InfoQ's Ben Linders wrote up Charlotte de Jong Schouwenburg's talk at Dev Summit Munich, The Human Scalability Problem, on what breaks in a software organization as it grows and what she has seen hold it together. The list is practical: redundant communication, which she sums up as repetition is gold. Offsites and virtual coffees. Buddy pairs across sites. Regular demos. Rotating facilitators so no one person owns the room. Metrics about people, not only about delivery. And leaders who model vulnerability so that others can admit what they do not know.
The item I would underline is the first one. Early in my management career I treated repeating myself as a sign that communication had failed the first time. I now think the opposite. In an organization spread across cities and time zones, a message said once reaches whoever happened to be in the room. The same message said in the all-hands, written in the channel, repeated in the team meeting, and mentioned in a one-on-one reaches the organization. Repetition is not the failure mode. It is the delivery mechanism.
The cross-site buddy idea is the other one I would take. Most of what people need to know about another office is not in any document. It is in having one person there they can ask.
What is the one message you have had to repeat most often, and did it eventually land?
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