Explain

Your team has lots of shared language, from acronyms that get used all the time to custom emoji to recurring inside jokes. This is great, it’s part of your culture and having a shared language actually makes your team more cohesive. But it’s also hard for new people to crack into.

Explain helps by giving you a lightweight way to store, retrieve, and even request explanations for these things.

• Anybody can pull up an explanation at any time and get a private answer from the app. Not that there should be any shame in asking someone a question, but you never have to worry when you’re asking the app.
• You can also post an explanation publicly in the room at any time. If something is being discussed and you know not everyone is in the loop, instead of explaining it yourself or letting everyone privately seek an explanation, you can ask the app to post the explanation to the group.
• If you’re looking for an explanation that doesn’t exist yet, you can request it. You can also choose where to request it. Maybe you want to post the request in a public room where lots of people might answer, or maybe you want to DM one person you know can help. It’s up to you.
• You can also add a link for people to find more information. This is especially useful to avoid duplicating information. Maybe you have a wiki with detailed information and you just want to put a stub of that in Slack.
• You can report problematic entries.

Embrace your team’s shared language, it’s part of how you work together. But make it more accessible to new people and get everyone on the same page using Explain.