We're killing the DM at @Zapier. Starting with the executive team.
We've long held Default to Transparency as a value. That value has largely encouraged communication in public channels. But as the company grew, DMs are a hard habit to resist and break.
But every DM is a gap in our Shared Brain. It's context that is lost for humans and AIs. As a result the cost of DMs keeps going up.
So earlier this year I posted about our exec transparency leaderboard. The leaderboard has become quite the competition internally…
I'm 3rd today. My co-founder @BryanHelmig has held the top spot as long as I can remember…
It sets a standard for the rest of the company. In fact, since last year we’ve seen the % of Slack messages in public channels go from 33% to 46%.
What the leaderboard measures
Transparency is a team sport, and a disinfectant. Every month we track what percentage of our execs' Slack messages happen in public channels versus private DMs.
When your CEO debates strategy in a DM, that decision is invisible to every agent and every team that needs to know what was decided and why. The decision happens but the reasoning vanishes.
When that conversation happens in a channel, it stays. New hires can search it, agents can read and verify it, etc. Your Shared Brain knows what's true now: ask it a question and the answer reflects the latest reality.
Taking It to the Next Level
Reducing DMs are one way to increase transparency and open up context for humans and AI, but there are other mechanisms that help too. Three things beyond the leaderboard:
1. Meetings get recorded, transcribed, and become queryable
2. We run a shared skills library. Anyone on the team can encode a workflow they've figured out into a skill and share with the team
3. And we keep score. It's a silly scoreboard, but it subtly drives positive behaviors
Raising Your Ambition
In order to get the most of AI in your company, the AIs need context. So making your context queryable is one of the most practical moves you can make to improve the effectiveness of your AI agents.
P.S. I’m coming for #1, Bryan...
