Refactoring at Scale

Part IV. Case Studies

Before I dive into our case studies, let me set the stage by telling you a little bit about Slack: the history of the product, the company, and its early influences.

Slack was developed as an internal tool at a small gaming company based out of Vancouver called Tiny Speck. The team, a mash-up of engineers, designers, and product people from Flickr, sought to build a fantastical, massively mulitplayer online game focused on community building. They called it Glitch.

Because everyone was distributed across North America, Tiny Speck began to rely heavily on internet relay chat (IRC) to communicate. Before long, the team realized that it needed something a bit more powerful: a tool that enabled it to keep in touch asynchronously, search through message history, and send files. The members set out to build it.

The game ultimately shut down in 2012, and the company laid off most of its employees, but Tiny Speck had one final trick up its sleeve. In an unlikely pivot, the few remaining employees chose to commercialize their internal communications tool. They polished the experience and branded it Slack: searchable log of all conversation and knowledge.

The Tiny Speck crew contacted friends and past colleagues to test out its new tool. With each new batch of users, the team collected feedback, fixed bugs, and built new functionality. By May 2013, the product was ready for a preview release, available to a select few who requested invitations. Just nine months later, ...