Slack Launches New Feature to Turn Conversations into Work

Slack today announced the launch of Slack Lists, a new feature that brings project management directly into Slack. Designed to help teams manage projects, track inbound requests, and prioritise work seamlessly, Lists keeps everything organised where collaboration already happens.

Year after year, business leaders are spending money on tools that promise to help them reach their goals, but those tools often don’t deliver on that promise. In fact, even with all the solutions available today, only 34% of projects are completed on time and within budget. The reason, according to The Wall Street Journal, is that it’s challenging to find one project management tool that satisfies employees’ needs. Our customers agree. They tell us that the project management tools available today get the job done for project managers and team managers, but they aren’t effectively used by the people who are actually doing the work.

Now, instead of purchasing a new project management tool that keeps information, conversations and teams separate and siloed, you can bring together everything and everyone that you need to manage work with Slack Lists.

Organize, Automate, and Collaborate with Lists

Millions of conversations take place in Slack daily. Now you can use Slack Lists to capture, organise and track the most important parts of those conversations – deadlines, owners, resources and more – where work happens. Lists give your Slack conversations structure. You can turn ideas shared in a project channel into actionable next steps, or capture requests from direct messages in a List to share with your team. With Lists, you can eliminate context switching between apps, so everyone you work with can collaborate and stay aligned on cross-functional projects, requests and more – all while in the flow of work.

‘With Lists, you can turn conversations in Slack into actionable tasks that drive work forwards,’ says Slack CEO Denise Dresser. ‘Now those loose next steps shared in a project channel can be tracked across a team. With project management in Slack, teams across organisations will have everything they need to complete projects faster and increase productivity using the full power of Slack.’

Lists can help any team at any organisation:

• Sales: Drive alignment across account teams to close deals faster. Map out the account strategy, prep for customer meetings and request approvals to keep the whole team organised and on the same page.

• Service: Resolve incidents faster with a standardised management process. Quickly pull in experts to swarm on incidents and guide agents with a template that lets them execute and resolve issues.

• Marketing: Plan and execute marketing campaigns, events and launches more efficiently by centralising conversations and working in lockstep with stakeholders.

• IT: Improve response time and streamline processes across the team. Manage help desk requests collected from workflow form submissions to assign task owners, prioritise work and close out requests quickly.

Customer Feedback on Lists

"Our team was offered the opportunity to participate in the Lists pilot and jumped at it," says Lori Drake, the director of system strategy at Marriott Digital Services. "We’re excited to use Lists to manage projects and track requests, and think Lists could unlock significant time savings for our team.”

With Lists, teams can focus on what’s most important: doing their best work, faster – all in Slack, the AI-powered platform for work.

The launch of Slack Lists represents a significant evolution of the platform from a communication tool to a comprehensive hub for work. By integrating project management and task tracking directly into the flow of conversation, Slack is addressing a key challenge of modern work: the fragmentation of tools and information. This feature is poised to enhance team collaboration, eliminate silos, and drive greater efficiency, ultimately solidifying Slack's position as a core platform for the AI-powered enterprise.

Explainers

• Slack Lists: A new, native feature within the Slack platform that allows users to create, organize, and manage projects, tasks, and requests directly within channels and conversations.

• Context Switching: The mental effort required to shift between different applications or tasks, which can reduce productivity and focus. Slack Lists aims to minimize this by centralizing work management.

• Workflow Builder: A visual tool within Slack that allows users to create automated workflows without needing to write code. With Lists, it can be used to automate tasks like collecting and triaging requests.