The joys (and pitfalls) of collaboration 👯♂️
Plus: tools, podcast templates, and a ton of jobs
Hey there audio storytellers,
This week I have an interview for you, with podcaster and workflow extraordinaire Alina Serebryany. Alina is the CEO and co-founder of Echo Echo, a tool which helps teams create brilliant audio stories. Here she offers her tips on how to successfully work with other humans — plus shares a few of her go-to tools (including her custom podcast workflow templates).
What have you learned about working collaboratively?
I have always been interested in the art (and science) of collaboration; it’s what I went to school for and what I spent a lot of my career focused on: designing systems and technology for people to collaborate.
But I’ve also had my fair share of struggles in working collaboratively. In fact, my first audio collaboration was with a group of friends. Poorly defined roles and boundaries resulted in a podcast that was in production for months but never got released. Some of my key takeaways from that experience were:
Create clear roles and responsibilities that people stick to. Have someone who owns the vision and provides the final say on decisions/directions.
When you’re working on a passion project and people have full-time jobs, it’s easy for timelines to start slipping. Consider launching sooner (even when it’s less than perfect) just to keep some of the momentum going and keep everyone accountable to listeners.
If you’re working with friends, create distinct time for both ‘work’ and casual conversation. You’re going to need a lot more conversation to navigate both types of relationships.
Which podcasts are especially good at collaboration?
Since I was previously working on a show about podcast collaborations, I got some great insights into some awesome working teams. With independent projects you see a lot of collaborations that feel like creative partnerships: two people totally in sync with each other. It felt that way especially with Artin Aroutounians and James Kim of Moonface, and George the Poet and Benbrick of Have You Heard George's Podcast?.
What’s striking is these partnerships have fairly specific roles and hierarchy, while also maintaining an ability to feel comfortable questioning and contributing. All members have a deep trust and respect for the others’ areas of expertise. A lot of creative partnerships have this ability to marry their respect for each other with an open space for learning.
My observation (both in podcasting and outside of it) has been that with teams that have been hired to work together, it takes work to create an environment of psychological safety. Sometimes that happens through team members sharing what’s really going on for them outside of the work context.
What are the benefits of working in a team vs going solo?
Where do I begin? At a fundamental level, I actually think you learn more [in a team], whether it’s in the form of hard skills and workflows, or social skills and dealing with your own emotions. I also think there’s something magical about being able to bounce ideas off other people, resulting in something very different to what you could have created on your own.
The truth is though, I’m a believer that it’s very rare that anything is actually created solo. I think there’s this false idea outside of podcasting that shows are hosted, created, and edited by one or two people. Maybe sometimes that’s the case, but ambitious audio is rarely made in a vacuum.
When I interviewed James and Artin about Moonface, I asked them: “How many people have been involved [in the podcast] over the years?” James said at least 26. The more we realize that work is created collaboratively, the more I hope we’ll start to dispel some of the unreasonable expectations we put on ourselves to create something incredible without anyone’s help.
What are your fave tools for working collaboratively?
When it comes to communication, I think it’s helpful to have both synchronous check-ins and asynchronous ones. When I’m working on an independent project, we have a weekly meeting on Zoom and then use Slack asynchronously. With teams, I’ve been using Tandem which basically sits on your desktop and you can hop into an audio-only or audio and video chat at any time.
My main tool for project management is Notion, which is kind of like Google Drive meets Trello meets Wiki. I’m big into templatizing a lot of my work, and I've created templates for different types of podcasts (both collaborative and solo, narrative and chat). These open source links to my templates can be copied from here:
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What I’m listening to
🎧 This week I caught up on an episode of KCRW’s Life Examined I’ve been meaning to get to as the topic has been on my mind a lot lately: Does having children really make us happier? Did it provide any concrete answers to the dilemma? Uh, no not really... but it was useful to hear well-reasoned insights from researchers exploring the environmental and psychological impacts of the decision to have kids.
📺 I also came across this nifty Kurzgesagt animation of an episode of John Green’s wonderful podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed. It’s about hand paintings and caves and humanity, and… well, just give it a watch.