Chicken ❤️ Remote Teams

Chicken is a new product for ambient connection we’re testing at Good Enough. This is a quick explainer so you can see if it’s right for you.

Shared physical spaces, like offices, provide an environment for many light-touch ambient interactions and connections. A quick glance up from your desk can tell you who is around, who’s busy, and roughly what people are doing.

These subtle connections are important. They help a team feel like a team.

Working remotely, on the other hand, brings a lot of its own benefits to a team, but you lose access to those important subtle connections.

Chicken is an exploration to bring that kind of ambient connection to remote teams. We’ve been experimenting with it, and think it’s time more teams got involved to help us make it better.

Throughout the day, as everyone communicates what they’re up to and you can see it all in one quick place, that team connection that is missing from remote work begins to creep back in. It’s nice!

We don’t see Chicken as another status app.

While chat apps like Slack and Teams do have status (what you’re doing right now) and presence (whether you’re around or not), they have some pretty big gaps Chicken attempts to fill:

• There’s no place in those apps to see everyone’s status and presence at once. As a result many people ignore them, or only use them for “lunch” and “done for the day.”
• Presence in those apps are limited to just here or away, which doesn’t tell the whole story. Are you here but busy? Are you away but returning in a few minutes?

Slack and Teams are too focused on chat and productivity to consider the team connection angle. We believe those ambient connections are pretty important to making a team feel like a team, and that’s why we’re exploring it with Chicken.

Here’s what we think:

Sharing helps establish a connection with the group, and sharing together helps us all feel connected. Like a team.

Chicken puts everyone’s status and presence front-and-center, so it encourages you to share, but you can set your status to whatever you like—what you’re working on, thinking about, watching… etc. One of our hunches is that you’d be surprised what is interesting to other people.

Chicken is not about tracking or logging work and tasks—save that for your project management tools. Chicken doesn’t want you to feel like you’re always being watched. Instead, it asks you only to share what you’re up to, at whatever level of detail you’d prefer. Chicken wants to be the wink you get when you catch a friend’s eye.

Some more things:

• Understand everybody’s where and when. This is a tool for remote teams, so you can tell Chicken where you are and what timezone you’re in. This is communicated to everyone in your team, so everyone can see what the local time is for you.


• This is not Slack, but it can sync with Slack. If you connect to Slack, whenever you update Chicken your status in Slack will also be updated, and (almost) vice versa. We know some people live in Slack and don’t like to leave there. That’s fine! We think that Chicken is complementary to Slack, but we always want to meet people where they are.


• There’s a chronological log of all your statuses, which is sometimes pretty interesting if you’re wondering what you were up to earlier in the week.


• We’re still working on it! There’s more to explore, and we’re evolving how Chicken works and what it’s capable of as we experiment with different approaches and interactions, but always with this question in mind: how can we feel more connected as a team?

If this sounds like something that could be interesting for your team, please get in touch. We’d love to have you on this journey with us.

Chicken is made by Good Enough.