Women in PS: how a Slack channel ended up in a London bar

Try it. Search for a women in professional services community and see what comes back. Women in tech, women in sales, women in CS, women in product. Keep scrolling.

Meanwhile the women running delivery, holding the client relationship and taking the hardest calls were all out there doing the job. Just not in the same place.

So a few weeks ago we opened a Slack channel and told some people about it.

It was a channel before it was anything else

There was no launch. We opened a Slack channel and told some people about it. A hundred women asked  to be added in the first week. They didn't show up with introductions and waving emojis, which is what usually happens right before a channel dies. They showed up with questions.

What do you do when a client escalates over your head. What are you actually charging for this. Where AI has actually moved the needle on margin. Whether to take the promotion that comes attached to the worst account in the portfolio.

People answered each other fast, usually with real numbers, usually because they had already made the exact mistake being asked about.

There's a word for places like this. Third spaces, that are neither home nor work, where you turn up because you want to and the only thing on the agenda is talking.

You have your company, which comes with its own politics. And you have the conference circuit, which comes with a stage, a badge, and thirty minutes before the next session.

A Slack channel is a strange third place. It worked anyway, which made us wonder what the same group would do with no screen between them. So in early September we booked a bar.

Two women crossed an ocean for it

The cocktail hour ran alongside PropelX, our three days in London, which was the practical reason for the timing. A lot of professional services leaders were already going to be in the city.

What we did not expect was how many people came who had nothing to do with the conference. Women who were not attending PropelX at all, who saw a Slack post about a cocktail hour and decided that was reason enough to cross London on a school night. Two more flew in from the United States after winning our raffle.

We had two venue options at the Pan Pacific: a bar, or a meeting room. Priya Parker, who wrote the best book there is on gathering, points out that rooms come with scripts attached. People behave the way the furniture tells them to. A meeting room was going to produce a meeting, so we took the bar.

There was no programme. Nobody gave a talk. I had a whole plan in my head for how we would nudge conversations along if the room went quiet.

Never used it. People walked in and started talking, and by the time the photographer turned up they had to be interrupted for the group photo.

What we accidentally started

One of the guests is not a customer and has no plans to become one. She told us, more than once, that she loves that Rocketlane does this. Not the product. The bit where a company puts a room of people together and then gets out of the way.

Some of it was practical. New working relationships. A conversation about running something jointly with a Women in AI community, which we are still following up on. A few people who now have someone to message when a client situation goes sideways at 6pm.

And the rest of it was two hours of women who do the same difficult job, in the same room, finally.

You get to pick the next city

New York. After that, wherever the community tells us to go.

Women in PS is a Slack channel inside the Preflight community, open to any woman working in professional services. It is a few weeks old, which means whoever joins this month still gets to be an early one.

The London cocktail hour was the first event. It won’t be the last.

If you want in, come and find us in Preflight.