Communication is the issue

At my last job, the number one piece of feedback I got from my boss was communication. It was always some version of, “Hunter, you need to communicate more. People don’t know what you’re doing on the team. I know you’re up to something, but I don’t know what it is, and you haven’t communicated it with me.” That feedback never landed when I was there and I didn’t understand it until I started my own company. The fact that communication is everything. Communication isn’t just about saying more. It’s about getting the right information in front of the right person at the right time. Just like at my old job, my boss didn't necessarily know what I was working on, what had changed, what’s coming next, or why something matters. I wanted to be in my own little world and have him trust that things were getting done. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. The more I think about it, the more I realize that this applies to almost everything in life. Your ability to get the most important context in front of someone might be one of the most important skills you can have. Your customer needs context. Your boss needs context. Your employees need context. Even the people closest to you need context. And everyone has a limit to how much context they can actually process. Which is why I think it’s funny that so much of the current technology being built is essentially trying to solve the same problem. We’re building things like Model Context Protocol because we want to get all of the relevant pieces of information into one place so an AI model can actually understand what is happening. Eventually, you hit the context limit. There is too much information in the window, and you have to clear it. The human brain isn’t that different. We can only hold so much information at once, and our ability to make good decisions depends heavily on which pieces of information are actually in front of us. The information we leave out can be just as important as the information we include. I recently listened to a podcast about the sales cycle that made me think about this in a different way. A good salesperson doesn’t show you every feature of a product. They show you the features that are most relevant to you. If you have fifty features thrown at you during a thirty-minute demo, you aren’t going to be able to put all of them into context. And even if you could, you probably wouldn’t want to pay for a massive suite of features that you don’t actually need. The salesperson is, in a way, managing your context window. It’s a little nerdy, but I think that’s kind of fun. And honestly, communication is something I still struggle with. The feedback I get most often is still some version of the same thing: communicate more. Speak up. Tell people what you’re doing. Tell people what you’re thinking. Show people your work. I know communication is important, and I know I’m not always great at it. But I’m starting to understand that communication isn’t really about talking more. It’s about making sure the people around you have enough context to understand what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and why it matters. It comes back to one of my favorite advice for building a start up. You can build a great product, but if your distribution sucks, you've got no customers. That's all about effective communication.