How to best leverage collaborative tools?

I would like to bring novelty in how we use them in our team.

If you're working at a FAANG company, this will probably be difficult. Expectations here depend on your level as well, so for the future, I recommend attaching your level/company to the question, especially as it's fairly high-level and FAANG is ginormous.

In general, I feel like succeeding at FAANG and Big Tech is more about taking existing methods and executing them extremely well as opposed to "innovating". Innovation is generally overrated in the tech industry and is naturally very difficult at huge companies laden with talent (like FAANG).

Besides the classical 1:1 with manager // meetings minutes for meetings, what use cases you found really impactful and productive in these collaborative tools?

At a high-level just try to use them as an alignment mechanism. Some other types of docs I used for these tools back at Meta:

• Tech specs (i.e. system design docs)
• PRD (product requirements document or product spec)
• Any sort of formal proposal (e.g. "Here is how I propose to revamp the oncall process in the org")
• Headcount tracker and hiring discussion (my team back at Instagram used the spreadsheets within Quip for this)

The gap I've generally seen at Big Tech with these documents is that they aren't kept up to date. I got a lot of credit as a tech lead for doing the "dirty work" and making sure that tech/product spec docs were kept up to date as it saved a ton of time amongst the team preventing misalignment. You'll be surprised at how often a team goes into a meeting to align on some tricky project decision only to not reflect the new alignment within the source-of-truth project spec document.