A Guide to Effective Bi-Weekly Team Updates
As your company grows, you find that people have meetings to just hear what each other is working on. While these “water cooler” conversations in the age of remote work can be great...
As your company grows, you find that people have meetings to just hear what each other is working on. While these “water cooler” conversations in the age of remote work can be great, they can also be productivity killers. Calendars start to get so full with people connecting that no real work is getting done week after week.
Along my career, I adopted a simple way to keep everyone in the company informed while minimizing meetings. Every 2 weeks, Directors from each department do a bi-weekly email update (every 2 weeks) on their teams accomplishments. Why Directors? They tend to have the best vantage point to both aggregate whats happening across multiple departments while also being close-enough to the daily/weekly tasks to answer questions that internal stakeholders may have. This way, not every person feels the need to give an update (also a waste of time), but Directors can be the “Directors” giving guidance on whats happening, when and by whom.
The format of this email update is below:
Overview:
Give a brief overview of the biggest win of the last 2 weeks.
What is going well that you’ll continue doing? What is going poorly that you’ll stop?
Risks and Issues:
This is the departments opportunity to ask for help. Does someone in the company have deep experience in this? Does the founder know someone who can give advice? Does another department need to unblock them?
Last 2 Weeks:
Green/Yellow/Red: followed by the task or goal to be completed. Is the department on-track, falling behind or at risk?
This allows for team transparency and accountability.
Sample:
Bi-Weekly Product Status - 12.12.22
Overview:
This week the product team finalized all product requirements for our Safari Extension and held a kickoff meeting with our Phase 1 engineers to gain alignment on all these requirements.
We will continue these kickoff calls for new features, as they allow us to align and ask questions on the spot - rather than wait for email feedback which can take one week to compile and ends in a call anyway.
We will kill our daily standup in a favor of a weekly team standup so we can get more done each morning.
Risks and Issues:
Two developers on our Enhanced Search module came down with COVID last week. We’re behind schedule by 4 days of work.
Last 2 Weeks:
Green:SSO Compatibility - We’re on track to deliver our SSO compatibility with Okta on December 30th. We’ve completed phase one of testing and will begin phase 2 this week.Green:Chrome Extension - Were on track for our 10.2 update to our Chrome Extension that includes enhanced cart features and size attributes. Update should be live on Chrome on December 30th.Yellow:Enhanced Search - We’re behind by 4 days on our Enhanced Search module as two engineers are out due to COVID. We have one full stack engineer working on this in the meantime, but will update status to red when we are 7 business days behind on deliverables.Red:Client Integration - We’re blocked and awaiting User Acceptance Testing to be completed by Client A.