Creating better comms channels 💬

This is the 22nd petal snapshot of spring 2024. And today I want to talk about teamwork and potentially a bit of productivity as well. So yesterday I spent a lot of time getting to know our team stakeholders a little bit more. We've been in meetings in passing. We've been in team meetings. We've been in occasional conversations, but I've never had the opportunity to get to know them individually. So I reached out and said, look, let's just have a quick introduction, a bit one to one, just to understand each other, what our roles are, what we do. I've come in in the last five months, really to try and improve how the team works and enable and support the team around us. But ultimately, we are here to build software for the stakeholders. So what I want you to do is establish better connections with our stakeholders and thinking about our team onion a little bit more, something that Emily Weber has thrown about, and I like the concept of I'll put a link in the show notes. So basically, I was just having those conversations, nice one to ones, just kind of saying like, this is what I'm here for. I'm here to try and bring value to the engineering teams to provide connections between you, the stakeholders, our product managers, the engineers, and just see where there might be a couple of gaps and try to improve the efficiencies in those situations. So for me, it was an opportunity to kind of reflect and go, well, actually, does everyone know what they're trying to achieve at the moment? And do we need to make sure we're having those conversations more regularly? It doesn't need to be like a really thorough, intense workshop, but even just like fortnightly touch points sort of go, what are the plans? How are we looking? Do we need any extra help? I've realized that I'd like to kind of establish those relationships a bit more regularly and open up more channels as well. I mean, all the connotations I hear about building bridges and establishing connections and talking to each other a bit more. A lot of these stakeholders use Microsoft Teams, whereas a lot of the engineering teams use slack. So we've instantly got an incompatibility there. However, I can establish that connection between the two. I can be the proxy ultimately and sort of go, right, hang on a minute, I didn't realize that conversation was going on or you missed the opportunity. I'll bring it all together. So think about where there are potential gaps in the comms. Think about how you can probably streamline that a little bit and think about where there may be opportunities to improve those connections and those relationships across the teams, within your teams and with your external stakeholders. A lot of rambling today, but hopefully I've got the point across. I'll be back again tomorrow with another petals snapshot.