@patio11 could you elaborate on the internal communications structure at Stripe? I’m curious how employees these days balance the use of different communication tools, especially as Stripe has grown and begun embracing distributed work.
I heard [0] for a long time it was all about long form posts to a massive number of Google Groups mailing lists with custom tooling to manage subscriptions (bc the Groups UI is poor). I understand these lists range from general to hyper specific.
But then I’ve also heard much of the communication has shifted to Slack or other tools. Slack tends to degrade into chaos at a certain size, and at Stripe’s scale I’m curious if this is a big pain point or how you mitigate it.
I am not patio11, but I do work at Stripe. Both are true; we use a lot of email, typically with lists, and a lot of Slack.
Other tools, like a wiki, an issue tracker, Home[0], and a culture of "run" rotations (like on-call but for helping folks on other teams) help keep chaos manageable.
It might be interesting for us to write up another update on this, since many folks are curious...
I heard [0] for a long time it was all about long form posts to a massive number of Google Groups mailing lists with custom tooling to manage subscriptions (bc the Groups UI is poor). I understand these lists range from general to hyper specific.
But then I’ve also heard much of the communication has shifted to Slack or other tools. Slack tends to degrade into chaos at a certain size, and at Stripe’s scale I’m curious if this is a big pain point or how you mitigate it.
https://stripe.com/blog/scaling-email-transparency