater website (now deprecated), including the creation of several Slack training guides

  • Designing and user testing the Slack Workspace Directory

  • Developing a safe, smooth migration experience for teams on Slack Plus to move over to Slack Enterprise Grid

  • Helping develop an “everyone does support” process for our team, in order to quickly address user questions & problems and improve the experience of getting support

  • Close partnership & collaboration with the vendor (Slack Corp)

Solution

The IBM Whitewater team spent over a year working closely with Slack to understand user needs and have them inform an enterprise offering. Slack Enterprise launched publicly on January 31, 2017. At that time, IBM had already begun rolling out Slack Enterprise to IBMers. Slack Enterprise is safe for IBM teams to use internally and to use for collaboration with invited external guests.

Since the original launch of Slack, the Whitewater team was reorganized and renamed Toolbox@IBM. The team’s goal is still to bring the best-in-class tools that enable IBMers to transform and accelerate into new ways of working. More than 250,000 IBMers still use Slack today for their daily work.

Robyn Johnson