Vector Media Group relies on HipChat for 99 percent of team communication to get more done, while supporting and building our company culture. Learn how we balance productivity (with team rooms where external data is centralized and shared), and silliness (like a bot that renders a founder's animated face whenever they are named in a public room).

1. #atlassian

2. How to Use HipChat to Collaborate and
Build Culture
MATT WEINBERG • PRESIDENT, DEVELOPMENT • VECTOR MEDIA GROUP • @MRW

3. Who am I?

4. WHO AM I?
• Co-founder and President of Development & Technology at
Vector Media Group
• Vector is an NYC interactive agency
• 20 people: 15 on-site, 5 off-site
• From 3->20 people in 3.5 years
• Business is split between web/mobile development and
online marketing (SEO/SEM/PPC)
• Company-wide, working on 15+ projects at any time

5. Previously…

6. PREVIOUSLY…
• No communication issues as a company of 3 in the same
room, working on 1-2 projects
• Basecamp with clients
• Skype for group chat
• Google Chat for IM
• Hard to organize communication at 4+ people, with multiple
teams and projects

7. Growing Pains

8. GROWING PAINS
• IM about a project, copy/paste it to someone else later
• Chat history is mixed with emails in Gmail
• Skype group IMs are not great
• Single threads about multiple projects
• Hard to get context after a few hours away
• File uploads were non-existent or ephemeral

9. Enter HipChat

10. Less than 1 hour to
setup

11. HipChat
• Sign up
• Configure account
• Download OS X and
iPhone clients
• Invite small test group
• $0

12. This Is SO MUCH BETTER Than Skype
“ BENJAMIN SMITH, VECTOR’S TECHNICAL LEAD ”

13. Benefits for our team
• Support for easy 1-on-1 and group chats
• Full and searchable chat history
• File uploads are indexed and stored (and listed in sidebar)
• Robust API
• Great native OS X, iPhone, Windows, and Android apps
• @mention and @here support
• Per-room unread bar
• Users added later get room’s full history

14. Over 300,000 messages sent by humans

15. Our HipChat Setup
NON-PROJECT ROOMS
PROJECT ROOMS
1-ON-1 MESSAGES

16. Non-project rooms
• General chat
• Everyone, mostly
kidding around and
figuring out lunch
• One for each department
• Dev chat
• Marketing chat
• Dev Project Management
• PMs, Tech Lead, and
President of Dev
• Executive Team

17. Dev Chat
• Interesting development
related links (libraries,
good reads, etc…)
• Advice about code
approaches for a problem
• Discussions about our
internal libraries/repos
• GitHub notifications for
our internal libraries/tools
• Make heavy use of search
history

18. Project Rooms
• Project-specific discussion
• Room topic is link to latest
project plan/timeline
• Devs on project + PMs +
SEO team if joint project
• Automated git, deploy, and
application notifications
• Private only because of
@mention behavior; anyone
can join on request

19. 1-on-1 messages
about projects
should always move
to that project’s
room

20. Other etiquette we’ve figured out
• At setup:
• Turn off icon bounces/sounds
• Turn off notifications except for @mentions and 1-on-1s
• Group rooms are asynchronous
• People will catch up later
• Need immediate response? @mention or @here
• Favor @here over @all
• Use /code when pasting code
• Remember: don’t let project talk happen in 1-on-1s

21. Integrations and
Automation

22. Developer notifications
• GitHub activity
• Pushes (with commits),
code comments, etc…
• Deployments
• Ansible, Laravel Envoy
• Environment
• Start and success (in
green)
• Application errors
• Rollbar, Airbrake

23. Hubot (our chat bot)
• Hubot, open source chat bot: https://
hubot.github.com/
• Easily extensible with CoffeeScript
• Added support for recognizing JIRA
ticket #s and displaying info when
mentioned
• Create repos with proper permissions
and setup
• Searches giphy for animated gifs
• Animated gifs of Partners’ heads
nodding when their names are used
• Anyone on team can contribute

24. Key takeaways:
• You don’t realize how much better team communication can
be than regular IM until you try HipChat
• HipChat is extremely easy to setup and very cheap/free
• Standardize behavior that organically develops, and make
etiquette around usage
• Integrate with other systems and customize as much as
possible. HipChat is our command center for a lot of tasks
#atlassian

25. Thank you!
MATTHEW WEINBERG • PRESIDENT OF DEVELOPMENT • VECTOR MEDIA GROUP • @MRW