How are you effectively communicating priorities, keeping people informed, and staying in touch in a fast-paced startup environment. Without the endless churn of chatroom chaos...
This is why it’s critically important to have a leader on the team to guide by example and set expectations for the team. Someone who can interrupt endless chat debates and steer people back to the ticket queue or planning tools. Someone who isn’t afraid to shut down endless debate about past decisions that were already made. Someone who won’t hesitate to recognize when conversations are becoming a distraction and force them into a call/meeting.
And perhaps most importantly, someone who can maintain an updated and accessible plan of record so that people don’t try to rely on chat as the source of truth. The plan of record can be as simple as a shared word doc or as complex as any tool you can think of, but the only thing that really matters is that someone keeps it updated.
The temptation is to use the most complex plan of record tool you can find because it may look “better” but it’s usually the simpler tools that are more likely to get used.
These are people problems and you have to invest in taking the lead yourself or training someone to do it. I’ve been down the road of endlessly changing tools in the hopes that a new tool will solve our problems, but the churn and inevitable loss with each tool transition only makes it worse.
I am that leader who is setting the example. We aren't endlessly changing tools, it's a new project. It's not another layer on top of the existing chatroom, nothing exists yet.
If there are product teams who are happy with their stack, I want to hear about it. It implies they have their communication sorted, their people have the right behaviours, and then they found tools which support them.
I can do the first parts of that, but I'm unaware of the current market of the tools that might follow. Or to put it another way: I'm looking for data so I can consider the problem, I'm not looking for an answer to some problem I haven't stated.
For us, it’s Slack/Zoom/GitHub Issues. But you’re using Slack/Zoom and not having success. It’s not the stack.
Looking to the tools for the success is the definition of cargo culting.
DND status is also used when needed.
Emails are for detailed and non-urgent info.
(And I like your approaches for doing that)