Good Startup Communication

Summary

Summarized wtih ChatGPT

The text discusses principles for good startup communication, emphasizing efficiency, clarity, and appropriate use of communication tools. It highlights the importance of conserving effort, using concise and clear communication, and addressing recipients specifically. To improve communication, teams should adopt norms that promote efficient communication, utilize appropriate communication tools, and ensure that recipients handle their communications responsibly.

Highlights from Article

Good communication conserves effort as much as possible.Teammate attention is a finite resource. It is perhaps the team’s most precious resource.

Good communication is concise, but not at the expense of clarity.

• Treat attention as a finite resource but not at the expense of being clear.

The Appropriate Artifact Principle builds on the Efficient Expression Principle: Let the artifact do the talking so that you don’t have to.

Good communication explicitly addresses a set of recipients. Good communication is never vague on who is being addressed.

minimizes the number of recipients required to consume information

Good communication defaults to public channels for all valuable and non-sensitive information. It is bad communication to sequester such information in private silos.

Good communication recommends that individuals should not request information that can be easily looked up.

Good communication closes the loop on all open topics of discussion.

Every startup needs its own version of these.

The most important norm to agree on is a responsiveness level per channel. Responsiveness levels should be set to the fastest possible turnaround that is not disruptive to meaningful work.

Good communication has recipients send acknowledgment of receipt as fast as reasonably possible. Acknowledgments inform senders that communications have been seen.

Good communication requires each individual to take full responsibility for their notifications.

All individuals should carve out at least one “in case of emergency” channel where notifications will reliably disrupt them.

ood communication requires that all recipients responsibly handle their inbound communications.Specifically: They should catch up on all messages since the last time they were online. This should be upheld regardless of how long they were offline.

All material owns to the authors, of course. If I’m highlighting or writing notes on this, I mostly likely recommend reading the original article, of course.

See other recent things I’ve read here.