Teams should find alignment by making work more visible, not by adding more process — nobody wants another daily standup.
More process kills flow for designers, engineers, and deep thinkers. A 30-minute meeting is never really 30 minutes: it’s also the 30 minutes before and after that people have to rewarm their brain’s cache of pixels, code, and context.
Great teams show up, do the work, and share progress as they go. They share thoughtful, context-rich, async updates—complete thoughts, not streams of consciousness. At Campsite, we believe that the best format for this type of sharing is the post, the sweet spot between chat and docs.
Posts
We run our company on Campsite, and posts are the backbone of how we communicate internally. We use them for everything, like sharing demos, asking questions, making announcements, or gathering feedback. These posts naturally become a self-documenting archive of our team’s knowledge and decisions:
- Posts are threaded by default — it’s impossible to accidentally comment outside of the post into some global comment feed.
- Posts are complete thoughts — most of our posts end up somewhere between a few sentences and a couple of paragraphs, a complete thought that gives people enough context to reply asynchronously.
- Posts are async by default — this is important for our distributed distributed team; we have many long-running conversations that would be a nightmare to keep up with in a chat-first tool.
Posts should be fun, too! We have a few channels for sharing design inspiration, shitposts and memes, and a photo stream for our team to upload highlights from their camera roll.
Feeds
Feeds are an intuitive (but underutilized) tool to make work visible to the right people at the right time. They naturally visualize progress over time and help people build a shared mental model of who is working on what and which projects are in flight.
From our own “Teams should work with the garage door up”:
Campsite draws from many of these lessons: that having access to information enables teams to act quickly and with more context; that open communication creates stronger bonds between teams, individuals, and leaders; and that mechanisms to discover interesting work lead to more serendipitous collaboration.
If you find yourself reaching for a process to solve an alignment problem, think closely about the source of that misalignment. More often than not, it’s because teams did not know about decisions being made early enough or didn’t have the right context at the right time.
