I'm part of a web development team where our process for product-related work is running smoothly. We use a ticketing tool for issues, handle pull request reviews efficiently, and keep track of deployments in a dedicated channel. However, there's a significant amount of coordination that happens outside of this structured workflow. Tasks like client follow-ups, internal decision-making, cross-team requests, and infrastructure inquiries don't fit neatly into a ticket system. They usually pop up in Slack conversations, but afterward, we lack a reliable way to track them. We've experimented with a miscellaneous tasks board in our ticketing tool, but it wasn't effective since people tended to ignore it. We also tried creating a #tasks channel, but it quickly became useless. How do other dev teams manage these informal coordination tasks without forcing everything into a rigid ticketing system?
4 Answers
The reality is that sometimes Slack is where some tasks will just stay, and that’s okay. We’ve set proper channels for client follow-ups and routed infra concerns to the ops team. It feels more like we need to categorize our tools based on the type of problem rather than forcing everything into a single system.
We use GitHub discussions for some of our less formal coordination. Since it's integrated into our dev environment, people actually pay attention to it.
We maintain two systems: our ticketing tool for engineering tasks and a Google Doc for everything else. Having two systems that actually get used works much better than relying on a single system that people don't engage with.
Honestly, Slack discussions can vanish pretty quickly. What helped us was transforming any actionable item into a simple task board, even if it's a bit messy. Slack is for discussion, while tasks should live somewhere else. This has really decreased the number of forgotten items.
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