As more people transition to remote work, we've received lots of questions about what work from home apps we use internally at Zapier. While different teams will require different tools for working remotely, we thought a peek into our tech stack would help you figure out what you might be missing. So here's an excerpt from the Zapier Playbook about the collaboration tools we use for remote work—and how we use them.
It goes without saying that at Zapier, we use Zapier. Read our Getting started guide to learn how Zapier can help you automate your workflows, and then check out popular automations for remote work.
Main communication tools
Slack
Our virtual office. Use Slack to chat about your work.
Async
Our home-built internal blog. Use Async to show your work.
Quip
Our internal knowledge base. Use Quip to document your work.
Zoom
Large company meetings or external meetings are usually conducted on Zoom. For smaller internal meetings, we sometimes use Slack video calls.
Other communication tools
Google Calendar
Keeping your Google Calendar updated helps your teammates schedule time to meet with you. The latest Google Calendar update has a lot of features that make it easier to schedule across time zones.
Gmail
We don't typically use email internally, except for notifications. Email is mainly used to collaborate with those external to Zapier.
Google Docs and Sheets
We tend to use Google Docs and Sheets for more specific, one-off tasks, as well as for writing blog content. Since it's not all housed in one central location, your best bet is to search Slack for references and links to the docs. If you decide to create content in one of these apps, be sure to link to your content elsewhere.
Coda
Some teams use Coda for planning and project management. It works a bit like a combination of Quip and Airtable.
Airtable
Some teams use Airtable for project tracking, storing data, recording notes, and more.
Jira
We use Jira as our task management system for all software projects.
GitHub
If you're looking for a non-app issue or pull request, or maybe even a specific hardcoded user error message in the codebase, you can probably use GitHub to get the most context quickly. For example, you might search the code base for an error string like "This Downloadable Not Found" and look at the file and the git blame to track down who was involved (or relevant issues or PRs). Anyone can do this—not just engineers.
Stack Overflow
We have a Stack Overflow for Teams site for private questions and answers relating to Zapier.
Rover
Rover is our internal "App CRM" where you'd go to look at the bugs for all of our app integrations. This also powers much of the issue trackers that our partners see in the developer platform. You can also find out how popular different triggers and actions are.
Looker
Looker is where you'll find the answer to most of the common data questions like "how many users did we add last week?" or "how close are we to our team goals in January?" It connects to the backends that the data team maintains and you can even explore and create your own "looks."
Zappy
Zappy is a screen capture tool for macOS that we use whenever we need to take a screenshot or screen recording. It's super quick and allows you to make annotations right then and there, so you don't need to mess with your computer's built-in tools. We made it in-house, but it's available for anyone to use.
Help Docs
We have extensive user help docs, but they aren't just for users. When you do all-hands support, you will become very familiar with our help docs.
