Innersource at Haus
After hearing about innersource — the idea that software teams can benefit by behaving internally as if they were open source — from Yahoo’s @reid at Node Summit, I’ve been thinking about how the idea can be used cross-functionally, especially at small startups like Haus.
Setting up a framework for sharing institutional knowledge, processes and tools — from road maps to planning discussions to internal and external facing documentation — can easily take a back seat when you’re busy building stuff. But decisions about what/with who/how to communicate information can lead to wasted time and energy and are often moving targets at small companies anyway. And without a framework, even the best intentions can lead to lost, obsolete or incorrect information and frustration. One part of the solution may be to focus on incorporating some ideas from innersource and applying a few key takeaways which can benefit your organization in big ways:
Enables diverse inputs
Choosing transparency wherever possible in your organization means everyone can be confident in the context of their own work, and can contribute cross-functionally regardless of experience or discipline. We try to set up our projects to facilitate thoughtful feedback and ideas from varied perspectives within the company by:
- Including people from as many functional areas as possible in planning and retrospective meetings
- Encouraging anyone to add to a Proposals lane in Trello
- Giving everyone access to Github to submit issues
Starting from a place of inclusion, support and access to information — across the organization — sets a great foundation for another important group for your product: your users.
Lower cost of continuity
When you’re moving fast, changing roles and scaling means the responsibilities of a role are likely to continue beyond the person filling it right now. We’re working to make the barrier to entry as low as possible by starting with a culture of openness and deliberate documentation, so the next hire or the person taking over a role will be fully equipt to assume both the functional and the institutional aspects of the role. We pay attention to questions that are being asked, deciding if they are being asked repeatedly or seem likely to come up again to take the opportunity to slow down to document and validate the clarity of the answer.
Shared responsibility helps your team grow together
Focusing on collaboration means people are more empathetic about their own work, and more likely to be invested in building and maintaining a supportive feedback system where teaching and interaction are aligned with goals. We’ve found that each newly included team member causes a new awareness and perspective on our work as a whole, creating a more deeply informed and empowering environment for making changes and contributions.
On the software side, companies like Walmart, Github and PayPal have discovered how adopting OSS-style teams can foster a collaborative culture and make transitioning between the open-source world seamless, among other benefits for internal software development. At Haus, we’re obviously already big fans of clear and open, so I wanted to focus on how to apply some of these ideas to an organization as a whole.
We haven’t figured out all the best ways to do it yet, but we’re working together to figure it out because we believe organizations, like software projects, can benefit from a culture of transparency, access to information, collaborative communication, inclusion and support. If you have stories or ideas about organizations that work like this, we’d love to learn from others’ experience!
If you’re interested in working with us, discussing issues like these and others, please check out our jobs page and get in touch!
