Launching Threads: Making work (from home) more inclusive

Today we’re lifting our waitlist and opening up Threads —a platform to help growing teams share, discuss, and make decisions no matter where they are —to the world.

What’s going on?

Back in February 2019, we came out of stealth with a waitlist in place, with the goal of making work more inclusive. The initial response was more than what we expected, not just in terms of sheer numbers, but the breadth of use cases. Over the past year, we’ve been building a communication infrastructure that works for teams of all sizes, with companies that span across industries with different needs and working styles.

From creating opinionated workflows that help drive discussions to implementing a variety of security features that ensure information remains safe—it’s been equal parts exhausting and exhilarating. We’ve learned so much about the way different teams work alongside each other since our initial introduction, and all of that knowledge has been poured directly into developing our product. With our initial roadmap and the number of advances we’ve been able to make in only a year’s time, our plan was to fully launch later this year to help teams effectively communicate as they become more mature, diverse, and distributed.

However, we understand that the rapidly evolving COVID-19 situation poses unique challenges for everyone; therefore we made the decision last week to significantly move up the timeline and today launch Threads to everyone.

This wasn’t an easy decision; as a startup, there’s an infinite list of things we want to complete in order to feel ready. The thing is, we’ve been building on this infrastructure for quite some time now. We have leaders in the remote community (like Buffer) who are fully distributed and have been loyal customers for over a year. We have technology that helps you feel included and a part of the critical discussions occurring at your company—even if you’re in a different timezone—and sitting on it during this time just didn’t feel like an option.

Why now?

COVID-19 is not how we wanted people to experience remote work for the first time. We’ve been writing and talking about how flexible work conditions are great because they enable you to create an environment where you can do your best work—be it at your local coffee shop down the street, at home, or across the country. We expected that over the next few years, these benefits would become mainstream, and the trend would accelerate naturally. However, people are now finding themselves in a position where they don’t have a choice.

So, if people are going to be experiencing remote work, it’s on us and other companies (if able) to help make the transition as smooth as possible. It’s been inspiring to see others in our space, like Zoom, Box, and Slack, establish a steady cadence here already.

Here’s how we can help

As your company grows or shifts to becoming remote, things must become more thoughtful than urgent. Threads is a platform that complements your real-time tools—like Slack or Zoom—to share important updates and efficiently contribute to relevant discussions. On Threads, you’re included. You can’t be late to a conversation (regardless of timezone), discussions naturally become searchable, and you can gain confidence that the right people have seen it with the intention to follow up and offer their thoughts.

As a community, we are all doing the best we can to support one another. To do our part, we’ve created some guides (on web only – mobile coming soon!) on how we use Threads with our own team, and how the leading remote teams use it, too. Additionally, we’ve created a new support email—wfh@threads.com—that we’re closely monitoring as a resource for people who have questions around how to navigate the world of remote work. We also will share access to a community on Threads so we can all help each other along the way.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a huge company going remote for the first time or a small team figuring it out as it comes. We’re here to help scale knowledge and support discussions—no matter who or where you are.

Original Post: Threads, 3/17/20