You know that feeling where you’ve found a bit of time to dig into that meaty design doc but just as you start, your boss pings you because the ceo wants something right now?
Now imagine how bad this is for an engineer who has pushed a ton of state in their head and is deep in the middle of debugging that important customer issue that was the number one thing five minutes ago.
You know this pain all too well, which is why you’ve tried to make the org be less reactive, but unfortunately, people have learned that this sort of faux urgency is a great way to get things done.
You kick yourself a bit, because with each response you’re enabling this bad behavior to continue but you know the info IS needed RIGHT NOW to help close that deal, or pass that certification, or whatever it is. You also understand that if you keep this up, you’re burning out your most reliable and productive folks, harming their ability to deliver and hurting the business in the long run.
So you vow to become a sturdy shit umbrella and give your teams the uninterrupted time they so desperately need to deliver their best work, while getting the execs the real-time answers they need to keep the business moving.
Where do you start?
Train Leads To Be Good Information Brokers
Each leader, be it a manager, a tech lead, or domain expert, should be able to:
- Take questions from top and distill them down - elicit the necessary and correct subset of details from their teams.
- Collect answers from the bottom and shape for consumption by leadership
- Present info at the right level of abstraction.
- Contextualize uncertainty, good news, bad news.
- Make sure the question behind the question is being addressed (that question about the database might be a masked financial worry, or a reliability worry, or a concern about the team’s capabilities, …)
- Information flows in a fractal. Train everyone in your org to understand their audience, the question, and the implications of their answers as they propagate information.
Optimize for transparency and trust
- Depending on your company’s culture, people may feel some pressure to paint a more positive picture when things are bad or overstate their wins.
- Make sure your teams aim for transparency at all levels.
- Premature or incorrect optimization here can erode trust that has taken a long time to build.
- Leave the final contextualization for your executive leaders to deal with as they deliver the news to the CEO.
Organize Information
- Embrace written updates organized for random access.
- Make sure everyone knows where to find project status updates, meeting notes, ongoing discussions.
- If you’ve ever had to figure out the state of something by digging through one of those super lengthy email threads with 30 or so nested quotes ||||| you know the pain here.
- Any meta work such as organizing documentation can trigger an allergic reaction by builders who are already stretched thin.
- Sell the overhead by aligning on the goal of minimizing disruptions and pitching the vision of the future
- Proactively share frequent updates, especially on those burning topics
- Teach people to fish by sharing sources of data and updates rather than the content
- The sooner everyone in the org builds a mental map of where data is, the more easily you can start to undo some of the bad learned practices
Overall, by building good information hygiene, you can handle info requests with ease, keep your teams happy, and dampen the disruptive scatter and gather tactics by those who aren’t optimizing for your team’s well being and rushing to get their own work done. By investing in good info flow you’ll have more reliable and correct information which builds trust and helps your management avoid getting egg on your face (especially in front of key customers and investors).