This piece is specifically more about Meta’s unique culture of “posting” about things but I imagine it can be a useful reference on communication in general. Many people loathe this process and complains about how it’s just a lot of “self-promotion” and while there’s definitely some truth to it, it’s also a valuable communication avenue that you can leverage to your advantage. As we will explore further below, posting by itself is more of a bonus as the post will still require actual substance (which is your work lol).
This is part of a series (The Opinionated Engineer) where I share my strong opinions on engineering practices.
Proposing an idea
A common theme of complains you might see in a work environment is how someone else steals your idea. Making a post serves as a paper-trail on this being your idea as the original author. It’s also a useful cross-referencing tool when you ran into discussions where your (previously suggested) idea could be a solution, you can share a link instead of going through your idea all over again. By itself, it also serves as a valuable RFC where others are free to comment with their concerns and / or how they feel about things in general. From there, you could gather feedback or even retool your idea a little to eventually become a valuable proposal and contribution towards your team goal.
Tracking progress
When working on a long running project (especially one involving many different people in different stages), posts serve as a good way to track and announce progress, signaling to others if / when they need to start getting involved or otherwise. It’s also a valuable communication tool where others can keep track of your project if it ended up affecting their own project (intentionally or otherwise). One of the more common “behavioral” gap issue for an E4 -> E5 promo is where an E4 can quietly work through the project and launch everything themselves while an E5 would communicate this clearly (outwardly) before even starting to ensure that their project do not end up conflicting timeline of other partner teams unintentionally.
Wrapping up a project
Often times (especially on a long running complex project) by the time it comes to finally closing out the project, everyone is exhausted and you’re just glad that “it’s done” and you can finally move on to the next thing. This is frequently a missed opportunity to nicely wrap up the project and show your appreciation towards everyone who helped make it happen. It’s like you went through all the trouble picking the perfect gift, understanding which variant fits them best, finding where to get one, but didn’t bother to wrap the gift in a wrapper or a nice little gift bag. Nothing wrong with it, and the value of the gift is still good but having a nice wrapper or even just a little ribbon would’ve been a cherry on top of the perfect gift. Similarly, making a post wrapping up the launch and sending thanks to everyone who supported the launch goes a long way in terms of both visibility and relationship building.
Calling out potential issues
Honestly this section kinda feels like just spelling out “regular social interactions” but sometimes it just needs to be said. Both as an author or as a reader of a post, you should take the opportunity to raise any potential issue you might be concern about in the comment of the post. As an author, this allows you to essentially crowdsource potential solution to your concern (maybe someone else has a “solution looking for a problem” lol). As a reader, you might have different perspective that sees potential risks that the author might have missed, or they figured it out but made an assumption that others would know, your question allows them to clarify their thought process or solution to your question.
There are some exception where if you think something is not suitable to be discussed in such an open setting but that’s largely up to your own discretion.
Pre-read from Subject Matter Experts
Sometimes you have an idea on stuff you might not be super familiar with (or at least not something you’re seen as an expert) and that’s fine. But it can be valuable to leverage people around you for their expert opinion. It’s also a great way to build work relationship as people like to be seen as an expert. I’ve largely found most people to be helpful and open to help look at whatever you’ve written as long as you have some level of relationship with them (be it working on a previous project together or trauma bonding through SEVs). Having a SME review your post provides credibility to the things you’re writing / proposing and helps get your stuff attention from the correct stakeholders.
Wrap up
Admittedly, this is less of an opinion piece and more of a “how to” (or “how I do x”) piece. I don’t expect this to change minds entirely on your take about how this is just a lot of self-promotion theatrics but I hope to at least provide a framework on how to use this to your own advantage.