Whimsical reposted this
Something I’ve borrowed from Frank Slootman is to send out thoughts to the whole company once every week. The content varies but it’s candid—it comes straight from me. I start with two simple questions: “What am I thinking about? What needs to be shared with the team?” I’ve been doing it now for 8 months. I like it for many reasons: 1. Writing is thinking. This habit forces me to sit down, reflect, and think. 2. It helps form a shared understanding and context for our team and can often lead to interesting discussions. 3. It promotes openness and transparency, which I believe is critical for high-functioning teams. 4. It fits really nicely with our remote-first, async-first working style. The posts are easy to find, search through, and reference later. This is valuable for our whole team but especially for new employees who want to better understand the context and thinking that predates them. 5. Personally, I prefer writing as a communication medium. It's durable. It lets ideas shine as opposed to delivery. It allows for precision and completeness. Naturally, I currently do this in Whimsical. I write each update in a new doc and then post it in Slack. It works really well. Being able to nest boards and docs inside of my weekly update gives me so much flexibility. Inline comments make it easy to discuss together. However, we're currently working on a new format in Whimsical that will be even better for sending out these weekly thoughts and it's getting super close. Can't wait!