My LEAD class was discussing information silos the other day, and it struck me that most information silos we talk about are the results of implicit decision making. For example, perhaps a person wants to share information, but they are waiting for a better time to deliver it. Or a person wants information from someone, but doesn’t want to step on another person’s toes, so they delay asking for that information. These are examples of gut feelings impact information silos, instead of an explicit decision.

However, I have been in situations where teams deliberated debated information sharing, the argument arising because of fundamentally different management philosophies.

The team was encountering its first SEV0. Some employees at companies that held enterprise contracts with us were on the wrong version of Dropbox Paper. We had multiple versions of Dropbox Paper, and had been giving consumer users the newest version with a major technical difference to try. Our enterprise clients were on a slightly older but more technically stable version at the time. Somehow, our enterprise clients were ending up with the consumer product, essentially alienating them from their enterprise organization.

We had an official list of companies this outage had impacted, and as we were fixing the issue, we were faced with the decision of either alerting the client to the outage as we fixed it, alerting the salesperson in charge of the client to then delegate communication work to the salesperson, or not alerting clients/salespeople who hadn’t detected the outage at all.

I thought it was inappropriate to not share the information at all, and personally then wanted to inform the salesperson to delegate communications. I felt that I couldn’t make an appropriate communication strategy without understanding each of the clients impacted, and since the impacted list was on the order of hundreds, this was infeasible.

My manager had a different perspective, since he did not trust our Sales team due to his prior experiences. He wanted to establish a communication strategy that didn’t require Sales’ buy-in.

Our disagreement caused the issue to be escalated to our VP of Enterprise, whose management philosophy was closer to mine than my manager’s. He believed in a culture of trust and delegation, and envisioned a company where Sales and Product teams worked closely together.

Delegating communications to our Sales team in this instance proved to be a successful strategy and greatly improved relationships between me, my product organization, and the Sales team. In the short term, we had no further client complaints or issues, and our SEV0 was resolved successfully and quickly. In the long-term, Sales felt comfortable sharing information back to me, which improved the quality of my work as well.