Context: This is a general guide written for the Open Tech team at Postman. In my role as OSPO (Open Source Program Office) Lead, I felt it could be helpful to my colleagues to hear and read what is appreciated at the company. While it's mostly very obvious stuff, it's stuff that we need to hear over and over again, myself included, to make them actually happen.
Being an island is great when it comes to defining your responsibilities. You can clearly see where your land ends, how far you can go, what you have and what you need to do to keep a grip of it all. It’s not so great when it comes to all the other things: infrastructure, resources, communication, trading, making friends, and learning. At Open Tech, we constantly strive to not work in isolation. The Open Tech philosophy is to overcome internal as well as external isolation, serve as an example and be a partner to those who seek to get out of their own isolation. Being truly open on everything that we do is core to everything that we do.
Our main strategy to work against silos?
🪄 Tell stories.
Your most impactful tool against isolation is storytelling. Your impact with collaborating with others will only be as good as the overall story is, that you are telling. Making storytelling an essential part of your work will help you enrich all the single actions listed below.
Don’t forget to make the collaboration a shareable story itself. Blog about it, record and publish meetings, share outcomes, code, screenshots, participate in public events, etc. Slice and dice it to as many shareable items as you can and tell that story.
Actions To Consider
Here’s a list of recommended actions and a brief description that should help you decide if this action is for you. Not all actions are applicable to all parties. Consider this a toolset where you choose which tools you want to use. If you are part of Open Tech, you can consider these actions to be applicable to external collaboration just the same.
📆 Participate in other’s team meetings.
Showing presence in other teams is increasing your visibility and will raise awareness for your topic, as well as position you as an available partner when it comes to questions. Offer to join a next team meeting as a guest whenever you meet a person from a team you’re not yet in contact with. Have a standard deck (max. 3 slides) or demo, that you can present. Keep below 10 minutes when introducing your topic and yourself, so you don’t dominate that meeting. And think about the story you want to tell. Ahead of the meeting, get in touch with the team lead of that team (often the people manager, the product owner, or the spokesperson of that team. Doesn’t necessarily have to be the person highest in the org.) if this isn't the person that you asked for an invitation or invited you.
🕙 Offer Office Hours.
Offering Office Hours can be scary when you start such a series of meetings. You don’t know who will show up, what questions will be asked and if you are satisfyingly prepared. It might need a little pushing yourself to make the first few iterations happen. And that’s ok, because here’s the deal: people join your Office Hours to have a chat and learn things, or just because they want to meet with folks they don't know yet. They are not coming to make you fail. Not knowing things is totally fine. You can always say “I don't know.”. If you’re like me, you then are triggered to find out the answer. And that helps two persons grow (if you let them know), instead of only one.
Office Hours can be internal only or hybrid (external and internal attendees). Make sure you let people know about the nature of the meeting. If you already offer external Office Hours, then promote them internally.
Office Hours can be set up to happen weekly, twice a week (if you want to offer different time zone options), or bi-weekly (UK: fortnightly), even once a month is ok. There’s always less people showing up than you would expect initially. Internally announce them on #lounge and other channels (#open, your own channels, ) with people you assume could be interested in joining.
🕐 Participate in other teams' Office Hours.
Make it a habit to randomly visit other teams' Office Hours. See it like taking a stroll in the city, where you discover new shops or diners, where you haven’t been before. It’s not always enough time for a stroll. “Occasionally” is a good start.
📝 Issue reports and distribute them.
Reports serve various purposes. 1) They aggregate things you’re working on and help you prioritize. 2) They show your impact. 3) They promote your work as they will be shared by others. 4) They keep track of what happened.
Depending on what you want to focus on, your way of writing these reports (and distribute and promote them, too!) will differ. As we want to increase collaboration opportunities, let’s focus on enabling sharing and re-sharing these reports.
A good minimal approach is to provide the 3 or 5 core things you’ve been working on during the last 7 or 14 days. Write a bullet list, provide links to internal or external resources. Actively ask people to reach out with ideas, questions or contributions. Encourage them to forward to other people potentially interested. Few will do, but if they are, they are all in and collaboration opportunities are likely.
Ideally, reports are following your overall story.
🔗 Find counterparts and connect.
You’re not looking for a twin role in another org. Who you want to find is the person that is similarly responsible for your tech, but from a different approach. Take gRPC: there’s someone in Product or Labs that is working on making things happen with gRPC. They have different stakes, but learning about them will be beneficial to your job as a link to you will be to them.
Then there might not be a counterpart, too. That’s ok, you’re cutting edge. Be ready to contribute and advise once the company is ready to get into action.
👯♂️ Find twins and connect.
There may be someone or more than one person with the same role for a different tech on your team. “Hey, this is not cross-team collaboration!” you say? True, but they might have a different view angle, tried out things, found some working and others not just as you did. You can learn form each other. You could have a buddy relationship, or a mentor-mentee thing that you agree on. Make it a habit to exchange on ideas around cross-team collaboration, join each others Office Hours and Slack channels. This is a gold mine.
🧑🤝🧑 Find partners and connect.
Regularly invite people to connect with you on your tech topic. Being an advocate for your tech is obvious, still often a left out opportunity. We’re a fast growing company, new people join every month, sometimes every week. Shouting into #lounge is only as far reaching as the list of our current employees. What about the ones that join tomorrow, or next month? Don't assume people will tell new colleagues about what you do. This is your own duty. Actively seeking for people who are interested in your tech and inviting them to your central communication hub (e.g. your Slack channel, our’s is #open) will be the beginning for sustainable connections.
Share work with your partners. Get them involved and let them take responsibility in your shared interest. This will grow trust and make them feel valued. We’re in a business environment and you can assume dependability until proven otherwise.
👑 Be a leader.
Opposite to a widespread assumption, not all people want to be leaders ([1][2][3]). Leading is stressful, taxing and time consuming. And while some people may say they would like to lead, they’ll sometimes still hesitate to do so. Their society-trained expectation from themselves differs from what they actually feel comfortable doing.
Leaders are storytellers. People will listen to and follow those, that share a conclusive authentic story.
TL;DR when it comes to your technology, be the internal leader. Others will not easily step up to do so.
🤓 Learn from others.
This is a basic. Always be learning. Even if you are the most knowledgeable person regarding your technology, you will still get plenty of opportunities to learn from collaborating with others across the company. I wanted to spare on this point, but it’s so essential we easily forget about it.
🔐 Be a mentor. And a mentee. And a sponsor.
Similar to “Learn from others”, as to creating learning opportunities and use them. But this is a pledge to actively support others and not be afraid to also claim this support from others. Having internal mentors and mentees opens up opportunities for collaboration. And you don’t have to be afraid to use these business opportunities. Of course you’re biased towards that person when you are a mentor or a mentee. That’s ok. In a conceptual interpretation, that’s what sponsorships are made of. A sponsor is a mentor who goes from silently supporting someone’s personal growth to actively supporting that person in their business. If done with support for marginalized groups in mind, it is highly appreciated.
💛 Assume good intent.
Cultural differences, use of language, personal experience (and maybe trauma) and a number of other factors influence our behavior and can make it difficult for others to understand what we actually want to express. This often is true for all parties, so the difference between what is being said and what is being heard can be off by a magnitude. This document is probably a good example of good intention, but poor execution in terms of language-correct tone and phrasing. When you assume good intent, you help bridge this gap between cultures, language proficiency, trauma or previous experience and all the other things, that make us act off the norm. You should also be able to expect that others assume good intent in your actions.
🏃 Be perseverant.
To keep your nose on the grindstone doesn’t sound too tempting? It’s what will lead to success finally, though. I’m not saying we shouldn’t re-calibrate what we have as goals, but working with others, especially when it comes to silos, is something that needs more than one attempt. When we are used to act in our silos, and it’s a learned behavior, then it’s hard and harder to let go of these patterns. We need to poke more than one hole into these silos, over and over again. It’s demanding, no doubt. But reality is, there is no easy way of breaking up with learnt patterns. And this is not necessarily you, it’s also everyone else.
👽 Have 1:1s outside your team.
Similar direction as the “Find a partner and connect”, but more explorative. Connecting with people outside of your circle helps you extend this circle. Try to connect with people that are different to you. Role, gender identity, culture, age, etc. Seek out diversity. It helps overcome sameness barriers, that we are often blind to. And it trains you to be better at collaboration in general.
🐙 Advocate for openness.
Talk to others about joining the breaking up of silos. Direct them to this document. Offer support when talking to others about the benefits of an open work culture. Breaking up silos and ending living on islands needs active supporters like you.
This is the common story for everyone across Open Tech. We’re open. We share our knowledge.
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