Seeing as we haven't had a general discussion topic yet this week, I summarised down a half-written blog post as I think the community might find the responses generated useful: I’ve been thinking about how you evolve your internal communication structure a lot recently, and building out from Tinybird’s fascination with avians, and mindful of our current Flock of about 70 people, I constructed a somewhat bucolic metaphor: The Forest, River, and Tower. The Forest is an ecosystem of trees of varying shapes and sizes, each being a specialist tool for different teams, collected around the Banyan tree of whatever your core project management and communication tool of choice is - perhaps Basecamp like us, or Notion or Atlassian - and your shared drive/docs solution like Google Workspaces. The ecosystem needs to be balanced to avoid too much functional overlap, while still allowing each team to grow and replace tools as needed. The River is our fast and easy comms, Slack or gMeet. We have plugins to assist in persisting important things, like TLDV to record and annotate meetings, and emoji triggers to turn Slack conversations into support tickets etc. which become part of the wider Forest. We encourage a culture of any question being worth asking, and any good answer should be saved for later use. If you’ll forgive the romanticism of the imagery, every bird in the flock can nest in whatever tree in the forest suits them best. Sales, Marketing & Design all want their team’s preferred tools and rightly so, and nobody will ever convince Engineering not to have a thousand tickets bloom in their Issues register. They all head back to the River regularly to drink, and the Banyan tree to share ideas, but as things expand it can be really hard to find exactly the bit you need so... The Tower is your landmark in the middle of the Forest, constructed from your accumulated policies, strategies and foundational knowledge. It serves a double purpose of allowing anyone to see what’s happening in the wider organisation, and is particularly important when onboarding new folks to give them a starting point into every specialist area. Here is your stable knowledge base, eventually constructed in a Wiki or Intranet or other persistent but reporting-friendly system, but probably starts as just a collection of the best bits harvested from the Forest cobbled together over time. I think for a long time we thought we were too small to need a specific tool for this, but we recently focused on iteratively improving our onboarding process which has led to recognition that the maintenance overhead is now beneficial. So, a somewhat stretched metaphor perhaps, but I think it conveys the need to be deliberate in your selection of the river-fast, forest-specialised, and tower-stable communication tools for your SaaS company. So what is your structure at your current scale? And which tools do you rate or hate? If everyone says Notion, Slack, GDocs & Confluence I think i'll be disappointed 😂

Curious if you'd count "machine to human" communication channels (Datadog, etc) as part of the tree. If not, then at 8 people, Notion and Slack all the way 🙂 Including collecting, tracking and processing of sales leads, customer support requests, feature roadmap requests, etc.

yeah I would say machine to human, and the reverse, are necessary parts. We push notifications for things like Sentry or Vanta into Slack so the on-duty person gets them in a timely manner. We also integrate notifications for customer nurturing where the system is sifting activity for actionable events that a human may chose to act on. Ha! I suspected Notion and Slack would be popular - then probably Github for tickets and Google for Workspaces right?

Almost 🙂 Linear for tickets. And Google Workspaces, but we use it very lightly. Oh, and Figma for design. Thats a big one.

I'll have to echo Gwens Google Workspaces! It's such an under talked about resouces but I spend more time in google docs, gmail, gmeet, than linear and slack combined! This is a great topic, btw! Thank you for posting. I'm curious to see what others have to say 🙂

That's two votes, I'm going to check out Linear.