I'm also curious about this. As a data point: we're fully remote and are in a similar product space @ Guilded (http://www.guilded.gg). One of our best early decisions was to use our product exclusively for all of our work communication.
For us, this degree of dogfooding - which is really only possible at a fully-remote company - has been directly responsible for too many features and improvements to count. There's no better way to develop empathy for your users and a deep care for your products than to have your entire team rely on them for their most critical communications every single day.
Not all companies build products that facilitate remote collaboration, but I think that remote work presents some unique opportunities for those that do.
Most companies aren’t fully remote, so dogfooding the common use of Slack seems smart, where it is still a useful tool even if you are slacking someone 5 feet away.
This is very true. I recently moved from a mostly on-site company, where I thought we used Slack a lot, to a globally-distributed, fully-remote one where Slack is the primary form of communication. We use it very differently, as the volume is far higher and we have to deal with timezones. e.g. in my previous job, I found threads annoying and rarely used them as I found they meant messages got lost. In my new one it's a faux pas to not use threads except for in very low-volume channels, because otherwise its tough for people to catch up on channels.
Yeah, that's an interesting point as well. Our product is for gamers, who are usually "remote" (if you can call it that), but Slack may trend towards over-fitting to highly-engaged, fully remote work if they were to do this.
For us, this degree of dogfooding - which is really only possible at a fully-remote company - has been directly responsible for too many features and improvements to count. There's no better way to develop empathy for your users and a deep care for your products than to have your entire team rely on them for their most critical communications every single day.
Not all companies build products that facilitate remote collaboration, but I think that remote work presents some unique opportunities for those that do.