How We Communicate

Convictional exists to help keep teams mission aligned by design. Our product encourages and reinforces the communication norms we've established over time. Convictional is an asynchronous communication culture by default. We are also a company that prefers to work in public (e.g. share knowledge organization wide) where possible. Our async, work in public approach reflects all of our core values: Focused Intensity, Caring Deeply, Extreme Simplicity, Disciplined Growth, Craft Excellence and Pro Human. This document outlines what our norms are. Please consider everything you read here when you communicate inside and outside the company.

For more information on work hours, we have a separate page.

Company announcements

When we need to announce something to the entire team, we make an Announcement Post about it. This notifies everyone and delivers it to everyone's inbox. It includes the ability to add emoji reactions, for admins to see how many people have read the Post, and for discussion to occur in comments. We fall back on team@ emails where appropriate, such as during team changes or unexpected leaves. Please default to Announcement Posts for company-wide announcements unless discretion requires email.

Making proposals

The best place to propose something at Convictional is by writing about it in a Post. If it's particularly long or complex, consider writing it in Docs first and then linking to that from the Post. The Post is where discussion about the merit of the proposal should happen from a business perspective. It allows us to make and associate one or more decisions related to the proposal, to see the full lifecycle of work through from someone initiating it with an idea on to decisions and the following implementation work.

Making decisions collaboratively

Written communication is a good way to go back and forth on a decision. Almost no decisions are urgent, and therefore do not typically require real-time communication. Those decisions can happen in Posts or in email. The beauty of written formats is that you can see how the decision was arrived at, including the valid arguments on both sides of it. We also prefer to explicitly record decisions in meetings, chat, email and Posts in order to compound our knowledge over time. Please default to Posts for decisions unless discretion is required. Please ensure decisions are explicitly recorded in the app as well.

Updates on input work

Since the company was founded, we have kept up the practice of written weekly updates. We now use the Posts feature as a roundup of weekly updates, and will revisit this in the future. We answer two prompts, including 'What I did this week' and 'My plan for next week'. At the start of each week, we habitually read each other's updates to get a sense of what others are working on and how we might help them. Please submit a weekly update each week on Thursday afternoon, and read the team's updates on Mondays.

Updates on outcomes

We support updates as part of our Goals feature in order to ensure that goal owners are updating on progress. Over time, you can review progress on the outcomes we are working towards on the goal page. If you're curious how often to update a goal, feel free to ask your manager what cadence to use. Goal owners should provide updates on your goals at least once every two weeks, or more where appropriate.

Team@ all hands meetings

Once a week on Tuesday in the early afternoon, we hold an all hands meeting named Team@. Team@ is the group email that includes every full time member of the team, so naturally we named our all hands meeting after it. Team@ is about getting people who might not otherwise be following context across the business talking about important cross functional topics.

The agenda is similar each time: The CEO may or may not give a customer or strategy update depending on what's going on. Then the Chief of Staff will go through customer adoption data in greater detail. Next, we go through updates on go-to-market hosted by the COO and product hosted by the Principal Engineer that might be relevant to people working outside of those teams. We have a section where each member of research provides an update on what they are working on and we do Q&A about it. Then we close on operations updates. Sometimes we do special segments before or after the regular content.

We used to run all hands meetings with a lot of formality and over time have stepped that back in favor of an open forum conversation about things going on at the company, with a particularly emphasis on customer adoption. We use Google Meet to host these meetings and record them so when future team members join they can view historical meetings. We use Convictional to coordinate the agenda for these meetings, and Chat to discuss any points that need discussing.

Other internal meetings

We regularly meet to talk about work in various formats that does not include the whole team. This includes:

• Syncs, which are typically 1:1 meetings focused on getting aligned on a particular topic (e.g. onsite content prep)
• Team syncs, are group format syncs also focused on getting aligned or making a decision (e.g. roadmap planning)
• Function meetings, which are a form of community of practice for a particular set of skills (e.g. engineering)
• Office hours, which is a one to many meeting format where people can join to ask a particular person questions
• One off learning and development, formatted as lunch and learn talks from team members about something topical

In all cases, we encourage but do not require using the Convictional meeting recorder in order to preserve context from the conversation. We build agendas in Convictional, which are circulated to people ahead of the meeting.

Discussing code

Where possible, we discuss code changes directly in pull requests on Github, rather than in other places such as email or group chats. The goal is to keep our discussion as close to the context of the work as possible, which in the case of code is the proposed change being made. Code is an uncommon exception in that we prefer discussion about it to happen on Github rather than in the app where possible.

We do however make decisions about how to build things in the app using Posts in the Engineering, Research and Design groups respectively. Please consider initiating proposals in Posts until a decision is reached, prior to moving that discussion into the code change itself when it comes to implementation. Please record decisions about how we build things wherever those decisions have occurred.

Discussing content

In most companies, discussions about written content happen in Google Docs or Notion or a similar word processing tool. People are invited by link, and comments are created, discussed in a sidebar and then closed - never to be seen or heard from again. Alternatively, people link dump the Doc into a chat tool and then discuss it there, severing the connection between the document and related discussion.

Convictional's Docs feature exists to ensure that discussion about content is preserved with the same level of importance as the content itself is. The comments are where meaningful work happens, where people are invited to review the work, things are debated and decisions are made. Our product and our communication norms encourage the preserving of this discussion where the content itself lives.

Please keep comments about Docs within the document itself, rather than scattered around in group chats, email and other unrelated places, so that the entire context can be preserved over time.

Sharing external context

Various times you might happen upon a source of external context, like news about a competitor, customer or recent research relevant to our work. Often people's default when this happens is to link dump it into a group chat. In Slack, that might lead to a sidebar conversation in a thread.

Convictional built Posts to facilitate sharing external context. Posts are where external context should be shared in order to start discussions that could lead to decisions. In the future we will develop algorithmic discovery mechanisms so that Posts are surfaced to everyone that they are relevant for.

By sharing external context in Posts, related async conversation happens in one place, subsequent decisions that are made are tracked alongside the original source, and all of this we think best serves compounding organizational knowledge in the long run. Prefer Posts where sharing external context.

Sharing visual context

Oftentimes it would be useful to communicate something via video, like a presentation or demonstration. Instead of doing a meeting, consider creating a recording and sharing it with your audience for async viewing and feedback. This has the benefit of giving the audience the opportunity to view and comment on at their own pace and timeline. We currently use Loom, and intend to build our own solution for this in the future.

Gathering internal context

Often in knowledge work, your own work at hand requires context from other sources to be completed. Modern companies have a bad habit of depending on people as their knowledge keepers. People develop a habit of 'pinging so and so' to ask questions that we think are often best answered by software.

Convictional's research feature is intended to be the antidote. Research exists in order to be the best source of context about everything inside the company, especially things that people have historically kept in their head such as the events of meetings, historical decisions and other organizational knowledge. We encourage our team to try asking Research questions first before 'pinging so and so'.

If research is unsuccessful, try to solve that context problem for yourself once and for all. To solve it once might require asking someone, but in doing so, you are revealing important context that should be preserved. Consider where it might best be preserved (e.g. sharing it with the organization, a group or specific individuals) and make that your last step after asking someone to provide the answer.

Direct messaging

In the event that Research doesn't turn up the context you need, or you have a matter to discuss privately with a specific individual, you can use direct messages in the app to do that. We use direct messages for private, asynchronous 1:1 communication in lieu of alternatives. You can also use email if you prefer. The app indexes context from both, and attempts to summarize and correlate it with other workspaces. Please use direct messages in the app as a fallback for private conversations, and where Research falls short.

Formal group chats

The app supports formal groups, such as Everyone (for the entire company) and function specific groups like Engineering or Operations. Formal groups are a place to share something with a specific group of people. Where possible, prefer Posts for proposals, decisions and external context, and prefer using Research first relative to asking a question. We also use formal groups for temporary events like when we attend in person onsites together. Please keep discussions generally as close to the work as possible.

Informal group chats

The app supports informal groups, such as 'Cam, Nina and Roger'. That said, part of what animates our work is helping companies avoid the knowledge black hole that Slack creates by encouraging lots of informal groups - leading to many rarely used but permanently present channels. Please use informal group chats sparingly and when other mediums such as Posts and emails aren't appropriate.

Discussing email threads

We continue to support and encourage using email for external communication, as well as internal communication that requires a papertrail (e.g. HR and legal matters) or which are permission sensitive (e.g. performance management decisions) and can't happen in Posts or in group chats.

If you need to sidebar about something going on in an email communication, you can use the app to tag someone on the email and post a comment to them. If you need to assign someone else to perform the work, you can use the app to do that. We encourage collaborative email wherever it is appropriate.

Other considerations

• In the event that the app is offline, please fall back on using the 'Convictional Team' Signal group. Signal is our official backup communication provider, so please keep the app on your devices.
• Prefer Signal calls to regular carrier phone calls for security reasons. Make sure to confirm that the person you are talking to shares the 'Convictional Team' group before initiating a call.
• Avoid SMS messages as they are insecure relative to using the app. While iMessage, WhatsApp, Messenger and other chat platforms are secure, we do not use them for work either.

Historical norms

You can find our historic communication norms here and here as a form of prior art.

It's important to keep in mind that we are deliberately different in how we communicate compared to most companies. We aim to capture, preserve and compound our organizational knowledge over time. We believe it's possible to feel both focused and connected at work. We achieve this by making upfront investments in time and in the way we use our own software, so that we benefit in the future.