How we think about communication and decisions

Communication is the heartbeat of successful teams. It gets harder as you grow and become more distributed, but it is still possible to communicate well if you are intentional.

How we communicate spans several sub-components: how we make and communicate decisions, how we collaborate cross-functionally, how we communicate sync and async, how we share knowledge, and how we handle documentation.

Whether from scratch or a re-design, you will likely revisit communication at various milestones of your growth journey. How you communicate as a five-person founding team is very different at 30, 80, 250 and beyond.

Establish your non-negotiables before you start: where you work (remote, hybrid, in-office), when you work (9-5, core hours, async), autonomy (top-down vs self-managing), and org structure (hierarchy vs holocratic). Design around these first.

Then layer on

• Tooling you need (Slack, Notion, Loom, Miro, and what each is for)
• Whether you can afford the approach as you scale
• How teams collaborate and what agreements make that work
• How decisions are made and documented

• How we make and communicate decisions: transparency, decision logs, who decides what
• How we collaborate cross-functionally: handoffs, shared goals, friction between functions
• How we communicate sync vs async: default to meetings or messages, response expectations
• How we share knowledge: retros, town halls, lessons learned
• How we handle documentation: single source of truth, wiki hygiene, SMoTs

How we communicate touches everyone, so most initiatives are org-wide and lean toward co-creation, with plenty of just-do-it and experimentation along the way.

Examples

• Agreeing boundaries for communication = co-creation
• Decision-making framework = just-do-it
• Selecting the right tools = co-creation / experimentation / MVP
• Org structure and reporting lines = just-do-it

Once you have designed and built, the question is: how do I know we are improving against what we set out to?

1. How many of the agreements above have you aligned on? What is missing that could be a lever?
2. How well have they been embedded and operationalised? What do you do well? What not?
3. Have you jumped to conclusions too rashly?
4. Is how we currently communicate appropriate for when and where we work, level of trust and autonomy, and org structure?
5. Should we design it differently based on the above? What must we stay close to as we scale?