Let me know if this situation is unique to my experience.

You’re at a startup and it’s mostly engineers. There’s one marketing person. It’s not that you don’t heart each other, but you don’t collaborate. You feel out of the loop. You actually have no idea what the other person is working on because you don’t understand their language, so their projects don’t become real to you until you see them deployed on the website.

This was my experience for the first six and a half months of oneforty, and it boiled down to a communication issue. Product things that I knew were being worked on had titles I didn’t understand, so I didn’t understand how it could translate into action on my part. (Oh, so this fancy code thing is a sick new website feature that could be promoted in a screencast for our users? Oh, so this feature is actually kinda huge and I should do some blogger outreach about it?)

We devised an incredibly elaborate and complicated solution to this problem. Now, this may be hard to comprehend, so here is the visual map-out:

Ask more questions! Talk to each other more. Explain your projects to each other. Provide some context. In the wise words of one of my engineers, “trust me, you don’t want to hear about every piece of code I push out.” He’s right. I don’t. He doesn’t want to see all of my Tweets either. Don’t micromanage each other – just communicate.

Ever feel like you’re “on an island” at your organization? Here’s my challenge: swim away and communicate. When you’re all in the loop, you don’t feel so alone on the startup rollercoaster. And when you’re communicating things internally, you’re better able to externally communicate new features. So jump in the water. Start swimming.