Internal communications

Rachel Provan

Hi All! 

How do you manage communication between departments in your company? 

I am currently struggling to get updates from Product (release dates, updates, new features, etc.) in a timely fashion and am finding things out third hand. 

What works well for you?  

I am looking to understand how other companies communicate:
- Product updates (before, during, after)
- Projects other teams are working on 
- Urgent updates (release delayed, major bug, downtime)
- Company goals

Much appreciated!!

Rachel Provan
Director of Customer Success - Doodle AG

Mary Rosberg

Hi Rachel:
- Product Updates 
    - Before: Marketing and Product have a monthly meeting where they give CSM & Support & TAM & brief training/sneak peek on upcoming features. This includes slides, use cases, and timing.
    - During: They also typically remind us in Slack as features go GA.
    - After: Not as strong here. Interested to hear how others reply, esp re: adoption.

- Projects Other teams are working on:
   - We see a selection of those projects in weekly sprint demos (all teams participate, not just Eng/Prod).
  
- Urgent Updates
  - We have an entire process around what we'd call an "incident". This includes slackbots that call key leaders, hangouts, and more.
  - Re: major bugs, it's a little more challenging to get viz across the company. Interested to hear others' thoughts there.

- Company Goals
  - We center around OKRs. Our CFO took the whole company through them in a company meeting. Then each team ladders up into the OKRs. Management meets every other week on OKRs. Execs meet weekly on them. Each manager is expected to carry that torch of info to its teams at a biweekly cadence if not more frequently. 

Best,
Mary

Chad Horenfeldt

Hi Rachel,
I find that that this continuously changes. You will know that a revised process is needed as things break down.

Here are some things we do:

• Company Goals: We cover progress here at bi-weekly town halls for the entire company
• Releases: We have a slack channel for release notes. We also have an alpha channel for a select group to get advance notice. Product Marketing runs a bi-weekly cross-functional meeting to discuss the releases.
• Urgent Updates: This is in Slack. We have a warroom for critical items. There is also CX/Prod/Eng leadership group where we cover hot topics and work out process issues
• Cross-Functional updates: I do a lot of this or have people meet with other functions so we can align on projects and goals. I then share this with my team.
• We have a subject matter expert program where we have people from CX meet with Prod/Eng squads. They then share updates.

All of these require constant improvements and tweaks. Hope this helps.