what if my company does not have this common platform ? Can I use standup instead- of course audience would be only my team

"If anyone has a question they could come to me" also sounds to me like "single point of failure" ... how can we differentiate?

Without Workplace, it's generally Slack. Standup is better for smaller things. If you work in a very traditional company, email probably.

Love the question about being an SPOF! I think the main thing is having a backup/working through others. Generally what would happen as I led projects is after I stabilized them, I would have an L5/L4 I was mentoring do some updates too.

The best tech leads IMHO bring up the entire team. It was *super* common to see a staff engineer take a very ambiguous project, make it clear (which includes a ton of update posts/messages), and after it's in a good place, hand a lot of it off to senior/mid-level engineers they were leading/mentoring to give them more visibility/skills/credit.

So a "meta" point here (pun unintended):

1. A lot of engineers hate communication/technical writing, so a lot of the time, you can just fill in the gap by being an expert communicator/translator. I've found this to be a generally straightforward way to find senior/staff scope.

2. I have seen the opposite. In the later days of my time at Instagram Ads, people realized that being the main communicator made you look good. So people would fight to write update posts… And then not enough people to code.

It varies a lot based on the org. Rahul's advice about communication won't be easily applicable to every org/team.

The main thing about being a Staff engineer in particular is filling in the gaps. Communication/alignment can be one of those gaps, but not always.
If you want to understand how Rahul and I do technical writing, you can just read our written responses in the Taro Q&A career advice database

Q: How do you check for alignment with the other person in verbal communication? How do you check if all parties in the verbal communication are satisfied?

1. You can always ask them for an "ack". Let's say you just give a big info dump. You can ask something like, "Does that make sense?" Sometimes I'll throw in something after to lighten the mood like "I know I just said a bunch of spaghetti." Also read their body language!

2. For satisfaction, I think the same tactics apply. The ultimate test is nobody coming up to you later in the future and being like, “Wait, I didn't realize you were doing that, why didn't you tell me?” <- Even after many years at Meta, this still happened to me sometimes lol

As Rahul mentioned earlier, it is effectively impossible to over-communicate. 99% of the time, engineers are under-communicating. It's probably higher like 99.5%.

There's a lot of value in sharing that "Oh wow, nothing weird happened to the project this week"

lol, that was my ques...how do u say nothing happened ? ...

When things went smoothly, I generally use the update post as a thanks mechanism. So let's say my project consists of systems X, Y, and Z (and those often break) - If the week went all, I'll thank the owners of those systems in my update post for holding down the fort and being great stewards of their components.

Writing updates isn't only for alignment - If done well, you can use them to build social capital/relationships.

What mechanisms were in place to ensure standup updates are within the time limit and having the right  level of detail ?

Timebox standup! Someone needs to own keeping it short and politely cutting folks off if they go on for 3+ minutes each.
Spicy take: Just kill stand-up and make it async. That's generally what my teams have done across my career

On the standup updates question - That's interesting - thanks

One piece of advice that a mentor gave me re: medium selection is that Slack should be used for real-time communication and email should be used for conversations which require thoughtful responses that might take some time to generate, e.g. feedback on an API proposal.

+1 to the medium selection. At Meta, Workplace replaced email, but most places don't use Workplace I think.

The art of running meetings is easily like a 1-2 hour session on its own.

yea, thats an interesting topic... I struggled with it in my prev work esp when ur team is workng on different projects simultaneously