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Straddle 101 - Internal
Effective communication is the foundation of a successful company, especially in a remote-first environment. At Straddle, we strive to create a culture of open, transparent, and efficient communication that enables our team to collaborate seamlessly across time zones and departments.
This guide outlines our working philosophy, principles, and practices for internal communication.
Chat attacks attention and severely hinders deep work
Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting, with random participants, and no agenda
Persistent group chat tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams have become ubiquitous — and incessant to the point of inducing anxiety. What began as a novel way to quickly communicate company-wide has become a heavy-handed interruption factory with serious consequences.
Now teams and individuals are expected to follow dozens of conversations in real-time, all the time. People are dedicating large fraction of their screens to a never-ending conveyor belt of conversation pile-ups. The mental overhead, and repetitive visual switchbacking, is exhausting.
Most teams keep a chat window open all day on the side of their screen or on a second monitor. This invites you to keep one eye on the chat window, and the other on your work. Problem is that chat window is a black hole for your attention — constantly pulling your gaze, constantly chipping away at your focus. Playing whack-a-mole with unread indicators across dozens of rooms/channels causes manic context-shifting.
Context-shifting robs you of uninterrupted stretches of time to concentrate on the work you’re supposed to be doing. Further, like your muscles remember repetitive tasks (muscle memory), your mind does too — and jumping around rapidly between conversations all day creates “attention residue” that makes it hard to clear your mind of the previous conversation before starting the next conversation.
It’s easy to get burned out on Slack — it creates a profound sense of FOMO because conversations are only relevant as they’re happening. Old threads are hard to find, awkward to engage with over long periods, and rarely give anyone a sense of resolution.
Let’s not.
Rules of thumb and general philosophy
Most of the work we do at Straddle shouldn’t require you to be in constant communication throughout the entire day with someone.
You should collaborate as though most things you ask of others will get an answer eventually, but not necessarily right this second. Your first choice of action should be to post a message, assign an issue, or write a RFC/document about what you need to explain or need to know. Then others can read it on their schedule, when the natural lulls of the day allow it, rather than being interrupted right in their peak flow time.
Of course there will be times when you do need to tightly collaborate with someone in real time - and that’s great! But it’s not how decisions get made.
Below you’ll find a collection of general principles we’ll try to keep in mind at Straddle when communicating with teammates, within departments, across the company, and with the public. They aren’t requirements, but they serve to create boundaries and shared practices to draw upon when we do the one thing that affects everything else we do: communicate.
Communicating day-to-day
This section includes specific examples of how we apply our philosophy day-to-day across the company.
Since communication often interrupts, valuing each other’s time and attention is a critical consideration. Keeping people in the loop is important, but asking them to follow along with everything is a distraction.
That’s why we’ll try to follow reliable, predictable methods to share the right kind of information at the right time in the right place.
Notion/Linear/Github
for most things
We default to using “posts” (catch-all term) for most communication, as they allow for complete thoughts, rich context, and seamless integration with other relevant information. Posts are ideal for project updates, decision-making, and sharing knowledge.
Slack
for vibes (and when stuff is on fire)
While posts are our primary mode of communication, we still use chat for urgent matters, quick questions, and informal conversations. It’s never a bad idea to hang with the team - or get ahold of someone when it really is urgent. In fact, chat is a great fit for a few things:
However, we should be mindful not to let chat become the default, as it can lead to fragmented, shallow communication. Here are some guidelines for using chat effectively:
Check-ins
shine bright like a diamond
As companies grow, keeping everyone up-to-date on everything that’s going on gets harder and harder. I’m not referring to KPIs, spreadsheets, or abstract dashboard representations of what’s going on, but the simple way people describe what they’re working on to their friends.
We’ve been thinking a lot about how to do this right. The goal is simple:
On a regular, ongoing basis, help everyone at the company learn things they didn’t know, discover stuff they might not have known was going on, and develop a better appreciation for their fellow co-workers and the work everyone does every day.
the solution
Use check-ins to eliminate hours of meetings and schedule coordination. It’ll save everyone time, and it keeps a permanent record of what everyone shared. There’s two key channels here:
These answers are in written form, and anyone in the company can see them and make comments. You decide how to answer this question, the level of detail, style, and frequency beyond the basics.
While its fair to be thinking, “This is fucking stupid. Sounds like just another way to micromanage me,” I can assure you, it’s not. Here’s the deal:
Check-ins are about empowering you to own your calendar, stay focused, and work autonomously while keeping everyone in the loop without incessant meetings or unnecessary managerial bureaucracy.
Consider how much time is wasted in status meetings, taking turns sharing updates while everyone zones out. By writing updates proactively, you control the narrative and share what matters on your own terms. And when we do have meetings, we’ll know what to talk about! Imagine that.
Think of check-ins as "daily stand-up meetings" that Scrum popularized, with their benefits amplified and without their problems. They aren't disruptive: nobody is forced to attend a meeting at a particular time regularly. And they serve as an invitation for cross-team pollination with information radiated in all directions, not only for the members of a certain team
And, tangentially, as a positive side-effect, we’ll automatically create a library of progress — a collection of institutional knowledge, with day-by-day documentation by a team of individual authors in their own words. Super cool!
What’s the matter with stand-ups? Here’s what:
Interrupt deep work — breaking flow to hop on a call costs builders time and focus, especially before and after the standup when they’re forced to context switch.
Aren’t remote-friendly — it’s hard to catch up if someone misses the meeting. Without disciplined note-taking, people miss important context about projects.
Devolve into decision-making and tangents — it’s too easy for a standup to veer off track and become a place where teams try to make real-time decisions. I’m the biggest culprit! This fragments the conversation, may not be relevant for everyone on the call, and makes it hard to find decisions later.
Work in progress
We view our communication practices as living, evolving systems. We actively seek feedback, reflect on our successes and challenges, and iterate on our approach based on what we learn.
We believe that by embracing asynchronous communication, working in the open, and being intentional about how we collaborate, we can create a communication culture that empowers our remote team to do their best work.
This guide serves as a living document, reflecting our current best practices and principles. We encourage every team member to engage with these practices, provide feedback, and contribute to the ongoing refinement of our communication strategy.
Don’t agree? Really agree? Write it up.
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