When in doubt, overcommunicate to prevent possible misalignments
high-output-software-engineering Product and Tech book-sample
Overcommunication is a great mental model to have.
At first, overcommunication might sound like an anti-pattern. Why would you communicate more than what’s necessary? Sounds inefficient, right? If we were taking the semantics of “over communication” to the letter, I’d agree.
But what I’m vouching here is the mental model of overcommunication as a way to counter balance our human limitations when communicating.
- Communication between people is noisy (think of the broken telephone game here). What I meant to say might not be what you understood in your mind. So if it’s something important to you, the team or the business, don’t hesitate to say things like: “Just double-checking we are on the same page… (and then go on explaining in other words what you understood the plan is)“.
- People forget. People have other things going on in their work and in their lives. What’s important to you might not be in the other person’s top priority list and can slip off from their working memory. If this is important to you, you need to remind them from time to time.
Key phrases to use here are:
- “Hey Warren, just double-checking…"
- "Just to make sure we are on the same page about this…"
- "Let me say it again back to you just to make sure I understood…”
Examples:
“Hey Engineering Manager, just wanna make sure you remember about the time off I’m taking 2 weeks from now. It’s been a long time since we’d agreed on it so I wanted to remind you once more so you can plan the next sprints accordingly."
"Hey Charlie, I know you said you would deliver feature X next Friday but I wanted to check in just to double-check if everything is on track. Our mailing list promising this feature is going out to users in 2 days so I wanted to be sure we’re on track.”
On the important things, don’t be afraid to sound repetitive. As long as organizations are dependent on humans interacting with other humans, putting an extra effort on counter balancing human communication noise and memory limitations pays off really well.
---
This is a sample section from High Output Software Engineering. If you liked this one, you might enjoy the other samples available:
- Why read this book?, What it is?, Who is it for?, and How it works?
- The hidden costs of additions to a system (and why you should fight them)
If you're a software engineer working on product teams and found this useful, you might enjoy my book High Output Software Engineering — it's all about understanding value creation, making value-driven trade-offs, communicating with excellence and knowing how to navigate organization dynamics.
Buy it now for $9.99 (PDF & EPUB instant access)