Sometimes Silos are Good

A trap I often see–typically as groups of teams are growing–is trying to hold on to that small group feeling for too long. It’s hard to let go! But at some point, you are just forcing it. Sure, you care about the other team, and you are genuinely curious about what’s going on, but eventually it becomes a show on the History Channel: interesting, yes, but not critical to your work.

Weekly status update meetings where you are so ignorant of each other’s contexts that your eyes glaze over? Try an async newsletter.

Multi-team demos where the teams aren’t even in the same space any more? replace it with a quarterly science-fair style demo event where you can still catch up, but not at such high frequency/cost.

The trick is to find the right balance, so that your very valuable live collaboration time is reserved for those you most crucially need to work with.