It’s not easy to write a weekly report (and even harder to stick to it). It can also feel sort of useless to do it as people often won’t read what you write. However, when deployed effectively reports can have a number of positive effects including:
Interactions with stakeholders become more productive as stakeholders are consistently well-informed about the state of things.
Meeting times and meeting volume are cut down since you need to do less context-building during meetings and instead can focus more on solutions.
Stakeholders start addressing issues much earlier than before and voicing their opinions more consistently.
You’ll gain a better understanding of your product and the ebbs and flows of your projects, which will allow you to improve your practices.
This article covers the current model I use (which was workshopped by the PM team at SportsRecruits and through the feedback of many teammates), why I’ve found it effective, and how I’ve tried to keep it valuable week after week.
Weather Reports:
Weather reports are simple; they’re an update on how things are going in your domain, clearly highlighting which areas have clear skies and which areas have stormy weather.
The report is concise and uses clear imagery (through weather emojis) to help others quickly screen and prioritize information.
By doing this, weather reports allow teams to quickly gather key information about your roadmap, ask questions, dig deeper, and, most importantly, act quickly.
Weather Report Dos:
Focus on the key things: Highlight the top 5 things on your roadmap that you want stakeholders to be aware of and potentially involved in.
Be concise: The more words, the harder it is to find what matters. Brevity is essential for the report to be read by others.
This is where discussions start: Think of the report as the starting point for discussions, work sessions, and other connection points and not as the endpoint.
Emojis for focus: Use weather emojis at the beginning of each bullet to highlight how you’re feeling and make your report easy to skim:
☀️ ”Sunny” This is going great!
🌤️ ⛅ 🌥️ ”Partly Cloudy” There are aspects of this that are going well, and there are aspects that I’m unsure about because they need definition or have the potential to become issues.
☁️ ”Cloudy” There are a lot of aspects that I’m unsure about.
🌧️ ”Rainy” There are issues here. We should be able to resolve them, but I want to point them out.
⛈️ ”Storming” There are some serious issues here. The team is going to need some help to resolve these issues.
🌪️ ”Tornado” Oh shit! We need to figure this out.
Keep a cadence: Publish these weekly so that everyone builds a routine of checking these for information.
Make it interactive: Include videos, links, and demos to make the team's progress tangible and ideally interactive for anyone wanting to learn more.
Ask for feedback: Make sure to ask for feedback on the value of your reports and what others would like to see in them. This will help you refine your writing over time.
Weather Report Don’ts:
Oversell or overpolish your update: You should report on the ground truth, especially if it’s challenging, so that others can step in and help. If you hide a problem, it’s on you if it gets worse.
Skip weeks regularly: The more consistent you are, the likelier issues or opportunities will be spotted. It’s okay to skip it sometimes if you’re totally overwhelmed, but the report should come first in most weeks, given its impact on others.
Overwrite. The more information in a report, the more that information turns to noise. There’s a sweet spot between too much and not enough. You’re trying to find that sweet spot every week.
Overwork and don’t do it if you and others are not experiencing value. Ultimately, every workflow that fails fails because it requires too much from people or because there’s no belief that it is valuable. Pursue reporting with the mindset of creating value but doing so efficiently.
Example weather report:
🌧️ Outage related to transcoding bug
What happened:
The transcoding queue didn't correctly prioritize jobs for about 3 hours, from 11:30 to 14:30 EST.
This led to around 526 video files getting stuck in the queue without finishing, affecting 256 users.
This issue was a result of the recent change to the prioritization approach for transcoding.
What we’ve done since and what’s next:
We have since processed these jobs and implemented a failsafe for future failures.
However, this failsafe will not work in the long run, so we’re going to schedule work to better address the issue and its underlying causes.
Additional Links:
For a technical breakdown of what happened and what the failsafe is see this link: {{link}}
🚀 New data cleanup tools
The new data cleanup tools are officially out this week! They will help reduce time spent on integration-related issues where user data is misaligned.
Additional Links:
Here’s a guide on how it works: {{link}}
Here’s a demo of it working: {{link}}
🌤️ Updated user signup flow.
I'm currently running inventory on the release to determine if there’s anything left, but, likely, all of the work is officially out of dev and in team testing/ready for QA.
We’ve found some areas of code around the account creation endpoint that need to be refactored, but we’ve agreed to do this post-release.
Additional Links:
Relevant tickets: {{link}}
See designs here: {{link}}
Try it out in this demo environment: {{link}}
🌞 New and improved favoriting feature
This week, we had a design review on the latest progress and discussed the technical approach. The review specifically covered cleaning up the existing system, adding the ability to bulk favorite, and permeating favorites across other features.
From here, we’ll start ironing out the first release and continue to iterate across the different areas of the project. As the initial release definition starts coming together, we should have a much more robust update next week.
Additional Links:
Check out the technical approach doc: {{link}}
Check out the current designs here: {{link}}