In early 2016, we faced a problem at Shopify. We were growing quickly, and decisions could no longer be made across the room, so to speak. Four offices became five, accommodating that growth raised interesting questions like: how would new people know the history of the company, and how could existing Shopifolk keep up with new developments? In addition to sharing knowledge inside the company, we also wanted to let people outside Shopify know what we were working on to give back to the community and to support recruitment efforts. Engineering communications was born to solve a specific problem. A valued saying here is “do things, tell people,” but, while we’re very good at the first part, we weren’t living up to expectations on the second. Ad hoc worked when we were smaller, but with technical stories now coming from teams as varied as production engineering, mobile, front-end development, and data engineering, we needed something more formalized. Strong communications inside the engineering team could help prevent the overlap of work by different teams or the duplication of mistakes, and it could support cross-pollination of ideas.
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