In modern, data-rich companies, information on what’s happening in a company is fragmented across people and systems, which makes it incredibly difficult to gather information on what’s getting done in the company. Innovation and serendipity results from those random conversations and collisions. The core idea is to put people who may be spread out - whether that’s physically or mentally - and put them in a “ statistically small space” so that they’ll collide. It’s engineering serendipity, and it’s not unlike what Zappos is doing with their new corporate campus and their revitalization of downtown Las Vegas. For Jon Steinberg, founder and CEO of BuzzFeed, snippets is his “ kismet engine” that helps him connect the dots on what’s happening in the company given that individual and team actions often seem disparate without contextualization in the company as a whole. When the company begins to grow rapidly, it’s easy to lose that magic and start to have a company in which one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing.īuzzFeed is a company whose headcount has tripled to 300 employees in a year, so it knows the meaning of growing pains firsthand. When a tech startup is young, it has that incredibly tight-knit feeling that everyone knows what everyone is working on in the company. “It only takes them a minute or two to read, and it’s like a bird’s-eye view of what I think is going well at the company and areas where I think we could improve.” 2. “ I get a lot of feedback from employees,” Crowley says. In response to his snippets, employees will send him feedback on how he can improve, which inverts the typical reporting-into-feedback power dynamic. When I send out mine, the first heading is, “Things I’m Psyched About,” and the next is, “Things That I’m Not So Psyched About” or “Things I’m Stressed About.” The next thing is usually a quote of the week - something I heard from one of our investors or maybe overheard from an employee - and then I have my snippets below that. When Dennis Crowley, co-founder and CEO of Foursquare sends out his snippets, he’s reporting to the team as any other member of the team would: Instead of employees only reporting to managers, managers report to employees as well. That made sense in the command-and-control management framework, but it’s totally out of date in the flat and decentralized way nimble tech startups are organized.īecause snippets asks everyone to account for what they’re working on, it’s a system that’s unique in that it flips the way company reporting is typically organized. Most corporate reporting systems force underlings to report up to management and executives. Here’s why three of the fastest-rising tech companies today use snippets and how it fuels their success: With Google snippets, every employee had access to important knowledge regarding what was happening in the company - a stark contrast from the old days when managers hoarded information and kept it from their reports.Īs Googlers eventually spread their wings and left the company for other tech pastures, they brought snippets with them, which is how similar systems became critical management tools at companies like Foursquare. What began as a modest tool for keeping everyone in the loop became a powerful tool for company-wide transparency, as Google grew from hundreds to tens of thousands of people. When you reply to the email, your response goes onto an internally accessible webpage, and the next day, you’ll get an email that shows you what everyone else in the company is working on. Snippets sends everyone a weekly email on Monday asking you what you did last week and what you planned to get done the next week. The reason the system at Google caught on is that it’s not only powerful but incredibly simple to use. Known as Google Snippets (having started as an internal tool at Google), this single tool has grown to become one that many of the best technology companies use to keep their teams aligned and working in sync while giving them the freedom to work creatively and autonomously. There’s one internal communication tool, little known outside of tech circles, that’s been the management engine behind many of tech’s biggest successes.
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