Using Yammer to Communicate Effectively in a Startup

Communication is incredibly important in a startup.  Every member of your team needs to be aware of what everyone else is doing, the direction the company is going in, funding status, you name it…  As soon as the lines of communication break down, chaos ensues.  People start thrashing, productivity plummets and you have to work to regain a decent level of efficiency.

At Sharendipity, we’ve tried just about everything we can to open up those lines of communication.   As a technology-driven startup, a lot of this focuses on communicating information about the product such as code changes, feature requests, the roadmap, etc.  Regardless of the company’s focus and what information needs to be communicated, Yammer provides a great way to keep the ball rolling.

Early Attempts at Communication

BugZilla

In the beginning we thought that BugZilla would help track a lot of the discussions.  At the time, we were coding in Java and there was a nice Eclipse plugin called Mylyn that integrated with BugZilla.  But when it came down to it, BugZilla is just clunky and didn’t fit into our workflow very well.  We’d have to go back to the BugZilla web page constantly to run reports and prioritize and assign bugs.  And it didn’t really help with planning out our roadmap.

An Internal Wiki

We thought that we’d just do away with BugZilla and keep track of everything ourselves on an internal wiki.  This way we could maintain pages for the wiki, keep bug lists and feature requests, and cross-reference things when necessary.  It worked fairly well for a while but gradually became less effective.  Again, maintaining the wiki didn’t fit into our daily workflow.  In addition, communicating updates wasn’t as easy because it would come through your email.  As a result, the wiki would grow out of date or get messy and someone would have to take some time to fix it up.  This was never fun.

An Internal Blog

The blog was a lot easier to manage and fit into our workflow better.  When someone made a checkin, we would duplicate the checkin note to the blog so that people could see it.  We were edging ourselves towards the real-time communication that we didn’t really know we needed.  The problem with using the blog was that, even with RSS feeds, it was still out of your normal workflow.  You’d have to make an effort to go check up on what had been done.  It did let us integrate all types of communication in a single environment though.  The wiki achieved this as well, but we didn’t see the information as a stream like we did with the blog.

What this ultimately comes down to is a problem of interfacing with the blog.  If we had a desktop client like Yammer’s, the blog would have worked a lot better.  Sure, we could have written a little desktop app that would notify us when there was a new post.  But this was before Yammer and before AIR.  More importantly, we didn’t know that it was a problem.

Why Yammer Solves the Communication Gap

Yammer provides a stream of information that is easily accessible.  It’s also in reach of everything that I do as a coder, but unobtrusive enough that it doesn’t distract from a task at hand.  If something urgent comes up, I can address it.  Otherwise, at least I know that I need to address it when I get a chance.

The important point is that Yammer fits into our workflow incredibly well.  I don’t have to go to a webpage to see what’s going on; the yammer client is always running on my desktop.  Nor do I have to make an attempt to see if something was posted recently; it pops up automatically.  In addition to fitting into my daily routine, Yammer also provides some nice features that make my life even easier.

Threaded Communication

I love that Yammer solves the problem of having to dig through BugZilla to find comments about a bug.  In Yammer, I can just look at the thread and see what someone had to say about it.  It also solves the problem of adding comments to a wiki (there are a few that do this but you can’t follow comments about updates or individual items on a page).  The important part though, and I can’t stress this enough,  is that Yammer facilitates a discussion around everything that is going on in our company.

Using Hashtags Effectively

One of my favorite features of Yammer (and Twitter) is the use of hashtags.  There are primarily five types of information that I’m concerned with on a daily basis: checkins, bugs, feature requests, roadmap discussions, and general office information (e.g. “Out of the office until 10 this morning”).  When posting to Yammer, we can communicate the type of information in a hashtag by applying any one of #checkin, #bug, #feature, #roadmap, or #office.  Furthermore, we can call attention to a post by appending #urgent to it.  We can also add other differentiating tags such as #client or #server.

Directed Communication

Oftentimes, I want to communicate something only to one person.  As long as it isn’t private, my post can call that person’s attention by simply appending the @ symbol to their username.  Oddly, in contrast to the way Twitter is used, most of our communication isn’t person-to-person.  But when it is, I can simply ask someone a question on Yammer, or answer theirs.

Distributed Communication

One of the other important aspects regarding our usage of Yammer is that it enables distributed communication incredibly easily.  It’s pretty common that we aren’t all in the office at the same time.   Someone will be meeting with a potential investor, someone will be in Germany, or someone will be at the coffee shop.  If we aren’t in front of our laptops, most of us have iPhones so we can check in on what’s going on using the Yammer app from just about anywhere.

What We’d really like to see from Yammer (and the Yammer community)

Better Search

The truth is that we still have to maintain some documentation outside of Yammer.  We still have to know which bugs are outstanding or which discussions involving the roadmap aren’t complete.  I want a way to search all threads that have been tagged with #bug, but haven’t been tagged with #complete.  Or if I want to see all of the client-side checkins in the past two days, show me everything tagged #checkin and #client for that time period.  Broadening search capabilities is a great place to start expanding the functionality.

A Better Desktop Client (this may have happened)

This topic may be a little late.  I just updated to the most recent one yesterday and it’s working very well.  Previously however, stability and bugs have been a big problem.  Here’s hoping that it continues to improve.

Third-party integration

I know that there’s an API.  But I don’t have time to implement anything with it.  If there were a few smart people out there though, they’d start integrating their applications with Yammer.  Take BugZilla for example.  How amazing would it be if BugZilla integrated with Yammer?  Every time I posted something to Yammer tagged #bug, a new one was created in BugZilla.  If a reply to that post was tagged #complete, BugZilla would mark the bug as closed.  You can take this further to assign bugs, set priorities, etc.  This would solve my problem above of requiring better search capabilities, and I wouldn’t have to go replicate content already posted to Yammer myself.

I’m guessing that there are a lot of similar applications that could benefit from this.  What about CMS apps?  Salesforce?  Imagine a few hundred people generating leads for your company, communicating progress and updating your company’s records at the same time.  How huge would that be…

So Go Use It

If you aren’t using Yammer, you probably should be.  It’s incredible what happens in a startup when the founders aren’t communicating well.  At that point, you become as effective and mobile as the Big Blue’s you’re trying to compete with.