One of our challenges is that context isn’t being shared equally among team members.
Since many business and product decisions are made informally, such as between founders, the CTO is responsible for most of the context. Engineers, frequently feel as though we’re flying blind or must continuously seek clarifications before making decisions, which leads to a dependency bottleneck.
I firmly believe that engineers and other team members could make better and faster decisions on their own if they had better access to context.
Has anyone successfully resolved this at a startup?
How can context be conveyed without being overpowering?
Which procedures or tools were helpful?
How can meetings and async documentation be balanced effectively?
Any recommendations or illustrations would be very beneficial.
One of the most difficult things for leaders to do is to communicate context. In my experience, the only way it works is to repeat over and over again, and on a variety of channels. When I discover something new that could have an impact on others, I usually share it right away with them in a public Slack channel so that other people I might not have thought of can also learn about it. I then put it on the agenda for our next team alignment meeting, which happens every two weeks and in which all team members attend—not just the lead who must then communicate in Chinese whispers.
If the strategic direction is more general, I create a brief PowerPoint presentation to explain it, send it in writing via Slack, show it at the next alignment meeting, show it at one of the upcoming company-wide meetings, record the meeting, share the recording in Slack the following day, and show the key slide once more at the subsequent alignment meetings. There is a trade-off between time spent and context provided, but overall, this is not really enough to provide everyone with adequate context.
One of my main goals is to shift the crucial conversations from unstructured, one-on-one meetings to team meetings where everyone is present. This way, they can see not only the final product but also the steps we took to get there, since merely displaying the outcome frequently leaves out 80% of the context.
Additionally, I’ve found that simply writing things down doesn’t help because it makes it difficult to ask questions, different people may have different learning styles, and it’s difficult to verify that what I wrote was understood exactly as I intended.