Why we didn't build a Slack integration

When Slack came out, everyone assumed the next step was to integrate everything into it. Thousands of products did. But after watching small teams use Slack as a task manager, a knowledge base, a filing system, and a water cooler all at once, we made a deliberate choice. We weren't going to make Relay a Slack bot. The request comes regularly. "We'd just like to see our tasks in Slack." Makes sense. It seems reasonable. And that's exactly why it's dangerous. The moment we build a Slack integration, we have competing interfaces. Your team member gets a task in Slack. Your manager posts an update in Slack. And suddenly Relay isn't the source of truth anymore—Slack is. Notifications start flying. Channels multiply. The original problem we set out to solve—too many tabs, too much noise—gets worse, not better. We want your team to have one place to check for work. Not one app with tentacles into five other apps. One place. This isn't a technical limitation. It's a strategic one. Building integrations is easy. Maintaining clarity is hard. We chose hard.