How we handle team emails at our startup: Defaulting to transparency

December 5, 2013culture

It’s an exciting time for Buffer. Toby Osbourn just joined and we’re now 16 people. Toby joined us as a Backend Hacker, and he’s been a joy to work with so far. Within just a few days we can all feel his impact.

In the first few days, Toby has been fantastic with asking questions and learning about the Buffer culture. One thing he asked me is how we think about email at Buffer. I thought that writing a blog post as the answer could help lots of other founders too.

Buffer Value 2: Default to transparency

One of our highest values at Buffer is to default to transparency, and we aim to live to this value in many dimensions. We stick to this through good times and bad, and we had a chance to demonstrate this recently with our unfortunate hacking incident. It was amazing to see the support we received by staying transparent and trusting our customers with the full details of everything happening.

Within the Buffer team we have complete compensation transparency and every team member knows each others’ salary and equity stake through stock options. We go all the way - we share whether we’re fundraising, we share when we have acquisition interest, and we share the bank balance. In fact, we share the bank balance and revenue numbers publicly.

Transparency builds trust and triggers better decisions

"lots of traditional, widely accepted, and perfectly legal business practices just can’t be trusted by customers, and will soon become extinct, driven to dust by rising levels of transparency, increasing consumer demand for fair treatment, and competitive pressure" - Don Peppers and Martha Rogers in Extreme Trust: Honesty as a Competitive Advantage

There are many reasons we default to transparency at Buffer, and perhaps the most important is that I genuinely believe it is the most effective way to build trust. This means trust amongst our team but also trust from users, customers, potential future customers and the wider public who encounter us in any way. For example, we have a whole blog dedicated to sharing everything about how we run the company.

By sharing all our decisions, numbers, successes and failures, we are showing our customers and supporters that we are responsible and strive to do the right thing.

Keith Rabois, COO of Square, put better than I ever could the second reason we place such a priority on transparency in an interview with Rob Hayes of First Round Capital:

Ultimately, if you want people to make smart decisions, they need context and all available information. And certainly if you want people to make the same decisions that you would make, but in a more scalable way, you have to give them the same information you have.

Defaulting to transparency with email communication

Narrowing down to the aspect of team emails, this is an area where we also strive for complete openness and transparency. Stripe do something similar and provided great inspiration for us.

When you start working at Buffer, it can come as a little bit of a shock. Instantly you’re receiving every email exchange between team members, in every single team. If you’re in our Happiness team you still see all the emails going on in the engineering and product team. You see design iterations and progress on our mobile apps. You see emails about our content marketing and work towards getting press.

This might sound a little crazy, and probably certainly seems totally overwhelming. But that’s the price we’ve decided it’s worth to have complete transparency. Nothing is more important to us. We have chosen to be open, and we find ways to handle the volume.

You also see emails of external communications happening. Interview requests, getting press and discussions with partners.

When you experience it, there is a magical aspect to it. You learn how Leo goes about getting us in all the top tech news sites when we launch a new feature. It all contributes to a faster pace of learning for the whole team, and means that everyone naturally knows a lot of what is going on.

How email transparency works in practice

We have several internal email lists, which only Buffer team members can send to:

team@ - this goes to the entire team
engineers@ - includes all our engineering team
heroes@ - for our happiness hero (customer support) team
crafters@ - related to content marketing
design@ - for design discussions
product@ - for product feedback and signals
metrics@ - anything to do with company metrics
biz@ - related to buffer for business
bizdev@ - for BD activities (partnerships, integrations)
marketing@ - related to press activities

Whenever you email something to do with Buffer, you almost always cc or bcc one of these lists. For example:

email a specific team member and cc a list
email an external person and bcc a list
email to a list to notify a whole team

The general rules are as follows:

if it’s “to” you, you’re expected to reply
if you’re specifically cc’d, you’re expected to read it
if it’s your own team that’s cc’d, you should read that
you should strive to always cc or bcc a list

Handling the risk of email overload

Admittedly with a growing team the overall email volume has gone up a lot in the past couple of months. We’re so bullish about transparency that this isn’t a huge concern for us. That said there are a few things we’re doing to ease that volume:

we’re starting to encourage filtering out some emails between other team members so they’re not in your inbox but they’re easily accessible and browsable
transparency often simply means that you can access that information when you want to, not that it’s pushed in front of your face
we’ve set up a private Facebook group to share links and emails that don’t need a reply. The concept of a “like” is proving to be very powerful for messages where you want to show appreciation but might not need to reply

Times when we might keep email private

There are a few times where email transparency doesn’t feel quite right. Usually this revolves around specific personal circumstances or a potential upcoming team change (e.g. a promotion or thinking about a firing). With this said, we truly strive for transparency and want to improve here too. Currently we try to always ask each other whether we can accelerate some of these discussions and bring in transparency.

Photo credit: Juin Hoo