GETTING STARTED

Here are a number of things we recommend you do to make it easy to participate and keep up with the discussions. 

Fill out your profile

It makes a humongous difference when you fill out some information about yourself. You can add a profile picture, ideally of your face, since this community also meets in person regularly. Slack also supports adding pronouns, name pronunciations, and a title. Members also commonly add their current company in parentheses after their name. e.g. Adam Tornes (CoPro, SwingU)

Introduce yourself

Before you start posting to the Slack, send an introduction to the group in #intros channel. What’s your name? Where are you based? What kinds of questions are you interested in? What kind of work are you doing? What companies/products do you work on? Why is applied ethnography in your world of interest? 

Join some Channels

Everyone is automatically added to several channels (#general, #events #jobs, #office-hours, #intros, and #product). Here is a little about our main channels and some additional ones to consider!

• #intros – where you introduce yourself to the community.
• #general – content relevant to the entire community! No pressure. 
• #product – product practice, philosophy, even good ole fashioned venting 
• #events – connect with people at product events, happy hours, conferences, panels, and local meet-ups 
• #jobs – share job advertisements, RFPs, freelance opportunities etc.
• #good-reads – share and discuss good books and articles
• #office-hours – once a month a member of the community hosts an AMA style office hour session. 
• #salary-banter – give and receive pointers on how to negotiate the best compensation
• #skillup – ask for recommendations, advice, or share content that has helped you up your product game
• #people-leadership — leadership is hard, and we can help each other by sharing advice and resources
• #wins – share your success and celebrate that over others
• #location- – find your geographic product neighbors and plan a lunch or happy hour
• #asksandoffers – a place for shameless promotion. Asks for product feedback or votes! Share your work with the world!
• #random – anything goes. Selling Broncos tickets? Trying to rent your place in LoHi? Funny anecdote, you know the drill
• You can also join channels specific to product adjacent roles like: #ux, #product-marketing, #engineering

Share some knowledge and get involved

Some recommended ways to get involved right away:

• Add a favorite product book or article recommendation in #good-reads
• Post a thoughtful Product question in #general or #product
• Share a meme or joke in #random

Feel free to propose new channels about topics that interest you. Let the admins know, and they can set it up for you. You can send private messages to individuals or you can start private group messages.

Helpful Slack Tips

If you’re new to Slack, here are a couple of helpful tips:

• While Slack communities attached to a full time role are often very real time, Colorado Product’s Slack community is more “psuedo realtime,” meaning while some conversations break out in rapid succession, most unfold over many hours. Thus conversations unfold more like a message board than a chat room. You can add the Colorado Product workspace alongside your work Slack, in both desktop and mobile, and check in on the community as you have time!
• You can mute notifications for specific hours of the day and week.
• Avoid @channel and @here, most Colorado Product #channels have hundreds of members, so using these aliases notifies a LOT of people. There are times where it’s appropriate, but they are rare, please just be mindful! Here’s a post that explains the difference between channels and DM (private direct messages)
• You can direct message (DM) any individual. However, be respectful, use good judgement, introduce yourself if you’ve never met before, etc. 
• Make sure to @[insertname] if you are responding to a specific person, otherwise they might not see your message. More on how to use the @ mention here. 
• Click the more menu (three dots) on any message to have Slack remind you about the message later, when you have more time to respond.
• Slack has custom emojis! Feel free to upload your favorites and make the community more vibrant!
• You can change the default skin color of your emoji hands to different shades of skin tones

A list of more slack tips from Slack.

Colorado Product Slack Rules and Restrictions

It only takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch so we ask that you please adhere to the following simple guidelines. If you have questions about any of these rules, or how they do or don’t apply to your situation, please reach out to me @Ben Golden – Slack Community Manager, who is happy to help!  

Zero tolerance for hate speech and personal attacks

Sexist, racist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic insults and broad, offensive generalizations about groups of people will not be tolerated and will lead to expulsion. Similarly, personal attacks are never appropriate. Please be a good person.

That being said, we are here to learn from one another and grow. Debate and critical analysis is not just okay, but critical! Speak your mind, just be respectful.

No vendor advertising

This just isn’t the place. Things like unsolicited DM’s (especially in bulk), incessantly posting about your Design consultancy, and offering deep discounts on your weight-loss supplements is not the kind of content that makes Colorado Product great. Promoting your employer or any other institution you have a financial stake in is expressly prohibited. Colorado Product is about genuinely sharing in the product practice, which simply can’t happen if folks put their individual needs ahead of the community.

*We may on occasion permit Vendors to post in our Slack group as a part of a sponsorship agreement, but they must obtain permission first and are ONLY granted permission in exchange for a mutually agreed upon tangible benefit to the community (e.g. sponsorship dollars, discounts for the community, event space, etc.)

Self-promotion

Plenty of folks work at a startup looking for traction, have a side hustle, or otherwise would like to leverage the scale of the community for their benefit, but keep it in the #asksandoffers channel only. Feel free to expressly promote yourself or your organization in this channel, but please exercise some common sense and please genuinely attempt to match the asks you make with offers or other contributions to the community. 

Above all, our goal is to make sure the community never feels like a burden to its members, so make sure you honestly feel like you aren’t straying into spam territory! If abused, Colorado Product will give you a warning, if not heeded, your access to the community will be revoked.

Using @here @channel excessively

If you’re not sure, don’t do it. And if you want a sounding board, reach out to @Ben Golden – Slack Community Manager, who is happy to help! 

That being said, the door swings both ways, mind your notification settings, Slack has a lot of notification flexibility. If you’re that bent out of shape about @here getting used, maybe fix your settings rather than berating a complete stranger.

If you see something wrong, say something 

Please alert the Colorado Product board of directors to anything we should review in light of the above.