Jason Vs. Freddy Vs. Ash Scares Up Slack Best Practices

Jason Vs. Freddy Vs. Ash is the six-issue comic book “sequel” to the movie Freddy vs. Jason, where the dynamic duo of undead serial killers battles the wisecracking, chainsaw-wielding Ash Wiliams of The Evil Dead movies.

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We’re going to show key plot points of Jason Vs. Freddy Vs. Ash as we dive into Slack best practices for Product Managers. And we’ll do it in 12 panels or less. You have been warned!

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The story begins with Will and Lori, the survivors and main protagonists from Freddy vs. Jason, returning to Crystal Lake to get closure. If you’ve ever seen a horror movie sequel, you know that doesn’t end well for them.

Jason drags their corpses to his shack, where we learn that Freddy Krueger is now stuck, powerless, inside Jason’s mind. Freddy discovers that the magical book, the Necronomicon, is hidden inside Jason’s old home in town. Convinced he can use the book to resurrect himself, Freddy tricks Jason into going to retrieve it. In return, he promises to fix Jason and turn him into a normal human being.

Meanwhile, Ash Williams is called up to the Crystal Lake S-Mart to share his retail expertise with their below-average employees.

Jason starts killing people near the store, and Ash believes the murders to be the work of his archenemies, the Deadites. He tries to warn his teenage S-Mart proteges that Jason might actually be a Deadite, but they decide to tease him, then leave him to have a party at Jason’s old home. Because, horror movie. The only one who suspects Ash might be onto something is Carrie, who decides to not go with the crowd and instead keep tabs on Ash.

Ash follows the teens to Jason’s house, hoping to find the Necronomicon. While Ash searches the basement, Jason stalks through the house, murdering the teens. Ash intervenes, saving one of the young women, Bree. A timely intervention by Carrie saves Ash and Bree.

Freddy berates Jason for his failure to recover the Necronomicon. Literally poking around Jason’s brain, he learns that Ash is an employee at S-Mart and sends Jason on a shopping trip.

At S-Mart, Ash and the surviving employees start drafting a plan to stop Jason… who walks into the store, kills a lot of people, including Bree, and escapes with the Necronomicon after shoving Ash headfirst through a wall.

Freddy uses the Necronomicon to restore himself to life, and starts studying how to use the book to increase his powers.

Freddy hunts Ash and his crew in their dreams. The survivors confront Freddy and Jason at Jason’s home where they discover that Freddy now has reality-altering powers. After killing all but Ash and Carrie, Jason turns on Freddy for failing to keep his end of the bargain. Freddy resurrects Jason’s previous victims as Deadites and sets them on Jason.

Carrie steals the book away from Freddy, and tries to keep it away from him while Ash recovers consciousness.

Having dealt with the Deadites, Jason turns his attention back to Freddy. Ash joins the fray. While the three of them fight, Carrie reads from the Necronomicon, banishing Freddy to the Deadite dimension…

… while Ash uses his car to send Jason back into Crystal Lake.

Ash and Carrie leave town.

Beneath the frozen waters of Crystal Lake, Jason opens his eyes.

The Reversals In This Story Got Me Thinking

When Slack was first introduced to my team about a year ago, there was definitely some excitement. With its realtime messaging capabilities, archiving, and search features, it was clear that Slack could be a lot faster than email. What wasn’t exactly clear was the need for all of us to buy into it.

We had our “Ash” championing it as the best thing ever, and then we had our S-Mart employees wondering why we needed this new thing when we had email and multiple instant messenger options.

Fortunately, we didn’t need multiple murders to get us on the same page.

Fortunately, we didn’t need multiple murders to get us on the same page.

Our Best Practices

Getting everyone to buy into Slack was relatively easy because nobody was really happy with the current options. A little trickier was getting everyone to agree to use Slack in the same way.

For us that meant: No emails for regular communications among the team; use Slack. Also, everyone had to agree to be on it during core work hours. Because you can’t collaborate with people in realtime if there’s nobody around to collaborate with.

Other learnings included…

1. Slack reflects the culture of the team.

What’s important to the team will show up in Slack because Slack is essentially a giant water cooler conversation reflecting what we care about.

For my team, this manifested in terms of the channels we created, the integrations we enacted, and the custom emojis we invented.

We also created private rooms as needed. For example, the engineers created a private room to discuss dev-only issues and product created a private room to discuss things among ourselves before bringing it to the wider group.

2. Slack channels are purpose-based, and work best when we understand how we want to work together.

My team’s Slack has three basic types of channels:

General channel – for work announcements and questions
Specific work channels – to communicate about work progress, share knowledge, and solve problems (e.g., designux, dev, product)
Update channels – for calendar updates, JIRA changes, deployment notices (e.g., jira, calendar, deploy)

3. Transparent conversation helps get work done.

At one point early on, we had some divergent ideas about UX in our app. We had different people in different time zones so it wasn’t always easy to get everyone on video chat at the same time. However, we used our design/ux channel to surface those discussions so everyone involved could see and collaborate and get on the same page.

As a product person, the JIRA updates in Slack are useful to me because they keep me up to date on progress without cluttering my in-box with JIRA notices. For the development team, the scm and deployment messages keep the developers aware of what’s going on in other parts of the project. As a team, the Google calendar integration keeps everyone in the loop on schedule changes that might have been discussed but forgotten.

How does your team use Slack to enhance communication?

What alternative tools have you used that work well?

Should we go to Camp Crystal Lake? Let me answer this one for you: The answer is always, “No.”