One of the hardest things about a rapidly scaling business is getting the org structure right and making sure that all of the different parts of the org are speaking to each other. Usually communication is breaking somewhere, and most often it is breaking everywhere. Communications architectures haven’t been agreed and as a result every team uses different tools and different cadences to communicate.
One theoretical way to address this would be to treat each part of the org (and possibly each team) as their own API. I don’t mean just technical teams (Bezos has already addressed this). I mean every org function: engineering, product, people, finance, CS, etc. Every function sets their own rules for how they should be communicated with, how often they should be communicated with, how quickly they should be expected to respond, etc etc etc. These rules are documented so that everyone, including new joiners, knows what they are, and so that the rules can be reviewed and updated as necessary.
There are, of course, tools that are trying to solve these problems. Slack is trying to be the single point of integration for the whole org. So is Okta. Netsuite provides a configurable set of rules for how people should interact with accounts processing. Individual teams and orgs implement “how to work with me” docs that are shared and effectively act as human-level API documentation (@chughesjohnson spoke about this at length in High Growth Handbook). But it all feels very disjointed.
I see a few problems with the current approaches:
Too generalised to address company- or industry-specific differences (Netsuite has about 500 fields, of which I use 8)
Too unstructured (I can set my own rules on Slack, but they aren’t communicated to anyone else and they can drop something on me at any time and in any format. My rules are also different from the person in my team sitting next to me)
No organisation level framework/direction for thinking about the problem
No organisation level buy-in to a specific solution/approach
I would love to see an implementation of this, I’m not sure if it’s a no-brainer or an absolute disaster. It is definitely true that left to their own devices, most people won’t set any rules at all. But the amount of thrashing that happens in every company because communication has no structure has to be either a great potential business or a huge potential organisational opportunity.