Get to know remote teammates in a fun & playful way

👋 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.