How Huli went from siloed teams to company-wide cohesion
HuliLabs is a Costa Rican health tech startup that's been providing end-to-end solutions for both patients and doctors since 2013. They develop platforms for doctors and patients all over Latin America: HuliPractice for doctors and hospitals, HuliVida for patients and HuliHealth, a medical directory. Their team is made up of over 60 people, with offices in Costa Rica, Mexico, and Panama.
We got to chat with Steve Vega,HuliLabs' CTO, about:
- The difficulties of scaling team values
- Why good tools are essential to align team values and team practices
- How Slite has become their company's internal wiki
Breaking down established silos
HuliLabs' preaches ownership and transparency to empower all employees to make decisions and call some of the company's shots. With six established departments, they encourage reporting and documenting across teams to ensure company-wide cohesion.
Any growing team knows that it's one thing to preach team values and another to put them into practice. At HuliLabs' fast growth caught up to them and before they knew it they were working in silos. Steve told us every department started their own documenting system making information hard to retrieve and share.
“We needed a place where everyone could easily discover and collaborate on our strategy, principles, values and missions” —Steve Vega, CTO of Huli
Despite strongly enforced values, their collaboration processes were getting in the way of cross-team collaboration and autonomy, and ultimately their team values. That's why they started using Slite across the company "to make looking, discovering and collaborating on information easy," Steve said, "we needed a place where everyone could find strategy, principles, values, missions, and vision."
And it worked: the silos between teams are breaking down and centralizing information has made departments more efficient. For example, the support and technical teams discovered their processes overlapped. More generally, they now have a place to optimize company-wide best practices and easily discover team-specific information.
An easy to adopt solution: choosing Slite
How did Steve convince all 6 departments to migrate all their documenting habits to Slite? Earlier this year, he and some of his colleagues were attending SaaStr in San Francisco. They were gathering precious knowledge and learnings but realized they had no convenient place to centralize it and share it with everyone back home.
That's when they ran into Slite. They introduced the tool on Slack, encouraging everyone to go check out their Saastr takeaways there. Quickly, it became obvious Slite could turn into their new internal documentation tool, solving their internal collaboration frictions. The product team was the first to fully adopt Slite until the five other departments followed suit.
Steve explained that Slite met two crucial criteria for them:
“The tool we chose had to make documentation easy to collaborate on and easy to find. Otherwise, no one would use it.”
Spotlight on their use cases
Some of their most common use cases include:
- Weekly newsletter for the entire company where every team gives an updates
- Onboarding new employees
- The other departments document their processes in public channels: from marketing to tech to sales, it's become their company wiki
- For example, the product team shares release notes and all their product docs in Slite
We couldn't be more excited to have empowered Huli to fully live up to their team values. Most channels are public so information stays discoverable to everyone—the total opposite of what was happening previously. They organize their Slite in channels with general themes such as "Projects" "Internal processes" and add collections of each department to sort the information within the channels.