Kelasa is a friendly bot that lets you stay on top of your tasks in Workfront – a popular enterprise project management tool.

Here’s a list of things that we learned that you could apply while developing your next Slack bot.

*Immerse yourself in your target audience – We attended and “launched” in Workfront’s Leap conference, without a working bot. It was a great idea to immerse ourselves within our target audience of project managers and Workfront fans. By figuring out their needs we prioritised the features to work on.

*Dog Food it – We started using both the beta and production apps on our projects and teams.

*Launch Early – We launched with just a launchrock landing page. This helped us build a small list of beta testers. Once we had a beta bot ready, we got some users onboard. Real life scenarios for the bot usage helped us launch the production bot quickly.

*Measure what you’re doing – We got dashbot installed – which gives us insights into how people were using Kelasa. Some of Kel’s failures became apparent as well.

*Notification madness – It’s easy to push out a daily notification, but it is a fine line between being a useful reminder to otherwise annoying. While Slack has its own Do Not Disturb settings it still falls on the developers to tread that line carefully. Something we still have to balance effectively for all our users.

*Get on the Slack Botkit group -This gave us access to other developers and to news about what Slack was up to. A lot of challenges can are solved by emulating other apps where they found a creative solution to the same issues in a different context.As an example – the Slack dev and roadmap blog told us about buttons that we implemented instantly for a (then) upcoming feature – logging time.

If you’re a Workfront user who’s in Slack all the time do check out Kelasa.