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Status updates (that don't) suck

Project updates template
Project updates template

How to effectively communicate the impact and health of a project.

How to effectively communicate the impact and health of a project.

Peter Wang

Use this template to effectively communicate the impact and health of a project. To get started, copy this page, customize it for your own project, then share it with your team.

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Copy this page

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Impact: Why are we investing in this project?

Be sure to quantify impact and effort whenever possible, and be as explicit as possible.

Benefits to the user

Example: Improve product recommendation feed to help users discover more relevant products.

Benefits to the business

Example: we project 10% increase in shopping conversion on recommended products.

Effort

Example:

Planned length of time: 4 weeks.

teams involved: led by the Commerce Tech team, with assist from the ML + Commerce Content teams.

Timing

Example: We target launch two weeks ahead of Prime Day to capitalize on the spike in shopping (expecting 10x in traffic this season).

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Health: Are we on track?

Use colors: Quickly show progress and risks with colors. Projects that are at risk or off track should be coupled with a remediation plan to answer the question to put the project back on track.

Articulate the why: Show cause→effect relationships or make a specific ask. For example: team attrition putting capacity at risk, scope creep exceeding original expectation, or a new dependency.

Share new learnings: Include data, dependencies, or potential risks that are new to the team.

Use visuals: Embed mocks, prototypes, or recorded demos to tell a story.

Project health options

Project health options

Status

Indicating

Probability of shipping on time

🟢 On Track

On track as expected.

75%

🟡 At risk

At risk of not hitting our target date.

50-74%

🔴 Off Track

Requires re-evaluation.

<50%

There are no rows in this table

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Example project health update

This project is

Blank

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Setbacks

Data integrity: A subset of our feature store data was found to be unreliable not usable due to invalid input data. It took us an additional sprint to create a new model based on the new feature store.

Attrition: One of our senior front-end engineer put in his notice last week. The good news is we have identified an internal transfer instead of opening a backfill, which would delay our project significantly Since the earliest internal transfer possible is beginning of 2023, we need to update our target date back two weeks to 2/3 from 1/20.

Wins

Offline tests showed a 9.3% average conversation rate. See chart below:

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