Recess

Get to know remote teammates in a fun & playful way

4.9•19 reviews•

24 followers

Get to know remote teammates in a fun & playful way

4.9•19 reviews•

24 followers

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Team collaboration software

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Remote workforce tools

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Virtual events

Recess helps remote teams connect with each other through fun and quick activities. From thought provoking to whimsical prompts, our application is designed based on behavioral science research for improving rapport and trust within teams. 🐻

Free

Launch tags:Slack•Free Games•Remote Work

Launch Team

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Maker

👋 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.

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4yr ago

My team has been using Recess for almost two years. It's been a great addition to our team culture. My team is remote (irrespective of the pandemic), so we have always lacked that familiarity and comradery that comes from with working together in the same location. While no tool truly replaces physical presence, Recess has added a new level of team engagement and has driven fun conversations or insights we otherwise would not have had.

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4yr ago

Recess

Maker

@aaron_bergquist Love to hear that Recess played a good role in your team bonding. Our favorite feedback is how many inside jokes are created via Recess 🐻. We hope to make Recess better with all of you ❤️.

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4yr ago

Hey this would certainly work well for us too as new employees are being hired all the time in different locations :)

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4yr ago

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Maker

@anu_varila Let me know any and all feedback. There's a convenient Send Feedback link in the product. But you can also feel free to reach out to me directly.

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4yr ago

@ajain Thank you!

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4yr ago

Looks like a great product! With more and more teams turning to remote, this is exactly the type of products we need to make our remote work experience more enjoyable, well done!

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4yr ago

Recess

Maker

@indranil_dasgupta Thank you for your support. Feel free to try it out with your team www.teamrecess.com, and let us know if you have any comments!

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4yr ago

it is an amazing product that helped my team get to know one another outside of work. It has cool prompts and breaks the ice no matter how thick it is

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4yr ago

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Maker

@said_madi Thanks for being a OG dogfooder :)

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4yr ago

Recess

Maker

@said_madi 😄 we might need to frame this quote: Recess helps break "the ice no matter how thick it is" 🙌

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4yr ago

Seems quite cool, I've already integrated into our Slack. Looking forward to seeing how it adapts to our team and sharing the feedback. Good luck! :) @ajain

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4yr ago

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Maker

@stefani_kovachevska Thanks! Please provide us any and all feedback. We'd be very grateful.

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4yr ago

Recess has helped our global team connect in ways we wouldn't have been able to even if we weren't in a pandemic. Over the holidays, the team released games that we used during virtual happy hours and everyone had a wonderful time with them. This is a fabulous product and I'm so excited to see it launched to the public. Teams will definitely see value almost immediately as it allows people to connect when distance prohibits the usual informal ways we learn more about each other.

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4yr ago

Recess

Maker

@heather_lozano We're thrilled Recess was able to make such an impact on your team! ❤️ We are very appreciative of your support, and hope to continue making Recess the best it can be for your team and other teams in need!

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4yr ago

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4.9

Based on 19 reviews

Review Recess?

Reviewers say Recess works best as a lightweight way for remote and distributed teams to stay connected through prompts, icebreakers, and small games. People repeatedly praise its simple setup, low-pressure async format, flexible timing, and mix of playful and more thoughtful questions, saying it helps teammates learn about each other, laugh a bit, and makes work conversations feel easier. A small note of caution: engagement depends on the team. For some groups it becomes a lasting habit, while others lose interest or use it less once the team is already established.

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Recess

Get to know remote teammates in a fun & playful way

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