Scaling Teams

Chapter 11. Scaling Communication: Communicating at Scale

One of the core challenges of a growing team is ensuring that everyone has the information they need without overwhelming them. Well-designed communication can achieve this by, as Caryn Marooney puts it, “Tuning out the noise so your team can hear the signal.” This is the mission of good internal communication.

Too Much Information: A Story from Alex

I worked at a company where we kept all information open by default. Every company document, for example, was put into Google Docs and shared. Everyone in the company received notifications for the documents, and would promptly review any changes. On the one hand, this setup was great, because you might end up seeing an interesting discussion between an intern and the CEO. On the other hand, some people spent their whole week in Google Docs looking at information mostly irrelevant to their work. This example illustrates the main problem of scaling communication: you want people to know everything they need to know, but still be able to focus on the jobs they were hired to do.

Communication Design

There are three steps to a good communication design: define what employees need to know, select the appropriate communication channels, and finally, implement the strategy.

Step 1: Define What Employees Need to Know

There is some information that every employee needs to know. Then there’s information that every designer needs to have, and information every engineer needs ...