How Snowflake delivers a superior employee experience inside Slack with Troopr
About the company
Snowflake is a cloud computing based data warehousing company. Founded in July 2012 and headquartered in Bozeman, Montana. In less than a decade, Snowflake has become a global force to help mobilize the world’s data. The company is globally distributed with more than 3000 employees working in 20 countries.
Employees: 3000+
Jira hosting type: Jira Software Cloud
Other softwares: Slack
Number of Slack workspaces: 1
Solution used: Troopr's Slack integration for Jira
Challenge 1
Challenges in keeping Jira current
Problem
Software team managers want Jira up to date, but in reality it requires a lot of manual nudging to get the team to update Jira regularly. Engineers find it inconvenient to context switch from their work to update Jira. The stale data problem in Jira bubbles up to the project reports to the key stakeholders that do not reflect the true picture. Jira email notifications and reminders are lost in all the spam. These challenges had a direct impact on Sprint delivery.
Solution
Snowflake teams have high engagement in Slack. With the introduction of Troopr, the software teams are able to easily track and update Jira issues inside Slack. Troopr commands are the easiest and fastest way to update Jira issues from Slack. Engineers update Jira issues in a single Slack message. There is no form filling or context switching. Some of the examples include
/t update +[fieldName]:[fieldValue]- to update any issue field
/t status [key] [statusvalue] - to update status of a Jira issue
/t comment [key] [comment]- to add a comment to a Jira issue
/t log [time] [key] - to log time against a Jira issue
/t create [summary] +[fieldName]:[fieldValue] - to create a new issue
Also Troopr brings actionable notifications in Slack channels. This means the entire software team can see and act on them. Troopr also provided capability to customize what an user would like to follow up, thus improving the focus on what needs attention.
Troopr automatically syncs every Jira issue and keeps all updates in sync between Slack and Jira. Now the employees get the convenience of managing and updating Jira issues from Slack while Troopr takes care of syncing them into Jira and vice versa.
Challenge 2
Challenges in facilitating remote team meetings
Problem
Snowflake is globally distributed with 3000+ employees working in 20 countries. The software teams at Snowflake hosted meetings in a traditional way. The participants hopped into the virtual meeting room and everyone participated in the discussions. This posted challenges in getting everyone at the same time and finding a suitable time that worked for everyone was challenging. Also, having 10 or more members in the meeting meant significantly more time taken out from their core work.
Besides being distributed across time zones, the teams faced another significant challenge. When the participants get on sync video calls, the entire process was manual and required the manager/Scrum master to coordinate the meeting logistics, capture the discussion as notes and follow up with participants on action items post the meeting. This was neither scalable nor desirable. The team was looking for a solution that was convenient, automates the mundane stuff and makes efficient use of employee time.
Solution
Slack is the platform for asynchronous work and Troopr provides a set of industry proven templates (customizable) for async team routines in Slack. The teams set up Troopr to configure and send the meeting questions to the participants at a particular time in their local time zone. The participants file their responses at a convenient time during their day. If someone fails to file the response within the time boxed schedule, Troopr smartly nudges them to contribute.
Troopr automatically aggregates participants' responses into actionable reports shared in Slack (project) channel and on the web portal. The managers/Scrum masters can view the entire report at their convenient time.
With the introduction of Troopr, the common team routines are automated. No more tedious and error prone manual process for the team and the manager.
Deployment
Solution
Why Troopr proved to be the best fit
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Troopr supports any and every Jira customization and workflow configuration across all Slack workspaces
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Troopr customer support team provided 24/7 support via email, chat, Slack and helpdesk channels for continuous premium support needs
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Enterprise grade security
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Dedicated account manager who periodically shares insights and feedback apart from ensuring all Snowflake requests are handled and resolved on priority
The lasting impact of Troopr
Troopr showed really encouraging results right from its onset. The software teams are able to use Troopr without any training and started creating, updating and discussing Jira issues in Slack soon after the launch of the Troopr. The team has seen significant 90% reduction in time involved in context switching and $2.7M cost savings per year.