Focus on productivity by drowning the noise out from team and group chat at work

Twist is the communication tool for teams who believe there’s more to work than keeping up with group chat apps and chaotic email threads.

Kevin William David interviewed Amir Salihefendic, Founder of Twist to know more.

Hi Amir, So tell us about Twist?

Twist is a team communication app based on asynchronous, real threads. It is Doist’s bet against real-time messaging apps, and for communication that happens on your schedule. So you can choose when to disconnect to do deep, uninterrupted work and when to connect to catch up.

It’s our bet against chaotic, one-line-at-a-time chat, and for the organized, thoughtful conversations that really move work forward.

Most importantly, it’s our bet against team cultures that require people to be constantly connected, and for cultures that prioritize focused, meaningful productivity. (And then sign out at the end of the day, guilt-free.)

Tell me more about why you are building this?

In 2014, our team which is entirely remote, tried Slack. Our team communication flourished like never before, even though many of us had never met in person. We shared GIFs, we shared laughs, and we shared a level of interaction that we’d never experienced before. But, the Slack honeymoon didn’t last long.

Communication wasn’t happening asynchronously — it was happening in real-time, by the minute, all day long. Issues and solutions discussed by teammates in Europe and Asia were already buried six feet under by the time teammates in the Americas even woke up.

Team knowledge wasn’t being preserved. Conversations weren’t inclusive or transparent. Communication was disorganized and chaotic. Worse still, keeping up with the group’s chat was beginning to take up more and more of our team’s time and attention.

Using real-time group chat was a completely unsustainable, and unfair, way to run a remote-first company.

That’s when we realized we needed a tool that supported our team values — of craftsmanship, focus, impact, balance, and clear communication — instead of undermining them. If we were experiencing these frustrations with real-time, all-the-time communication, other teams like ours were probably experiencing them too.

What’s unique about what you are building & why do you think companies should use Twist?

Here are a few of the design decisions we’ve made along the way to prioritize asynchronous communication over real-time messaging, doing great work over being constantly connected.

Thread-first communication

Threaded conversations have been at Twist’s core from the beginning. They let anyone on the team create a conversation about a specific topic and ensure that whole conversations — ideas, issues, answers, and decisions — stay organized around that topic.

With Twist, there’s no pressure to respond immediately. In fact, many members snooze all notifications for significant portions of the day, and some don’t have notifications turned on at all. This gives them complete control over their time and attention to do deep, thoughtful work.

Here’s an example of a thread from our Doist Branding channel where we discussed, gave feedback, and iterated on the new logo for Twist for over a year — all organized in the same thread!

Slack recently introduced the concept of threads inside the app as well. The feature is great at what it’s designed for — to hold small side conversations that branch off the main channel — but it doesn’t solve any of the issues we faced. Threaded communication isn’t something you can bolt on as an afterthought. When everything else is built around group chat, real-time communication will always be the default.

Truly transparent conversations

From our experience with Slack, we knew that merely making conversations public wasn’t enough to guarantee equal access to information across the company. Transparency was one of the main reasons that we built communication around clear topics.

Instead of having to skim through single-stream-of-consciousness chat channels, our team can now browse topics to get an overview of the discussions happening in the company. We can delve deeper into just the conversations we’re interested in, even if we’re not directly involved. We often share links to whole threads as reference so people can look and see how a certain decision was made.

Our newest team members have been able to quickly get up to speed on what’s going on and see our team culture in action by reading past discussions about our work.

We’ve found that Twist has helped us stay connected in more meaningful ways, not just socializing, but actually sharing in the important conversations that determine the core of who we are as a company.

Leaving out the online presence indicator

A small, but impactful design choice we made in creating Twist was to leave out the online presence indicator.

The presence indicator has become something of an expectation for any team communication tool, a holdover from the days when productivity was measured by hours worked rather than work accomplished. But we felt that it would ruin the asynchronous nature of Twist:

• If you see that a teammate is online, you expect an immediate response.
• If you see someone is offline, you’re more likely to postpone sending a message because they probably won’t get back to you right away.

Without the presence indicator, our team has adapted to adding comments and sending messages whenever they need to. They have no way of knowing if the person is online, so they don’t expect an immediate response.

Conversations may happen more slowly, but more real work gets done since we don’t have to deal with constant distractions and context-switching that come with real-time messaging.

Time Off (really off)

Another example of how we’ve designed Twist to foster mindful communication is the Time Off feature. Twist lets you set up a Time Off status that mutes all notifications from the app, changes your avatar to a “vacation” avatar, and lets your teammates know when you’ll return. This way people can properly recharge and take a well-deserved vacation, and everyone knows not to expect a response until they get back.

Ambition and balance are two of the core values of our company. Yes, we want to work hard and build a strong company, but not at the expense of our health and relationships. If we achieve our goals, but we’ve burnt ourselves out in the process, then we’ve failed. It feels amazing to be able to build features like Time Off that reflect those values.

Who uses Twist?

Extrapolating data from Twist’s beta testers, approximately:

• 25% work in tech, software, IT
• 11% in advertising and marketing
• 7% in finance and accounting
• 7% in manufacturing
• 50% remaining are a mix of many diverse industries!

How are your customers using Twist? Could you share a few different use cases?

Peter is the a manager at an engineering company. They are using it to manage projects related to the implementation design, R&D, bugs, etc.

Ellen is a management coach who provides corporate and personal management training in the US and Canada. She works with three employees, four volunteers and several external contractors. Everyone works remotely. They use Twist to make plans and have conversations– when their discussions needs to become actionable, they switch over to Todoist.

Mark owns a social events business. They were using Facebook Messenger, but could never properly track all the details about the different events that they were planning. Twist has helped them become more organized, and has helped them try new ideas because they can propose them and then come back later to fine tune them.

Lain is the Senior Director of a large veterinary practice with two locations, many employees and four other directors that lead different aspects of the business standpoint. With Twist, his team “can have a continuous conversation, versus jumping in and out of stand alone emails, and checking a bloated inbox full of spam and inquiries. [We] can go into Twist to take on the core of [our] work.”

Have there been unique use cases for Twist that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

We’re still surfacing use cases but, for example, Eric is a serial entrepreneur who has many small businesses. His invents prototypes of products and then has them produced in China, and sells them online. He has 7 FTE and 20 contractors working on their core business in Twist.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

We worked hand-in-hand with an active beta testing community comprised of people who were already familiar with Doist’s products and philosophies (they were using Todoist Business). This helped us refine our app and identify bugs and inconveniences in the UI.

Our growth tactics has been largely based on content marketing. We’ve published several posts on Medium about how our team works and why we decided to create Twist. One of those posts– Why we’re betting against real-time team messaging– got published on Reddit and “went viral.” It was “liked” over 700 times on Medium, was shared heavily on social media and ended up getting syndicated on Fast Company.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

Our main goal was to ensure that Twist was mindfully designed in order to reflect the ethos of the company. We build products that are based on our philosophies and values and not to make an immediate profit or to hijack people’s attention and free time for a quick buck. We’re taking the more difficult path but we believe it’ll be the best one not only for users but for our bottom line (in the long run).

We were very cognizant of making sure Twist WOULD NOT:

• Create the feeling of being at work while actually accomplishing very little.
• Make people anxious about missing out. About having to contribute right now.
• Cause constant distractions.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

• Todoist– turns conversations in Twist into actionable Todoist tasks and allows you to get updates about tasks and comments in a specific Twist thread.
• Zapier– links Twist to hundreds of other apps & services (reference)

Before we finish, what are the top 5–10 products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

• Twist: 100% of our team communication
• Todoist Business: team task management
• Google Drive & Dropbox Paper: document creation & management
• GitHub**:**issue tracking
• Zendesk: customer support
• SendGrid: marketing emails
• Sketch: design
• Marvel: design mock ups

Originally published at siftery.com.