The Do's and Don'ts of App Messaging: Destroy the Silos
Silos are great for storing grain. They're not as great for knowledge, data and processes. Given communication's transversality; Is it possible to coordinate communications across value streams?
In the beginning your team will be small. It will require little to no coordination. However as your organization grows, it will face growing pains. The pains will be technical, technological or organizational. The very first debate will be how much tech and organizational debt we are willing to accrue. What is the right amount of process and documentation to adopt?
Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.
Melvin Conway rose to fame when he published what would later be known as Conway’s law. The law states that a system will be a replica on how the organization communicates. For example a secretive department will work as a blackbox. All activities inside that department will be unknown to other departments in the organization.
Linear and hierarchical organizational structures have strongpoints and weak points. In the context of app communications it is mostly damaging. The knowledge hoarding and the power dynamics at play increase the bureaucracy needed to coordinate efforts.
This article proposes a simple structure for organizing communications. This rule of thumb builds on top of Event Storming and Domain Driven Design. It serves as a workaround to strict organizational charts.
Why do Information Silos exist?
There are three main reasons for information silos within an organization. All of these reasons are the result of organizational decisions of the past. The first challenge is that information is dispersed across applications and databases. The second challenge is lack of documentation, and operation procedures with a holistic and integral view. The third – and most critical, is a culture that rewards internal competition and ties incentives to metrics.
The technical challenge is relatively straightforward – but not easy. A lot of companies have this issue. There’s a reason for Snowflake’s $60+ billion valuation. This issue can be solved with market tools like Segment, Data Warehouses and Data Lakes. Teams will need to create Data Dictionaries and map attributes across multiple services. This will not be easy, but it is possible. The caveat being people should want to participate.
Second and Third culprits are by-products of leadership. Organizations need to be setup for knowledge sharing and collaboration. If hierarchies and command-control are paramount in the organization, then power dynamics will come at play. Organizations should reward teamwork and end-to-end understanding of the generation of value.
Challenges to Silos for App Messaging
The two main challenges to information silos in the context of app communications are lack of clarity and incentive misalignment. I define lack of clarity as ignorance of what the organization currently has in place in terms of tooling, messaging and data. Incentive misalignment stands for rewarding a part of the experience at the expense of another.
An example to this challenges can be exemplified with Rappi. Rappi used to send SMS, Push Notifications and Delivery Notifications constantly. You would get an SMS offering a 10% discounts, then a Push Notification promoting a new restaurant, and then a push notification to confirm your other with another restaurant. It got so bad even magazines provided tips to block them:
I have never worked for Rappi. My impression is that a part of the growth team was required to hit a minimum number of requests per week; and, they were measured based on an output rather than an outcome. My belief is that there were conflicting priorities and poor alignment on which tools were used to send messages.
How to face these challenges?
Lack of Clarity can be solved in two steps. Step number one being conducting an audit on the messages, tools and systems used to to send messages. The second is to map the ideal future state using techniques like Event Storming. The visualization will help understand and plan how to coordinate and plan the messages. This approach will also help design the user journey, understand the reason for messaging and optimize for user satisfaction and economic value.
I do not have a one-size fits all approach for incentive misalignment. I believe all organizations should try and understand how a decision impacts other metrics. For example how much will a promotional message impact the amount of support requests.
Most importantly, organizations should make the time to understand themselves. Companies should be aware of how culture and behaviors are creating silos in the first place.
Closing Remarks
Organizations are dynamic and ever evolving. The organizational decisions made in the past have an impact on how information is shared and made available. While you can’t change the past, you can intentionally try to get all relevant stakeholders in the same place and agree to change the ways of work towards collaboration.