👋 Gm Product Hunt, Thanks @chrismessina for hunting Recess! I’m Aman, one of the founders of Recess. We’re part of Meta’s internal innovation lab called New Product Experimentation (NPE). 💡 Why we built Recess The flexibility that remote work offers is great. But it also brings its own set of problems. There’s no more chit chat at lunch. No more impromptu coffee runs. Work feels more transactional and it’s harder to forge genuine connections with your teammates. We started Recess to solve this problem — first, for ourselves, and then for others. Our little team of four had never met in person, had never worked together before, yet we needed to move quickly and couldn't afford not to trust each other. We tried all sorts of products, but nothing worked quite as well as we would have liked. (1) There were products that facilitated happy hours over Zoom or matched people in the company to schedule a 1:1 chat. But, in reality, people were just tired of staring at their screens and didn’t want to partake in another video call for team bonding. (2) There were other social gaming apps, but none were optimized for fostering deeper and more personalized relationships with your teammates. We realized we needed to build the product we wish existed and hence Recess was born. A year after launch, we have 1000s of teams using it every week! ⚡ How Recess works Recess weaves seamlessly into your team’s Slack and asks routine prompts designed to improve rapport and spark interesting conversations. The algorithm blends deeper, meaningful questions with lighter-weight ones so that it never feels like a chore. Over time, the team builds up their own memory vault of inside jokes and surprising reveals. This also helps new peeps easily onboard by quickly giving them a peak into what their teammates are like. Recess Bear automagically surfaces commonalities between folks, which serves as a great way to build 1:1 connection. In addition to the routine async question prompts, teams can also play real-time games on Recess like Trivia, Would You Rather?, and Caption This. Note: Recess currently requires either Slack or Workplace to use. In the future we may integrate with other platforms like Discord, MS Teams, Google Workspace, or even plain-old email. 🚀 How is Recess different? There are tens of team building products available on the internet. Yet, Recess is different in several important ways: - Recess’s prompts are carefully crafted and optimized with the goal of fostering genuine connection between teammates. Many other apps focus on more frivolous prompts. - Recess integrates seamlessly into your team's Slack channel so your teammates can answer asynchronously. This ensures that it’s super low-effort for folks to participate. - Recess allows a combination of more-frequent yet lightweight asynchronous team bonding prompts with less-frequent real-time games. We know that team building in the remote world requires a combination of offline and online interactions. - Unlike many other icebreaker apps which forget your responses, Recess organizes the team's responses into a memory vault. This allows newcomers to quickly glance at the activity to see what the team is like and find shared interests with teammates. 🎁 Recess is completely free to use! If you use Slack or Workplace try out Recess and drop a comment with your feedback.

Hey this would certainly work well for us too as new employees are being hired all the time in different locations :)

My team has been using Recess for almost two years. It's been a great addition to our team culture. My team is remote (irrespective of the pandemic), so we have always lacked that familiarity and comradery that comes from with working together in the same location. While no tool truly replaces physical presence, Recess has added a new level of team engagement and has driven fun conversations or insights we otherwise would not have had.

Looks like a great product! With more and more teams turning to remote, this is exactly the type of products we need to make our remote work experience more enjoyable, well done!

Congrats, what a great name for the product!

Seems quite cool, I've already integrated into our Slack. Looking forward to seeing how it adapts to our team and sharing the feedback. Good luck! :) @ajain

Love the idea! Congrats on the launch team!

it is an amazing product that helped my team get to know one another outside of work. It has cool prompts and breaks the ice no matter how thick it is

I've used this with two groups and it's a fun way to stay engaged with the team.

Recess has helped our global team connect in ways we wouldn't have been able to even if we weren't in a pandemic. Over the holidays, the team released games that we used during virtual happy hours and everyone had a wonderful time with them. This is a fabulous product and I'm so excited to see it launched to the public. Teams will definitely see value almost immediately as it allows people to connect when distance prohibits the usual informal ways we learn more about each other.

Nice idea. Congrats on the launch!

Looking forward to integrating this on our team slack!

This is delightful as expected of @jiheetcb and team's work. I love how talented makers are jamming together to pioneer the solution to workplace social/getting to know each other in this era of new work environments.

Amazing product built by a fantastic team. Have been using it for over a year now and it's a must-have for remote teams to build camaraderie and get to know each other better.

Nice idea!

Interesting concept! Looking forward to seeing you guys grow!

Great product. It's been almost 2 years that we have been working from home guess this product will help all of to connect with our team mates in a much easier and fun way

Just what you need in a remote job

It's been AMAZING to use with my team! Love all the fun questions and getting to learn about people I work with!

My team and I look forward to answering (and guessing!) Recess questions all week. We love it. It's a nice break in between meetings & work. We get to discover things about teammates we otherwise never would. Thanks, Recess!