Overview

Inspired by an internal system that has been in use for more than a decade at Google, SnippetsBot delivers simple accomplishment, goal and obstacle tracking with reporting inside of Slack. Each week, team members share progress on current projects, objectives for the next week and highlight anything blocking their momentum. Before the Friday evening deadline, SnippetsBot will gently remind team members that have not submitted snippets for the week. On Monday mornings, SnippetsBot organizes the individual submission into reports and delivers them via Slack Direct Message.

SnippetsBot is great for:

• Cultivating an open environment within your company
• Eliminating unnecessary check-ins and status-update overhead
• Monitoring individual progress without micromanaging
• Identifying and eliminating project bottlenecks
• Creating a unified, searchable progress log for your entire team
• Referencing accomplishments for performance reviews
• Keeping investors informed of your weekly progress

Examples

To get started after you've installed SnippetsBot, DM /dm @snippetsbot start or invite it to a channel /invite @snippetsbot #channelname. SnippetsBot will wait for you to introduce it to other members of the team before contacting them, just type introduce #channelname or introduce @username. To be polite and avoid public channel chatter, we recommend talking with SnippetsBot via DM.

start - starts a snippet reporting session
@snippetsbot start

done - adds an accomplishment for the current week (ending Friday)
@snippetsbot done finalized bandwidth contracts and SLA for datacenter

next - adds an objective for next week (starting Monday)
@snippetsbot next upgrade all routers to ddwrt snowden release

block - adds a note about something standing in your way
@snippetsbot block Progress with Cellebrite stalled due to sticky Mophie case

current - shows your snippets for the current week
@snippetsbot current

save - tell @snippetsbot your snippets for the week are complete
@snippetsbot save

show - displays most recent snippets for @username or #channelname
show @username - displays most recent snippets for @username
show #channelname 3 - displays snippets for last three weeks for #channelname
@snippetsbot show @larry 4

report @username [on|off] - start or stop a weekly report for a user
report #channelname [on|off] - start or stop a weekly report for a channel
report list - review your saved reports
report @sundar on

help - ask @snippetsbot for guidance
@snippetsbot help

vacation [on|off] - tell @snippetsbot that you should not be disturbed
@snippetsbot vacation on

introduce #channelname - introduce me and the snippets process to specific team members
@snippetsbot introduce #engineering

feedback - send feedback to the snippetsbot team
@snippetsbot feedback we love snippetsbot but wish you would...

Note: SnippetsBot can’t generate reports or show snippets for private channels unless you invite it into your exclusive, secret private channel party.

pricing

SnippetsBot is freemium service with core functionality available free of charge for all teams. The free version is limited to four weeks of snippet history per user. We are working on premium features, including enhanced reporting with metrics, configurable deadlines, usergroups and unlimited snippet history.

Support

Need help, have a question or suggestion? Email the humans: support@snippetsbot.com
or send a tweet: @SnippetsBot

Background

One of Google’s longest running internal systems is the Snippets tool. Every week, Google employees email a summary of accomplishments/progress for the current week and an outline of objectives for the upcoming week. On Mondays, Google’s snippets system compiles the individual submissions into one report that’s shared with executives via e-mail and posted publicly on MOMA, Google’s intranet. SnippetsBot (built by an ex-Googler and a serial entrepreneur) brings the lightweight approach Google has been using internally for years to any team that’s using Slack.

Privacy

What personal information do we collect?
When you add SnippetsBot to your Slack team we save basic information about your team (name, slack id and domain) so we can recognize the account in our application. When users interact with SnippetsBot we collect basic information from their Slack profiles (name, slack id, team) in order to personalize each user experience. We will never share or sell user or team information.

How do we protect your data?
SnippetsBot lives on servers provided by AWS and employs best practice security standards. We use an encrypted connection to communicate with Slack servers which are also on AWS and perform regular backups which are stored on Amazon S3.