When departments stop being silos

The problem nobody says out loud

In most companies you know your own department well. The rest, mostly by name.

That is not an accusation. It is the natural consequence of how work is organised. You have meetings with your own people, projects with your own people, Slack channels with your own people. How often does someone in finance actually talk to product? How many in sales really know anyone in engineering?

In remote companies it is even stronger. There is no hallway, no kitchen, no chance encounter. If you do not network on purpose, you stay in your bubble.

The effects are real: less knowledge sharing across teams, less empathy for other perspectives, weaker long term attachment to the company. Research shows it, HR knows it, and still nothing much happens, because there is no system that actively fixes it.

What was built

A tool that organises random coffee chats. Fully automated, inside Slack, with no one acting as coordinator.

HR decides who goes into the pool. The tool randomly forms pairs, trios, or fours and drops them into a shared Slack channel. Up to that point, you have seen simple bots do similar things.

What makes this tool different is what happens next.

Everyone’s calendars are connected and overlaid anonymously. No one sees anyone else’s appointments: only when everyone is free at once. From Slack, one click creates a shared meeting. No back and forth messages, no Doodle link, no waiting for a reply.

Three systems work as one: a platform with login and multi tenancy so several companies can use it independently, a native Slack app with full OAuth, and the Google Calendar API for scheduling. Built with React and Supabase.

The hard part is not that each piece is difficult on its own. It is that they fit together cleanly. Login, Slack, calendar: one flow, without the user feeling the seams.

What it achieved

150 people across several companies used the tool.

That means 150 people who regularly spoke with someone they would not otherwise meet. Conversations between teams that usually never talk. Connections that were not planned, and worked because of it.

The long term effect is hard to reduce to one number. But HR leaders know what it means when people feel they know the whole company, not just their own department. It is one of the most underrated levers for satisfaction and retention.

What this shows technically

Scheduling coffee chats is not the hard part. Any bot can do that. The hard part is the friction between a Slack message and a real meeting. When is the other person free? Who sends the invite? Who writes first?

Each small step is a drop off point. This tool makes those steps invisible. And because booking no longer feels like work, it actually happens.

Good technology does not only solve a problem. It removes what stands in front of it.

Facing a similar issue inside your company, or an idea that needs several APIs to work together? 30 minutes is enough to see whether and how it can be built.

Similar problem? 30 minutes is enough.