As your team grows you need to move from organic conversations to structured ones.
I think this is good and necessary - but there is a downside.
The downside is that organic conversations are more human and more personal. So it's important to think about the cost to people, emotionally and interpersonally, as you put constraints in place about who can talk about in which forums.
In situations like this I find it's always worth having half an eye on the human perspective.
Strip out the fact that people are at work doing a job part of a team etc - what do we humans want from our relationships and how is communication part of that? I think one of the big things is empathy. We want to feel understood. We want to feel like we are not alone. We also want to feel respected, and that we are valued by others.
"I want my team's work to be understood by this other team - I want them to feel that our work is as valuable as their work"
"I do not want to feel alone with all the thoughts and feelings I am having about these projects that I am working on"
So, in streamlining and structuring communications between teams (which I think is a good thing!) - it can be helpful to have this perspective open about "how can we help people meet the needs that are driving their current way of communicating?".
Another way of looking at this: in product design you work with personas because you cannot make a unique product for each user. So instead you create a ‘persona’, an abstract imaginary version of a person, and you design for them. If you do this process well then you will have created a persona that cases the most number of people the least amount of pain from being shoe-horned into a slightly depersonalised box. As you grow your organisation, this is also a great goal to have.
