As you go further into your software development career, you will need to be thoughtful about communication patterns. One of the skills you will need to master is communicating progress in a way that is meaningful for senior leadership.
This post is a penance for a recent transgression. It is very easy to give a weekly status email that tells you everything that is in progress and conveys almost zero useful information to the recipient.
Engineering leaders need to become accustomed to answering the following questions in their updates:
Is everything on schedule?
Are there any new risks that need to be discussed or managed?
It is very easy to write an email describing the weekly activities of your organization in a way that does not answer any of these questions.
Making sure that leadership is aware of any changes to completion dates for a project, and identifying areas where there is increased risk is very important.
You might make an assumption that there are no changes to a schedule, and that there are no changes to risk in a weekly report. I would encourage you to add that explicitly to your email in the future—especially if it is a long status email.
While it is nice to convey your team’s status at this level, it might prove to be dense and inscrutable further up the chain. They will want to have a quick one or two sentence summary rather than digging through the email to confirm the overall project status.
It is a good habit to get into, and one you can start tomorrow regardless of your current level of seniority.
That’s it. That’s the whole post. You might find shorter posts are highly correlated with holidays. I will be outside trying to climb the neighborhood Halloween decorations leaderboard for the balance of the day. I would love to shamelessly give you an Amazon Affiliate link to some of the merchandise I am putting in the yard, but it is better to go buy all this stuff on discount from the various halloween stores and aisles on discount in 48 hours. This is how you can fight “The Inflation” for next year.
See you next week!
