Creating valuable status updates

On making updates easy to craft and ensuring they are consumed

Ah, status updates. If there was one topic which elicits some intense emotions from product managers, it is sending status updates. I have seen companies where PMs spend hours each week crafting the most detailed status update emails and also companies where PMs never send any updates about their products.

Universally, status updates get a bad rep because:

1. they take time to craft

2. people don’t read them

This is an unfortunate mix!

I personally believe status updates provide value in keeping stakeholders informed of progress, and can help you get unblocked by raising visibility of challenges as they arise. But there is a time/effort tradeoff for creating these, which is why making them quick to craft & building an internal company culture where status updates are read, is key to their effectiveness.

Making status updates easy to craft

To solve the first challenge- making status updates quick to craft- I recommend doing some upfront work at the beginning of your project to identify the audience, content, and cadence of status update. For e.g. a project which directly ties to a top-level company OKR could warrant a weekly update with audience including execs in addition to the team. Another project, which is less critical, might warrant sending a monthly update, with the audience being team or functionally specific.

Whether you send a status update weekly or monthly, you can make it an easy to repeat process by creating a template you can re-use. I use the following simple template as a starting point and modify as needed given the details of the project.

Simple starter template for project status updates

Ensuring your status updates are consumed

At larger companies I worked for, there was an executive leadership process around consuming status updates. At LinkedIn, teams would send out weekly progress updates on Thursdays, which the exec team would then review on Fridays, having discussions on whether company-wide priorities needed to be changed based on the updates. At Niantic, the product team would meet to review progress on Fridays, with the exec team meeting on Monday to review those updates and take action.

The biggest challenge was making sure there weren’t clashing status update processes between different functions or orgs. Some examples:

• Product and engineering separately creating and reporting the same status update into their functional leaders

• Functional leaders or orgs having a separate cadence of status update sharing from the executive team’s process

The outcome from having multiple, competing status update systems is that people spend a lot of time creating updates and there are too many updates providing the same information in different ways, leading to noise & loss of value. This then causes disenfranchisement among those responsible for creating updates.

The best way to gain value out of status updates is to have one streamlined process across your company. If you are an org leader, take ownership to simplify status reporting across your company. As a contributor, you can speak up and shine visibility on inefficient status update processes. I have been on both ends of the spectrum.

Finally, make sure the content of your status update is valuable for readers. The key is to clearly communicate:

• Is the project on track?

• What was the progress from your previous update?

• Are there any blockers that someone can help with?

A healthy and streamlined status update culture, is effortless for creators, highly valuable for consumers, and helps key projects stay on track by providing visibility into challenges, blockers and trade-offs.

Do you send status updates for your projects? What works well in your company, and what are your challenges?