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Ask HN: How do you communicate in a remote startup?

238 points aml183 | 2 comments | 15 Nov 24 19:17 UTC | HN request time: 0.424s | source

We are a remote company. Everything is going well. No plans to be in person, but I’d say we can do a better job at communicating. Any tips or articles to read?
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why-el ◴[19 Nov 24 17:21 UTC] No.42185886[source]▶
I learned the following:

- Everything public in Slack. Create a fun-sounding moto that discourages DMs. Even if a DM happens, and the back and forth resulted in a consensus, share that consensus in a public channel (which makes it searchable).

- Record your team meetings, preferably with software that can AI-summarize. Folks on vacation / leave can get the rundown easily.

- Encourage the sharing of solutions to various problems (technical or otherwise) in Slack. If a developer is stuck, and someone helped them in a huddle or a pairing app, share the solution afterwards (again, makes it searchable). Discourage the over-sharing of screenshots (of your application and other things). Again, not searchable. If one must be shared, describe it. For instance, many devs share a picture of a stack-trace. Not super helpful for others. Grab the text and dump it to Slack.

- Have a good pairing software setup, unblocks for when Slack back and forth is too tedious. I like Tuple (tuple.app).

- Connect your issue tracker to Slack, if you use one, makes creating issues easy. Linear does this well.

- If feasible, have your team meet in person, cadence up to you, but at least once. Meeting the people in real life humanizes them more. I know it sounds silly to say, but it's very true in my experience. Your people will seem even lovelier.

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1. MisterKent ◴[19 Nov 24 17:56 UTC] No.42186307[source]▶
Agree with the above, except:

Sharing solutions in slack works until stuff becomes impossible to find.

Using confluence or some type of team documentation feature can help with that stuff. Better yet, keep it very low effort to add docs there, so people can copy paste important (long lived) messages there.

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2. rglullis ◴[19 Nov 24 19:31 UTC] No.42187197[source]▶
Yes, I think I mentioned this before: we had similar issues on our team and I was tasked with improving intra- and inter-team communication.

The solution we adopted was to create a Confluence space for each team, and any question on Slack would have to be in the form of "Where on Confluence can I find the information about <thing I need to learn>?"

This very quickly made all team leads responsible for documentation and for keeping things up-to-date. If no page about <thing I need to learn> existed, then the lead would have to create the minimal page even if just to answer the question on Slack and respond with the Confluence link. Once you have the link, people would use the comment page to ask for clarifications/details, and we would "resolve" the comments as soon as the page was updated.

Maybe it's because I am big fan of wikis, but to me this worked quite well.