As a software engineer I work in a team. We work together to achieve a common goal or set of goals.

We can work faster by collaborating and leveraging synergy compared to a situation where we would be working separately without communicating with each other.

Imagine a basketball team trying to run a play. We need everyone on the team to know that play and a point guard / coach, who will give a signal to run it. Without it there is chaos and lower chances of scoring a basket.

Continuous FYI allows you to maximize out the benefits of working in a team.

What is Continuous FYI?

Proactively informing about things you learned that might be helpful to others as soon as you learn about them

Wooow, that sounds a bit extreme, why can’t it wait until the stand up tomorrow?

If you could learn something right now that will help you in the nearest 5 hours, do you prefer to learn about it right now or in 4 hours?

Benefit 1: You Help Others Now

Imagine this situation: you notice that the documentation of the service your team is using is outdated and is the root cause of an issue your team has been noticing the last couple of weeks.

By sharing this information and including a way to resolve the issue, you allow your colleagues to benefit from your work and avoid them debugging the same issue again.

Benefit 2: You Manage Expectations

Let’s say you plan to implement a specific feature during a sprint. The first day of the sprint starts. You suddenly learn that there is a blocker the team was not aware of during the planning.

By sharing that blocker early, you allow others to reassess their expectations.

Imagine two scenarios. You are 4 days into the sprint and you give an update:

  1. Scenario A - you were giving ongoing updates on the blockers, everyone is aware that you faced them and that it took effort to resolve them.

  2. Scenario B - you announce after 4 days that you just managed to resolve all blockers and are getting started with the implementation.

In Scenario B your colleagues and stakeholders already might have an expectation that you are almost finished with the task. They may be surprised that they are learning about blockers just now. This can be especially bad if they knew how to resolve those blockers for you which would allow you to progress faster.

Benefit 3: You Help Others in the Future

Ever heard the phrase it’s a known issue? Well some known issues can be unaddressed for a long time.

That’s why it is important to share that:

  1. the issue exists
  2. there is a known way to resolve or work around the issue

in an internally public and searchable channel of communication.

That way, you allow everyone who faces that issue to search their communication channel (e.g. Slack) about that issue and find a solution instantly!

Benefit 4: You Allow Others to Help You

If you learn about an issue and share that you are working on it. Someone who already encountered that issue or quickly comes up with a solution can help you.

You leverage the knowledge and experience of your colleagues that might allow you to progress faster.

Benefit 5: You Avoid Stepping on Each Others Toes

Imagine your team gets a bug report. By telling others you will be looking into it, you avoid a situation where too many people are looking at the same issue.

An unassigned bug report is like a loose ball. Someone picks it up and everyone has a clearer situation.

Someone can ask you to:

  1. Pass the ball - because they know how to fix the issue
  2. Keep the ball - because they see you are in the best position to solve the bug

Benefit 6: You Create Durable and Reusable artifacts

By writing and sharing those FYIs you create an artifact that:

  1. Your manager might save and use it for your performance review as an example of a good job you are doing (things said in a meeting can easily be forgotten)
  2. You make your job easier performance review time as you might just be able to use Slack and copy over links to the messages you want to include in your brag document
  3. You create small building blocks for larger pieces of content. For example you share solutions to issues encountered in a specific platform. Once you collect multiple messages, you can easily merge them together in a post like top x issues encountered by users of platform A or that could become a larger part of an FAQ page. Which allows you to further increase your impact

Blind Spots of Continuous FYI

That said, there are cases when doing Continuous FYI might do more harm than good.

For example, if you publish 10 pages worth of information every couple of hours - this might be too much for your team to digest and it might discourage anyone from reading it.

That’s why it’s important to make your communication

  1. Concrete
  2. Concise
  3. Meaningful

When using Continuous FYI those heuristics might be useful:

Heuristic 1: Make Your Message Easy to Skim

For example you can include a tldr; at the beginning. That way you allow others to quickly get a summary of your message and allow them to decide how deep they want to go into the topic.

Heuristic 2: Think About the Place You Are Posting It

Is the message relevant to the members of that Slack channel?

For example news about a new version of the technology you are using might not be useful to the stakeholders of your project.

Unless you find a way to link how that new version can help achieve their goals. Of course it can be a good topic for a “random” channel or a coffee chats channel (those interactions are important too).

Heuristic 3: Be helpful

Continuously informing others about the issues you see might be counterproductive.

Usually, there are more problems to solve than there is capacity to solve them.

That’s why try to be level 5 helpful and instead of writing

There is this issue reported here

you can instead write

I saw this issue reported here. I’ll try to have a look and see how we can help. Will let you know at the stand up in 2 hours where I am at.

Conclusions

Constantly Keeping your colleagues up to date:

  1. Helps others now
  2. Manages Expectations
  3. Helps others in the future
  4. Allows others to help you
  5. Prevents you from stepping on each others toes
  6. Creates durable and reusable artifacts

So use continuous FYI to keep them in the loop.

But remember about:

1, Making your communication Concrete, Concise, Meaningful

  1. Trying to be Level 5 helpful