Threads: Feature requirements

Customer problem

To run successful projects we need to be able to make decisions, raise issues, and get feedback, however current methods of to do this all have flaws:

• meetings - sync, ephemeral, non-discoverable
• slack - sync, ephemeral, poor discovery
• email - non-discoverable

Some good tools exist for this (Threads etc), however they do not co-locate discussion alongside project info, which makes it harder to track and run projects as a whole.

A good example of this working is GitHub, however that tool is only applicable for software teams.

Example discussions threads:

• Idea: Improved sign-up flow
• Prioritise: Help us create our Q2 strategy
• Pre-mortem write up

Bad example threads:

• Sign-up flow UI - this should be a task
• New feature released! - this should be an update

Requirements

• Async: Discussions should work for remote and distributed teams, and not require everyone to be online all at the same time
• Discoverable: Team members and stakeholders should be able to easily find active discussions to learn from them and to give input
• Durable: Discussions should exist beyond the lifecycle of the project, and be easy to find so that others can learn from them, and understand how decisions were made after the fact – Manageable: Team members and stakeholders should know which discussions require their input and when. i.e. They shouldn’t have to manually keep track of this.

Note. The ‘Manageable’ requirement, along with notifications in general, will be out of scope for this first implementation. We will revisit this after as it requires more thought.

FAQ / details

What about threaded discussions?

In keeping with out simple design principle, we will keep discussions single-threaded for now. This not only simplifies the UX, but also means that important comments will not be missed.

Users can create separate threads for any important spin-off discussions.

What about sub-forums/thread categories?

It would be nice to label threads to be able to sort by categories, however this will be out of scope for now. Will keep this under review as we see more feature usage.

What about notifications/mentions?

This is out of scope for v1. We will address this in future.

Who will be able to contribute to discussions?

Private projects:

• create thread: members only
• close thread: members only
• comment: members only

Public projects:

• create thread: signed in users
• close thread: members only
• comment: signed in users

Will I be able to see who has seen the latest comments?

Knowing who has seen a discussion and whether they are up to date is a key requirement to keep this feature async. Apps typically solve this problem with some kind of ‘seen by’ UI. Threads goes one step further, not only showing a ‘caught up’ status, but also that the user intends to respond.

This is important, but until we have a way to prompt others to reply (e.g. mentions) it is less useful to know who has caught up. So…this will not be included in v1.

What’s the difference between Updates and Threads?

Whilst both Updates and Threads support comments, Updates should be used for announcements which do not require a discussion. In contrast, Threads are for when you explicitly want others to comment and give feedback.

How can I mark a discussion as resolved?

You can close discussions once they are complete. You will also be able to mark individual comments as a decision - this will help others understand when a decision has been made.