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Status updates (that don't) suck

How the best PM's craft concise, precise, and actionable updates for their product leadership team.

Peter Wang

Angeli Mehta

Justin Hales

Most status updates suck.

Too little context. Or too much. Too long. Too complex. And too late.

Often, after spending hours writing status updates, Product Managers are left wondering, “did my boss even read this?”

Great status updates rely on the Goldilocks principle, or the idea that your team is seeking “just the right amount” of everything. While anyone can create a slide deck or write a doc, clear communication is a consciously learned skill—one that can give PM’s superpowers.

In our experience, the best PM’s develop specific habits to make their updates shine. Here are our top 5, along with some suggested reading and templates to get you started quickly.

How Buzzfeed writes status updates

Copy these templates created by Peter Wang, former CTO at Buzzfeed, to communicate effective status updates:

⁠

Project updates template⁠

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Metric updates template⁠

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Team updates template⁠

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Habit #1: Keep updates precise + concise.

Most PM’s include any and all stats, customer quotes, tweets, and charts relevant to the topic.

The best PM’s, like

Albert Einstein⁠

, know that “the definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple.” This is done with precise and concise updates. Status update should be a surgeon’s scalpel, not a firefighter’s water hose.

Tip:

Lyft’s 3P’s⁠

is a good format for this.

Habit #2: Tell a captivating story.

Most PM’s focus on presenting facts and information.

The best PM’s tell stories. They include a hook, a plot, and characters that move through a

story arc⁠

. They embrace visual storytelling.

Tip: Need a quick hack? Just hand-draw a simple diagram in a tool like Figjam or Miro.

Habit #3: Send a pre-read before meetings.

Most PM’s don’t adequately prepare meeting attendees. Meetings can easily be de-railed due to varying levels of context across leadership and stakeholders. This means you finish a meeting without a clear action plan.

The best PM’s send a pre-read one to two days before a meeting to ensure everyone comes into the meeting with the same level of context. Check out

PR/FAQ template⁠

for a quick one-pager example.

Tip: Read this doc from Coda PM David Kossnick to see how pre-reads can improve meeting efficiency:

Catalyst meeting⁠

Habit #4: Capture feedback in a single place.

Most PM’s don’t specify where feedback should be captured. Without explicit direction from the PM, comments and suggestions get scattered across every communication tool inside a company: email, meeting notes, Slack messages, and side conversations.

The best PM’s always pair pre-reads with a feedback tracker. In practice, this is as easy as designating a place for feedback inside the writeup artifact and asking stakeholders to add their feedback in that single spot. This ensures the entire conversation is visible to everyone.

Tip: Read

Two-way writeups⁠

to learn how to gather unbiased feedback and understand how everyone really feels.

Habit #5: Drive action.

Most PM’s wrap up a meeting and forget about the purpose behind the meeting: action. Inaction is the common enemy on your team — and it’s deceptive. You can finish a meeting feeling great, but if nothing happens afterwards you missed the point.

The best PM’s make specific asks from specific people. They organize post-meeting huddles to make sure action items are clear. Their updates focus on how they’re iterating the plan (actions), not just facts about what happened. They take a “what’s next,”

high-agency approach.⁠

⁠

Tip: want to really make your boss’s day? Include an update log in each of your status update so they can quickly see what has changed since the last update. This has three benefits:

Continuity: no need for stakeholders to search for and cross-reference previous updates

Accountability: because updates are pre-pended, teams are more encouraged to follow the previously-communicated narrative versus reframing the narrative.

Collaboration: a doc enables stakeholders to initiative conversations specific portions of the update, instead of replying to all to an email chain.

⁠

What kind of status updates resonate with you and your team? We’d love to see them. Tweet us here:

@peterpeterwang⁠

@AMehta7⁠

@halesjustin⁠

. And if you want to improve your status updates right now, here are three templates to customize and share with your team.

Get the templates

Copy these templates created by Peter Wang, former CTO at Buzzfeed, to communicate effective status updates:

⁠

Project updates template⁠

⁠

Metric updates template⁠

⁠

Team updates template⁠

⁠

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