We recently had to communicate to a larger part of our organization how we work at Aftenposten, and we thought it could be interesting to share the language used to do so. Imagine that something went well. Maybe you, the individual, implemented some highly requested new feature. You might be proud of the work you did, so want to share it with others. It’s easy to use “I” in these situations, because after all, you, the individual, did the work. But rarely you were the only person involved. There was probably designs made by a designer, or feature descriptions by product people, or input from users. So instead of using “I”, you can use “we” to signify that it was an effort made by your team. Using “we” encourages the wider audience to raise questions related to the feature to the whole team, through your typical feature request/feedback channels. Using “I” implies that you are the single point of communication for that feature, and suddenly you start getting side-channel requests, and the bus-factor goes down to 1. You, the individual, are now responsible for all those messages rather than you, the team.
Team-first language
Team-first language
Team-first language
We recently had to communicate to a larger part of our organization how we work at Aftenposten, and we thought it could be interesting to share the language used to do so. Imagine that something went well. Maybe you, the individual, implemented some highly requested new feature. You might be proud of the work you did, so want to share it with others. It’s easy to use “I” in these situations, because after all, you, the individual, did the work. But rarely you were the only person involved. There was probably designs made by a designer, or feature descriptions by product people, or input from users. So instead of using “I”, you can use “we” to signify that it was an effort made by your team. Using “we” encourages the wider audience to raise questions related to the feature to the whole team, through your typical feature request/feedback channels. Using “I” implies that you are the single point of communication for that feature, and suddenly you start getting side-channel requests, and the bus-factor goes down to 1. You, the individual, are now responsible for all those messages rather than you, the team.