You won’t learn what it takes to make great work by staring at a finished product. You’ll miss the messy middle, the meticulous process of crafting an unformed idea into something alive and real.
There’s something inspiring, yet demystifying, about watching a lump of clay turn into a final vessel, or a plate of ingredients into a delicious meal, or a series of pull requests into an elegant piece of software. When we can observe the process, we naturally pick up little habits, tricks, and techniques that strengthen our own work.
Let’s call this way of building: “working with the garage door up.” [1]
Working with the garage door up will:
- Unlock serendipity — especially in a remote culture, the opportunities for creative serendipity are few and far between. Great ideas don’t wait until your 4:30 Zoom meeting next Tuesday. Working with the garage door up creates more opportunities for concepts to collide and mash together into something new and creative.
- Create passive visibility — many builders want their work to speak for itself and for their work alone to be the reason they are promoted, get paid more, and land that annual bonus. But the painful reality for builders is that if you build it, they won’t always come. You have to talk about your work. But this talking vs. doing is usually where builders (engineers and designers, especially) get stuck. Working with the garage door up creates passive visibility through doing the work.
- Propagate the best ideas — one of the great joys of working at many companies over a career is building your own amalgamation of all the best practices and processes from the many people and teams you encounter. When teams work with the garage door up, this propagation of tools, techniques, and ideas happens faster and as a byproduct of people going about their daily tasks.
- Enable early feedback — with exceptions, it’s generally better to get feedback early than late: early feedback is an opportunity to spot duplicate efforts, nudge a team in the more true direction, and identify blockers and complexities that will change the overall approach. When teams get this type of constructive feedback early, the rest of the project will likely run smoother and ship on time. Nobody likes a surprise the day before a launch.
- Develop shared context and culture — with more garages open, people steadily accumulate a mental model of who is working on what, which projects are in flight, which ideas are being explored, and what features are being shipped. This accumulation helps people connect the dots between people and projects and reduces the likelihood that a single person will be the sole librarian of a company’s institutional knowledge.
- Inspire — exposure to great work helps people learn what it takes to create great work. Seeing from the ground floor how high-caliber teamwork happens is one of the best career accelerants; once you’ve seen what “great” looks like, the world is never the same.
Internal transparency at Facebook
I recently listened to Lenny’s podcast with Boz, and they spoke for five minutes (starting at 22:10) about how Meta’s culture of internal transparency is used to drive clarity and alignment across tens of thousands of people. I’ve pulled out some of my favorite quotes from this segment, with light editing to add clarity.
You want to make sure good, talented people are fully leveraged. Any time they have the wrong information, or they don’t have enough information, you’ve now blocked one of the most economically valuable things your company possesses: a person’s time, attention and talent.
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So often, great work that has happened at [Meta] has not come from a top-down mandate but from people understanding what we’re trying to accomplish top-down and having way more information at their disposal to act on it.
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This comes at a tremendous price: you need to get really good at managing incoming information…you have to have a system for managing your information, triaging the incoming, figuring out the groups you want to be a part of, and where you need to get push notifications.
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; that mechanisms to discover interesting work leads to more serendipitous collaboration.
These principles are baked into the core of Campsite:
- The inbox keeps you focused on the conversations that matter most: conversations you’re directly involved in, places where you’ve been mentioned, or where your feedback has been requested. The inbox gives you confidence that you’re not blocking anyone and delivers a satisfying sense of being “caught up” that is lacking in most chat-first collaboration tools.
- Spaces (our name for groups) allow teams to work with the garage door up. This keeps people focused on relevant projects and workstreams while allowing anyone else to poke their head in to follow progress and share feedback.
- A ranked newsfeed for the entire organization helps people discover interesting people, projects, and conversations that they wouldn’t have otherwise known about.
Where teams fall short
It’s easy to confuse being “internally transparent” with “working with the garage door up.” Just because all of the information is technically transparent doesn’t mean it’s easy for people to encounter, digest, share, and build upon.
This is one of the primary reasons I see teams frustrated with chat-first and document-first team collaboration tools. In the first case, people want to follow along with other teams and projects, so they join too many channels where only 1% of the total messaging volume is high signal. With document-first tools, there’s no concept of “following progress” on a document or folder. Instead, you’d have to go out of your way to actively browse through directories looking for anything new; it’s not conducive to passive discovery.
This is why we are building a post-first team communication tool [2][3] with a feed as a central mechanism for distributing ideas across people and projects. Posts are less noisy and have a higher signal by default, and a ranked feed is one of the most familiar and intuitive ways to browse and discover lots of information.
[1] Credit for this popular phrase goes to Andy Matuschak and Robin Sloan who, as best as I can tell, write about working with the garage door up in the spirit of individual output, or “building in public.”