How you can use Discord for business purpose too

It was 2012, the Mayan calendar was over, but the end of the world was postponed to another date and I started a new job. I was included in a global team scattered around the world - Egypt, Brazil, the Philippines, and the USA. As I was used to working only within Slovakia and face to face, virtual tools for communication were something completely new for me.

Days and months passed, and I got used to new ways of working. The manager from the US did not understand why I go to the office, as I work with a global team. At that time, I got acquainted with work from home, the home office. Armed with knowledge of communication using digital tools, fast ADSL internet, I set to work. At first it was 50% home office and at the end of my career at IBM, I climbed up to 100 %.

Later we decided to start our own company, Labzone. As guys used to the ways in IMB, we wanted to keep the comfort of working from home and leave communication to digital tools. The first attempt was Slack, but as it did not suit us, we switched to Discord.

Hello, my name is Discord

Discord is a tool for communicating via message, video, and voice within a certain community, whether it is a school club or a game group. It is completely free. Are you asking if you can use Discord for business purposes? At Labzone, we use it to communicate within work teams, whether with each other or with our clients.

We consider the advantages of this tool to be:

• communication speed = higher efficiency, compared to e-mail communication
• server stability
• decent quality video conferencing calls
• the price
  

To be objective, the solution also has its disadvantages:

• absence of threads in communication
• the message size is limited to 2000 characters and the attachment size to 8 MB
• impossibility to create a group chat if the participants are not "friends"
  

The biggest competitor, in our opinion, is the more popular tool Slack, which is very well known, especially in the IT community.

Project per channel

In LabZone, we solve several projects at the same time when different complex teams work on each project. Discord allows the creation of so-called private channels, where role-based access can be controlled. Therefore, we chose a simple rule: 1 project = 1 role + 1 channel.

Communication with the client

As the saying goes, the rules are meant to be broken. So, we broke our simple rule. In the case of a project where communication is done internally within the team, but at the same time we enticed the client to use Discord, the rule is as follows: 1 client = 1 category = 1 channel for public communication + 1 channel for internal communication + 1 channel for non-work items (memes and other fun).

Extreme even without the risk of injury

Agile software development techniques are gaining ground in the digital world. One of these techniques is extreme programming, where team practices also include pairwise programming. Basically, two developers are working on the same code at the same time. One writes the code and the other thinks about this code and whether it is the optimal solution or whether there is another way. Developers can take turns in these roles.

With Discord, it is quite simple, as it's possible to create a video conferencing channel where the two developers come together. One shares his screen where he programs and the other watches and discusses it. Thanks to pairwise programming, the quality of the output code is higher, the number of errors in the code has been reduced and the code review process has been speeded up.

At the end

Although Discdord is a communication tool primarily intended for the gaming community and is associated with leisure activities, it is surprisingly effective for business as well. We have been working with this tool for almost two years and it has become part of our team. In Labzone we are trying to build a so-called remote first culture and therefore it is important for us to use effectively available tools. We are currently working with the following:

• Communication - Discord
• Project management - Trello and JIRA
• Time tracking app - Clockify
  

If you want to learn more about our experience with these tools or about our remote work, do not hesitate to contact us.