Add product ideas to Google Sheets via a Slack

Use Case

This workflow is a slight variation of a workflow we're using at n8n. In most companies, employees have a lot of great ideas. That was the same for us at n8n. We wanted to make it as easy as possible to allow everyone to add their ideas to some formatted database - it should be somewhere where everyone is all the time and could add a new idea without much extra effort. Since we're using Slack, this seemed to be the perfect place to easily add ideas. In this example, we're adding the ideas to Google Sheets instead of Notion, like we do.

What this workflow does

This workflow waits for a webhook call within Slack, that gets fired when users use the /idea command on a bot that you will create as part of this template. It then checks the command, adds the idea to Google Sheets and notifies the user about the newly added idea as you can see below:

Creating your Slack bot

1. Visit https://api.slack.com/apps, click on New App and choose a name and workspace.
2. Click on OAuth & Permissions and scroll down to Scopes -> Bot token Scopes
3. Add the chat:write scope
4. Head over to Slash Commands and click on Create New Command
5. Use /idea as the command
6. Copy the test URL from the Webhook node into Request URL
7. Add whatever feels best to the description and usage hint
8. Go to Install app and click install

Setup

1. Create a Google Sheets document with the columns Name and Creator
2. Add your Google credentials
3. Fill the Set me up node.
4. Create your Slack app (see other sticky)
5. Click Test workflow and use the /idea comment in Slack
6. Activate the workflow and exchange the Request URL with the production URL from the webhook

How to adjust it to your needs

• You can adjust the table in Google Sheets and for example, add different types of ideas or areas that they impact
• Rename the Slack command as it works best for you

How to enhance this workflow

At n8n we use this workflow in combination with some others. E.g. we have the following things on top:

• We additionally have a /bug Slack command that adds a new bug to Linear. Here we're using AI to classify the bugs and move it to the right team. (Bug command workflow and Ai Classifier workflow)
• We also added other types, like /pain to be less solution-driven
• To make it easier for everyone to give input, we added a Votes column that allows everyone to vote on ideas/pain points in the list
• We're also running a workflow once a week that highlights the most popular new ideas and the most active voters