Transparency and efficiency: how Pumpkin transformed their collaboration culture

Transparency and efficiency: how Pumpkin transformed their collaboration culture

Launched in 2014, Pumpkin is a colorful mobile app that lets friends pay each other back instantly. The money app is already adopted by 450,000 users in France, their team has grown to 50 employees and is scaling rapidly. We talked with Hugo, the app's co-founder, about how Slite has benefited his team's culture and workflow.

We addressed the following three main points with Hugo, read on if you're curious:

  • How his team used to run way too many inefficient meetings and share content on too many tools
  • How Slite became a place to centralize all their company knowledge
  • Most of all, how their team collaboration culture was totally transformed by Slite: from how they onboard new members to how they make decisions

Bringing content at the heart of their teamwork

As co-founder of Pumpkin, Hugo noticed the gaps in content sharing: some were in Google Docs, others in Confluence and even sometimes in Trello. Even when they tried sticking to Google Docs, it was simply too much of a hassle to follow document permissions and get the big picture of what the team was creating.

Between not using the right tools and not having any processes in place, collaboration inefficiencies caught up to them: endless meetings, duplicated information and the inevitable loss of productivity.

"We were looking for a tool to make our teamwork more collaborative and efficient when we came across Slite," Hugo told us. As the team started to adopt it, it quickly became the unique place they share content. In their Slite, you'll find meeting notes, processes, brainstorm docs etc. The ease of storing and finding information made the move to Slite an obvious one.

From a synchronous meetings culture to an asynchronous writing culture

With offices in two cities, Paris and Lille, and no collaborative writing culture, Pumpkin was stuck in the all too familiar "many meetings culture". As the team started to use Slite, they reduced meetings and started making decisions asynchronously.

Hugo showed me a specific example of this: when the Pumpkin's Executive Committee needs to make a decision, they create a note in their channel, get all relevant parties to contribute to the decision-making and set a deadline. Everyone takes 10 minutes out of their own time versus setting a time-consuming meeting.

Pumpkin pro tip: use a Slite note to make decisions as a team asynchronously.

A collaborative and transparent effort

It's not just the case with decision-making but with any content and across all teams: Marketing, Sales, Finance, HR..

Hugo was taken aback by how much Slite transformed the way they work at Pumpkin: "the team creates, shares and contributes more than ever."

He noticed this shift when he created a public onboarding channel. Before he knew it, team members from the Product and Client Relations teams spontaneously contributed to it. He explained that because Slite "is easy and accessibly, your team sees what's new and naturally engages with it."

Pumpkin pro tip: use Slite to onboard all your team members by creating checklists and giving them access to all relevant knowledge.

Giving managers the big picture

"All the important information at Pumpkin is now finally in one place."

As a manager, Hugo gets a better idea of what his team is creating. Across the team, there's more transparency and allows everyone at Pumpkin to topics other than their own.

When we asked Hugo how exactly Slite has helped his team he said,

"it's literally keeping the team on the same page: previously on Google Docs, no one came to check what work others were up to. We also avoid losing valuable insights in our Slack history."

"Surprisingly, Slite created new habits for our team and we're eager for what's coming next!"

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