Engineering Teams & Communication

your engineering team is highly skilled at what they do, but let’s face it – communication is outside of most engineers’ domain. For the most part, this is no fault of their own; engineering programs focus on developing the left hemisphere of the brain, and students graduate without learning how to explain their work or collaborate effectively. On a small scale, engineers can typically learn how to work well with their teammates, but it becomes difficult to scale effective communication once a team begins to experience fast-paced growth. Studies have found that communication tends to break down at start-up companies once their team grows past 15 members. In the remote age, distance and time differences introduce miscommunication even earlier.

It’s more common than you’d think. According to Dynamic Signal’s Annual State of Employee Communication and Engagement Study, 70% of employees feel overwhelmed by broken communication methods and fragmented information. 78% of employees surveyed said improving Employee Communication and Engagement should be a higher priority for their current company. That said, it’s clear that not every company struggles to foster a transparent environment that highlights the importance of information sharing. Uber has effectively scaled their engineering team to over 3,500 distributed engineers while continuing to dominate the ride-sharing space. Let’s take a look at how they did this.

Uber’s Guidelines for Scaling and Maintaining Good Communication

Uber scaled from 1 to 3,500 employees in about ten years and dominated the rideshare space. In 2022, Uber acquired companies like Postmates and integrated with numerous other services, a considerable technical effort regardless of talent or team size. How were they able to do this so quickly and efficiently? Although every step Uber takes to keep information flowing is not public knowledge, here are a few initiatives they’ve taken that contribute to their success:

1. Define quality communication: Uber has specific, documented guidelines for proper communication in particular scenarios and channels. These guidelines detail:

i) Avoiding misunderstandings or false expectations - Misunderstandings are common in big teams, especially during emergencies. Anticipating and planning how to communicate during emergencies helps to prevent further chaos. “Emergencies” can be last-minute PTO, production issues, poor performance, scope creep, etc. Consider and define proper communication for as many common scenarios as possible.

ii) Writing a clear message - Provide examples of well-composed, easy-to-understand messages in various situations; these include Slack, PRs, emails, and any other format common to company culture. When working asynchronously with complex technologies, engineers must master clear and efficient written communication.

iii) Using tools to simplify collaboration - Uber takes the time to document all software in current use. This way, engineers understand the purpose of digital channels and how to utilize all available technology properly. Commonly used collaboration tools include Jira, Asana, Slack, Teams, GitHub, and many others. By defining best communication practices through various channels, engineers know the expectations for successful communication.

iv) Hosting and attending meetings - Meetings are perhaps the primary method of communicating across teams, especially in the age of remote work. To avoid superfluous meetings that distract teams, Uber sets expectations on when meetings are appropriate and how they should be formatted and run.

2. Build and rely on culture: From the day you are hired, Uber works to create a strong sense of community. This is done by carving out deliberate time for social interactions and feedback to allow and encourage employees to practice sharing their thoughts openly. It’s a proven method – a leaked employee satisfaction survey from Uber showed that 73% of employees felt heard by their manager. Work to build a culture of transparency and trust, and your employees will likely follow suit, enabling a smoother open dialogue.

3. Create a knowledge-sharing culture with documentation: By documenting important decisions and functionality, Uber quickly aligns large teams on complex products and initiatives. This is important for both cross-functional and siloed teams – systems are interrelated and all contributing parties must have a foundational knowledge of how systems interact. After all, code and processes can often conflict if people aren’t able to understand the full picture. Design docs serve as a helpful starting place for team members to discuss and understand company-wide efforts. All employees should be encouraged to review docs, provide feedback, and asked questions to ensure they are properly informed. Below are examples of documentation that should be regularly created and maintained:

a) Product documentation

b) Roadmap documentation

c) Design documentation

d) User manuals

e) Code documentation

f) Strategy documentation

4. Grow intentionally: Intentional growth starts with the hiring process. That’s why Uber is extremely cognizant of hiring both experienced and diverse candidates beneficial to the needs of specific teams. Over-hiring and under-hiring are both detrimental to the productivity and morale of teams; keeping a pulse on the staffing needs of each team is crucial to keeping communication following. After all, when teams become overwhelmed with work, information is more likely to slip through the cracks. By working with employees to understand team needs, you show trust and empower them to share their opinions.

5. Force focus:  In large remote/distributed teams, it can be challenging to keep all employees on the same page. Some organizations seek to remedy this by scheduling recurring meetings to provide organizational updates, but oftentimes excessive meetings are detrimental to productivity. Rather than schedule meetings, Uber “forces focus” by blocking off specific times on the calendar to devote time to a specific task. For example, if new documentation is provided, or an organizational update is sent over email, block off a couple of different hours for all employees to devote to informing themselves and asking questions asynchronously. This way, employees can stay up-to-date on their own time and questions can be documented online for all to benefit.

Conclusion

Written and oral communication are paramount to any team’s success, including and especially an engineering team. Every day, corporate technical contributors gather to accomplish a shared objective in some way. Whether this is on Zoom, GitHub, Slack, Teams, or in person, engineers must collaborate on both decisions and implementation efforts to produce a product. For large and distributed teams, this collaboration becomes a significant challenge, as decisions are constantly being made without impacted individuals present. For this reason, teams must be proactive in establishing and maintaining standards to communicate thoughts and plans with each other. Written documentation is the best way to share information and receive feedback asynchronously for all to contribute and feel heard.