Crafting Weekly Updates
A tool for managers to ensure alignment inside the engineering organization.
A big part of my job as a manager is ensuring people are aligned.
I'm responsible for keeping my team updated on what’s happening in the company while ensuring they’re focused on what matters.
On the other hand, I also want to make sure the senior leadership knows what’s going on down to the teams I manage and what our goals are.
My preferred way of keeping everyone on the same page is sending weekly updates to senior leadership and the teams I work with.
Weekly updates make my life as a manager much easier as it ensures everyone is aligned on the team’s focus, along with small wins throughout the week.
I like sending them every Friday. It’s enough time to have something to share while I don't spend too much time doing it.
Who, When, and How
Every company and team works differently. I'll fail to recommend “the right way” of doing this.
I sent the updates every Friday at the end of the day to the senior leadership and the team members using slack and Notion.
I'd duplicate the weekly updates template, write it down, and send a link of the document over slack to the team members and the senior leadership, together with the summary,
Hey, here is the week updates for team X.
The team is focusing on milestone Y we estimate shipping in the next 4~6 weeks. We made progress towards 45% o the milestone and we keep focusing on it.
You can read it in full here (link)
Start with a summary.
Start with a summary. You can call it a TLDR; for your update.
I will describe whether that was a good week and the plans for next week.
Keep it short, three paragraphs at maximum.
Focus on giving a brief overview of how the week was. Highlight wins, challenges, and changes that happened in the team.
Example
The team is focusing on milestone Y we estimate shipping in the next 4~6 weeks. We made progress towards 45% o the milestone and we keep focusing on it.
The team is struggling with dependencies over System Y that we plan to remove next week with team X.
Wins and challenges
Use the Wins and Challenges section to praise your team and share lessons learned on things that didn’t work out.
Delivering on commitments and reaching milestones deserves recognition. Use this opportunity to keep the senior leadership aware of the team’s progress and victories.
Wins and Failures happen all the time, and the only way you can improve is to recognize when something didn’t work out so the team can try something different next time.
Example
- Delivered JIRA-111 which is now in production under a feature flag
- System X faced a 8 minutes downtime on June 17, 2022 2:17 PM — Post Mortem link
- John Doe gave a presentation on App Security best practices
What we’re focusing on next
Describe at a very high level the goals for next week.
I prefer sending this at the end of the day Friday because, by them, I'd already aligned with the team what they think are reasonable goals for the following week.
In this section, I'm simply sharing those goals with the senior leadership and reinforcing them with the team members.
I prefer to under-commit and over-deliver every week. I encourage the team not to be so bold and commit to less.
Not delivering on your goals will happen, but you don't want this to happen weekly. Commit, review, adjust.
Pick one thing that needs to get done the following week. That should be the top priority. Add a couple of more items, and you're done. Define reasonable goals.
Example
- Focus on removing the dependency on JIRA-222 ship it under a FF
- Work on Post Mortem #123 items to prevent any further down times
- Start upstream on Jira-444 and hopefully finish it by Friday
Important notes
Changes or events that affect the team that worth mentioning.
Is someone taking time off? Important event ahead? Is someone new joining the team?
Make sure to keep folks updated on things that will impact the team.
Example
- John Doe is taking next Friday as PTO
- We have a new team member, Alice, joining on @July 4, 2022 as Backend Engineer. You can see her Linkedin here.
Ending notes
Weekly reviews helped me create a strong alignment between senior leadership and the team members by sharing the same thing at the same time and ensuring people know where we're going and how we're doing.
I hope you can find it helpful somehow.
Here is a template on Notion if you want to start this technique. Don't get attached to the section names, be creative.
Consistency is key.
Bye!