Imagine a sales manager invites a team of his account executives and a technical manager to a meeting via chat. The intent of the meeting is to discuss the status of a new software product the company is developing. During the group chat the technical manager shares screenshots of the software. She provides an update on the development progress. She also gets excited and mentions that the new release will be available within four weeks. Hearing this, the account executives also get excited and start discussing plans on approaching their prospects to introduce the software.
The sales manager wants to caution the technical manager to properly set his team’s expectations. But he has no opportunity to privately share his concerns in the team channel. He can separately chat with the technical manager in a direct chat between the two. However, when he does that, this direct conversation is no longer linked to the ongoing chat between the team. Such separate unlinked conversation threads can mushroom and cause stress since everyone must rely on their memory to recall what was said when and in which context.