This is a guest post from Nicholas Muldoon (@njm) who spent 2.5 years coaching Product and Engineering Directors at Twitter in San Francisco. He is passionate about building effective companies and is turning his experience at Twitter into products companies can use to be more effective.
Companies spend a tremendous amount of energy communicating publicly to customers, potential recruits, press and others. These companies often face difficulty maintaining the same high standard when communicating internally with employees. This is a missed opportunity for enabling understanding and alignment across a company.
At Twitter, our fast growing product and engineering organisation was constantly adapting to changing market conditions. In this environment VPs and Directors faced difficulty communicating with everyone in their groups and ensuring teams had the best chance at alignment around common goals. Further, individual teams had trouble sharing technology developments with the whole organisation and gaining adoption of internal tools. Ultimately it came down to two key challenges:
- it is physically impossible to get everyone in same room
- email announcements leave no place for a discussion to take place
Our Internal Engineering Blog languished for months. We had great content from around the company being posted to Confluence and yet few people had taken the time to subscribe themselves to receive email notifications of new blog posts.
Whether you've got tens, hundreds or thousands of people it simply isn't sustainable to ask everyone to subscribe themselves to receive notifications. And when you've only got a portion of the desired audience subscribed there isn't the desired discussion around new blogs. Ultimately you don't see the alignment and understanding required to build highly successful companies.
Enter Better Blogs for Confluence.
Better Blogs for Confluence allows a Space Administrator to subscribe a group to email notifications of new blog posts in a space. At Twitter that means adding the LDAP group that contained members from the product, design and engineering groups to the Blog Watchers list of the Engineering space. Once that's done everyone in the group, including all new employees, receives an email notification whenever there is a new blog in the space.
Better Blogs leads to more effective internal communication, more discussion, and greater alignment across the organisation.
Speak with Seibert Media and try Better Blogs for Confluence today.
