When Honeycomb was a small company, All Hands meetings had announcements and discussions. Discussions mostly took place in the meeting chat, where everyone can answer anyone’s question. Between that and the announce channel in Slack, information got out to the whole company.

Or did it? It’s hard to check for understanding in that big a forum. We’re past 150 people now, past the number of people who can know each other personally. Most new people aren’t comfortable asking questions in that large a forum.

Sometimes broadcast is fine:

• “Thanksgiving holiday is coming up in the US, so the office is closed on Thursday and Friday.”
• “Our new marketing messaging says that Honeycomb is an observability platform, not a tool.”
• “This year, we’re adding features around frontend observability.”

Wait. Broadcast isn’t perfect for any of these. When we have a company strategy like implementing observability in the frontend, there’s going to be questions that vary by department. Everybody wants to know whether ‘frontend’ includes mobile. Then Sales wants to know who they can sell it to, Engineering wants to know all the details of what that means, and Marketing wants to know whether we can say we have RUM now. These questions are more often asked in smaller forums.

Yet the questions are only half of the information flow we need. Marketing knows that we need to compare to RUM features, so that can influence what product we build. Sales has some ideas of who to sell it to, and whether we’re going to have a whole new audience to advertise to. Engineering has all kinds of crucial information on what’s easy, what’s hard, and what works with the underlying strengths of our software. Every person in the organization has different information to contribute. That information, even if someone has the guts to throw it out into the Announce channel, isn’t getting to the right place with the right context.

Back in the day, All Hands was a conversation. People got their questions answered, and they spoke up with what they knew. Dialogue happened. How do we keep communication a conversation, as we pass 200 people?

Systems scale with federation and levels. Company communication is no exception.

Last All-Hands, Charity (co-founder and CTO) told us we’re moving toward a federated communication style. This means the most important information flows down through departments, directors, managers, into teams. We’ll have deliberate communication beyond “spray it in announcements.” Not that we won’t talk about it in All Hands, but we’ll make it a conversation at every level.

Our first worked example was about the holiday schedule for next year. Because “Hey, next Thursday the office is closed for Thanksgiving” is something people can have feelings about. We’re increasingly international, and the Europeans are like “there goes a perfectly good week” while the Canadians sigh “nobody cares that our Thanksgiving is in October.” There’s valuable listening to do here, some clues to take to the director level and to People Ops.

“Marketing says we’re an observability platform, not a tool.” It isn’t enough that our CMO said the words in All Hands. As a representative of Marketing, it’s important to me that our product, documentation, engineers who are speaking at conferences, and customer success people get the language consistent. That means I need to show up at department meetings and talk to people in their perspective. Next Monday I’ll talk to all of Engineering very briefly, and later to the docs team specifically.

Carrying these conversations down the organization is a muscle we have to develop. It means I have to wrangle the team meeting of my developer advocates onto a specific topic–always a challenge when there’s so much kubernetes frustration and open source committee drama to rant about. Then I need to gather any input they have and bring it to my marketing leadership team, because I understand the context it came from and some of how it might matter.

This can work at Honeycomb because we have teams at every level. Managers have up to 8 team members, and then managers form teams of 3-5 under directors, who belong to departmental leadership teams, whose department heads make up executive staff.

I think this is the point of middle management! Like, the good stuff that it can do when not squashed into number-crunching and goal-checkbox-filling. At each level of the system, people have the context to understand what they’re talking about, and the relationships to say what they mean. Alignment is not bestowed; it is negotiated.

The goal is dialogue at every level. When directors and VPs are really listening to their reports, and really talking with each other, then the company can stay connected. Execs stay connected to reality, and workers stay connected to strategy.