I’ve always been passionate by how people work together as a team. It’s an area where simple things can have a big impact: the way people are seated and the tools they are using to communicate with each other are two elements I’m paying close attention to. Let’s talk about the second one, how people communicate within a team.

The problem with emails

It looks like most companies and startups are using emails as their main internal communication tool. Emails have several problems. First, there is an expectation that you need to reply to them quickly. The consequence is that most people will live in their inbox, which is very bad for focus and productivity. Second, and that’s the terrible part, people think that doing emails actually equals doing work. I think this is mostly because they have the impression that it’s like a todo-list and the goal is to get to inbox zero. The last point is distraction: you get too many emails that are not related to real work you should be doing.

The goal with email is Email Zero, not Inbox Zero. I don’t want to send or receive any emails from my co-workers.

Our solution for Email Zero at Sunrise has been to use Github for everything. Literally, a new employee at Sunrise doesn’t need to have a work email. Everything will be available from our Github. Let’s take a look at the tools we are using to efficiently work together.

Pull Requests for Code Review

Of course, if you are not using Github’s pull requests to do code review, you are doing it wrong. Zach Holman wrote about this a while ago. Simple.

Milestones and Issues for Project Management

One of hardest part of running a startup is to do efficient product management and manage roadmaps. We’ve tried a bunch of things at Sunrise and what is working really well for us are “Weekly Milestones”. Every week, we have a milestone on Github and we put things we want to get done for that week. The goal is to only have a few issues by person – usually three – so it’s really easy for everyone to know what they should work on. I’m really grateful to David Aubespin who introduced me to that ‘Weekly Milestone’ idea.

GitHub Flow for Shipping

It’s not done until it’s deployed. So more recently, we’ve started to follow the Github Flow that Scott Chaon has described here. It’s too early to tell how we are doing with this, but it seems to work really well so far. Also, we are using Codeship.io for all our CI and we are really happy with it.

Team Repository for Internal Communication

We have a repository called team where anyone can create issues about anything. We post articles that other employees should read, or the next thing we want to do outside of work for fun. You don’t need another mailing list for your company.

What Github could do better for us

We have a few ideas that could make this workflow even better:

• A view of all your issues across multiple repositories. Maybe shared milestones across repositories could help too (but I’m not sure this is a good idea to solve that problem).
• Parse cl.ly links to add inline images (really need that).
• Create new issues from email (usually when I’m on the go, I take a screenshot of something I want to change, and wish I could create a new issue directly). Email is only useful there because it works offline and I have a shortcut from Photo.app to Mail.app

I’m curious to hear what you are doing to work efficiently within your organization.

Pierre, CEO @ Sunrise.