Communication is the key to fast-paced development
Artem Rudenko
CEO, Founder
With the advent of AI tools, writing software has become faster than ever. As building things becomes easier, communication becomes a more significant source of delays in project timelines. In this post, we’ll talk about how to communicate efficiently, to maximize your team’s chances at delivering a working product on time.
What does efficient communication look like?
Slack and Teams are the de facto standards for communication within engineering organizations. Both of these platforms feature instant messaging, which can significantly speed up communication compared to email. Questions should be answered in minutes, not hours or even days as might be common with email.
If a person is off work, they should indicate this with a clear “out of office” status on their Slack or Teams profile. The same should be done if someone has a long interruption during the day when they’ll be unavailable.
Keeping text chat organized
From our experience organizing text chats significantly improves discoverability of the information in the messages. For each project, there should be a single text chat channel that is shared between the dev, management, and marketing teams. General, high-level questions should be resolved in this shared channel.
Each team should also have its own internal channel. Team-specific questions should be answered in these internal channels, to avoid polluting the shared channel with information that is irrelevant to many of the participants.
This is a simple and easy to follow approach, but benefits are significant.
Having questions? Talk to us.
Communication is a culture
It’s important to establish a culture of effective communication. With no culture, a text chat may become inefficient and lead to lost time and productivity for the whole team. Here are some key principles that should influence your culture:
- Always include relevant context in your messages. Without the proper context, other team members will get confused and be unable to provide useful feedback.
- Keep messages succinct and to the point. Large walls of text with low information density should be avoided.
- Voice calls should be viewed as a fallback option, when an issue cannot be resolved over text chat. When a voice call is necessary, it should be kept to a small number of people to avoid wasting the time of team members who are only tangentially involved.
Final thoughts
The ideas discussed in this post only scratch the surface of effective communication. You should evaluate your organization’s current communication habits, and adapt this advice to address the specific inefficiencies you are facing. There’s no one right way to do communication, but it’s critical to optimize this part of your business so that you can deliver high quality products quickly.