You Should Make a Hype Channel
A Frictionless Approach to Self-Advocacy for Engineers and Managers
During my time at Square, I started using a Slack channel as a living hype doc and worked with my manager, Stephen Pickens, to refine the approach. Together we put this document together to share the strategy with other individual contributors and engineering managers across Square. The practice ended up being genuinely impactful. Engineers who adopted it had an easier time advocating for themselves, and managers stayed more connected to their team's wins. As AI and LLMs gained access to work tools, these became a critical part of performance reviews, self reflection, and general summaries of work completed.
We want to share it more broadly because we think it's useful well beyond Square, and it's one of the things we are most proud of building into our team culture.
Background
Keeping track of your professional wins is important. Let's face it, it's easy to forget or overlook them when things get busy. The idea of a hype doc started at Square within the Women in Engineering community. A former Square engineer wrote about it on Medium, breaking down why having a hype doc is a game-changer and how you can use it to advocate for yourself by keeping track of your own accomplishments. While people traditionally kept hype docs as personal Google documents, integrating them directly into Slack channels takes this practice to a whole new level of ease and effectiveness.
I started my hype doc in Slack¹ after struggling to maintain a traditional one. I wanted to keep track of my accomplishments, but found the usual approach full of friction:
The doc lived outside of where work actually happened, which made it easy to forget.
I had to copy messages, links, or screenshots across different tools, often breaking context or losing detail.
It wasn't always clear what to include: should I paste a screenshot, a link, or both?
Updates felt like a chore instead of something quick and lightweight.
To make the process easier, I worked with my manager to figure out how a dedicated Slack channel could serve as a living, low-friction hype doc. This setup allowed us to stay aligned in real time, capture wins as they happened, and reference specific accomplishments when it mattered most without ever needing to leave the tools we were already using every day.
This small adjustment to reduce friction ended up creating a lightweight system that anyone can adopt. Let me break down why hype channels can be so valuable, starting with the benefits for engineers.
For Engineers
Having your own dedicated hype doc channel in Slack has lots of practical benefits. Slack's real-time format makes it super easy to add your accomplishments on the fly. You can instantly forward messages, shout-outs, or project highlights into your hype channel, which means you're more likely to capture achievements as they happen. This can also track support work that takes place in Slack that otherwise goes untracked in other software such as Github (PRs) or Jira (tickets). Since Slack is already central to your everyday work, it's natural to update your hype doc regularly without extra hassle.
On top of that, this setup streamlines the entire process:
Automatic time tracking - Timestamps are automatically recorded, so there's no manual logging required.
Real time notifications - Interested parties can choose to be notified or tagged in real time making it easy to "manage up" or tag collaborators.
Easy search and summarizing - Whenever wins need to be resurfaced, Slack has an excellent search interface that makes it painless to find what you need.
This habit boosts confidence, encourages proactively advocating for yourself, and helps you easily recall important accomplishments during performance reviews or when you're preparing for promotions.
One engineer I worked with created a Slack Workflow (IC Hype Tracker) to categorize & track hype feedback in a way that maps directly to engineering level expectations. This easily enables quick searching for relevant content in the hype channel when writing promo packets or reviewing performance with a manager.
Several engineers also made their hype doc channels open for transparency and as examples for others. 👏👏👏
Engineer Testimonials
Here's what some of the engineers who adopted this practice had to say:
Testimonial 1
I had previously kept a hype-doc using Google Docs, but transitioned to using a Slack channel to take advantage of some automation tricks and more easily track Slack-native content.
This engineer configured the Reacji Channeler Slack App to cross-post hype-doc content by reacting to Slack messages with a custom emoji. It had a few positive effects:
It removed friction from tracking hype-doc content.
It encouraged other individuals to track their own hype doc content by alerting followers of a message or conversation when hype doc content was logged.
It encouraged tracking smaller pieces of hype more often, creating a larger narrative pool to draw from when reviewing performance.
Testimonial 2
I tried using a notion doc and found myself just duplicate tracking my jira tickets.
This engineer shared some tricks they use in their hype channel:
Sharing private DMs. This will only share the one solitary message and not an entire thread, but is often sufficient for surfacing work with your EM that is brought to your attention in private DMs before you move it to a public channel, or if you're sent a kudos privately.
Leveraging slackmoji reactions for categorization and retrieval. You can flag each message with a slackmoji and later search your hype doc for a specific emoji. You could use this for easy retrieval for impact, behavior, and betterment.
Summarizing when forwarding. Each time you share a thread to your hype channel you can summarize what the hype is.
Testimonial 3
I had tried, unsuccessfully, to keep a hype doc in Google docs for years. Creating a slack channel was so much easier. Most of the work happens, or is documented, in Slack. It's trivial to share a post to my hype channel, and it usually already has screenshots, videos, and links. This makes it that much easier when assembling a promo packet, because you can quickly jump to the post and gather all of the context. It's also obviously a great platform to discuss your hype entries with your manager as they happen.
Testimonial 4
Like others, I've struggled to keep up a hype doc and when it came time for promo or performance conversations I needed to spend a lot of after hours time getting these artifacts together. I just started using a Slack channel, but with the automations available via emoji reactions and lower friction my initial experience has been positive.
For Managers
Managers get plenty of value from Slack-based hype docs too. When managers join these hype channels, they get to celebrate their team's wins right away. This makes it easy for them to stay informed about their engineers' successes, strengths, and growth areas in real-time. This is especially helpful for managers with a lot of direct reports or multiple teams.
These channels are also incredibly helpful when it's time to give feedback. They provide a steady stream of concrete examples that make it easier to offer thoughtful, consistent input, and they help make evaluations simpler, fairer, and more transparent.
Managers can quickly forward notable achievements from a hype channel into larger team or leadership channels, making recognition visible across the company. Another big perk: if there's ever a change in management, simply adding the new manager to the existing Slack hype channel immediately gives them all the historical context they need.
Creating a dedicated Slack section for ICs' hype channels also helps maintain Slack organization.
Summary
In short, turning hype docs into Slack channels makes tracking and celebrating accomplishments easy and effective. It simplifies the process for engineers, helps managers stay engaged and informed, and creates a positive, recognition-rich team culture. Adopting Slack-based hype docs contributes to happier, more motivated teams and a workplace where everyone's contributions are noticed, appreciated, and celebrated. Create yours today!
Footnotes
- We used Slack and I refer to this throughout this post, but any tool you have at work where you can set up a channel for you and your manager should work!
