Edit: as requested, here are some screenshots: - Feed: https://imgur.com/a/bvH7ypQ - Post Creation: https://imgur.com/a/HENe15A, Chat: https://imgur.com/a/MVyVykY.
Over the last several years, we’ve noticed that it’s getting increasingly difficult to stay in flow. We believe it’s because chat (i.e. Slack, Teams, and similar tools) has evolved into something it wasn’t designed for. Chat originally served as a way to free us from our desk by giving us the safety that if we were needed for immediate matters, people could reach us. Now it’s become a dumping ground for all communication: daily updates, product and engineering discussions, announcements, etc. Both of us still reminisce about the days of in-office work, before Slack became mainstream, where everyone abided by the headphone rule—the unwritten pact that headphones meant someone was in deep work and not to bother them unless you really needed to. Compared to then, the onus has now shifted to be on us to determine which chats are urgent and should take us out of flow vs. which messages can be responded to later. It feels like the very tool that was meant to liberate us instead made us beholden to its pings.
Patchwork is our attempt to solve this problem by shifting the primary communication model from group chats to feeds. Posts are made in relevant groups and each team member has a home feed personalized to them.
The feed algorithm evaluates each post's relevance and urgency based on a bunch of factors, including the post’s content, user's role, ongoing projects, and recent interactions. Our goal is to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio with our feed’s algorithm so we can surface the most important information first. When you’re not in flow or in between meetings, you can check the feed to stay in sync.
There have been feed-based work communication products before, but they’ve often overlooked the fact that writing a post has more friction than writing a chat message, which is why people often revert back to doing everything over chat. We’re combating this by using LLMs to create a better writing experience (ie. generate title and tl;dr, simplify selected content, change the tone, etc.).
As a product team ourselves, we know that much of our work happens on different platforms. We’re building integrations with the likes of Github, Linear, Figma, GSuite etc. Having all of this activity from different platforms also rolling into our feeds allows us to stay in sync with all the different work being done on our team instead of having to check various sources of data.
Lastly, we do have chat on the platform, but chat looks and feels like chat. It’s meant to be used for immediate needs.
Here’s a demo of the product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA3rmSjNjDw
Since it’s a team communication product, it's hard to use it in single player mode, so we don’t have a “try it now” link to jump straight in. But you’re welcome to email us at [email protected] and we’ll onboard your team.
The product is still early with a basic feed, a few integrations, and simple LLM assisted post creation, but the main flow is already there, so if the message resonates with you, we’d love for you to give it a try.
More importantly, we’d love to hear your ideas about team communication and getting it back to working for people, not at them!
by Andrey
Azimov