We moved chat out of a tab.
Chat sat in a tab alongside Tasks, Docs and Billing, which meant the conversation disappeared whenever you went to do the work it was about. The shell is now built the other way round.
What was wrong
A tab bar tells you that everything in it is the same kind of thing, visited one at a time. That is true of Billing and Crew. It is not true of a conversation, which needs to stay visible while you look at a ticket, a document or an invoice.
Every user we watched had the same workaround: two browser tabs, one parked on chat. When people build the same workaround, the structure is wrong.
The new shape
Conversations live in a permanent left rail. A channel is a project: open it and you get Chat, Board, Hours and Docs for that project, as tabs inside the channel. Work that belongs to the whole bothy — invoicing, approvals, the full board, all docs, crew and settings — sits in a pinned top bar instead of competing with channels in the sidebar.
The awkward decision
Hours are project-scoped because billing requires it — an hour with no project cannot be invoiced. Boards and Docs are the opposite: a ticket often moves between projects, and a runbook is rarely about one client. So those two are bothy-wide with a filtered view per channel, and the filter says so out loud: “Filtered to this channel · See the whole board.”
Getting that label right took longer than building the view. A filtered list that does not admit it is filtered makes people think their work has vanished.
On a phone
The same structure, rotated. Channels as a list, the top bar becomes a bottom bar, and a running timer gets a persistent strip so clocking out is never more than one tap. Nothing was cut for mobile except the width.
What a conversation carries now
Moving chat to the centre only pays off if chat is good enough to live in. So the room got the things people had been going to Slack for. Replies open a thread, one level deep, so a message and its follow-ups stay together without the room turning into nested folders. A small curated set of reactions handles the acknowledgements that do not deserve a reply. Type @ and a name to pull someone in.
None of that is new to anyone. What is different is the activity stream: a separate tab that shows only what happened to you — replies to your messages, reactions to them, mentions, and direct messages — with filters, kept apart from the bell that carries approvals and money. Notifications about the work and notifications about the conversation are different things and now live in different places.
The door is open.
Thirty days free for a team, free forever for one person. If it does not replace at least three things you pay for, do not keep it.