Hey, Ashwin here! Welcome to edition #10 of the Tech Lead Compass newsletter!
Many of my readers find it hard to manage stakeholders. And yet, this is something you do more often as a tech leader.
In this first post of the stakeholder management series, let’s talk about a topic that we hate but can’t live without – status reports.
Status report emails are often the most “filtered” ones, ending up in a folder that never gets opened. But that doesn’t mean the stakeholders are not interested in the status… they just hate the way it is reported!
3-Speed Reporting
From my experience across a wide range of stakeholders, information is often expected at 3 different speeds.
On-demand (fast) – get the information when they need it, without having to contact anybody
Concise (slow) – get them the information in a way they can easily digest
Details as needed (slowest) – they can go into finer details as needed
Often, preference is given to #1 or #2, with #3 being used for information that they care about (e.g., a big failure or escalation)
About 80-85% of stakeholder expectations are addressed by one of these 3 modes.
As someone responsible for reporting status, like a project manager, it becomes important to address these modes.
How do you do that?
The Reporting Sweet Spot!
Here’s a recommendation that works with most. However, you must understand the expectations and tailor it for any specific needs.
3 recommended ways to report information that is proven to work are:
Information radiators / Dashboards – on-demand, single-page view of status and visualization of key metrics
TLDR Summary – a condensed summary of not more than 6 bullet points that highlight important aspects and key messages
Double-click Reports – a detailed report, not more than 2 pages, that has a double-click of key messages in the TLDR summary
Also, include a specific section that calls out actions for the stakeholder – it can be an approval or have them enable a smooth progress.
Here’s a sample email structure that you can use – covering all of the above:
I hope these tips help you make the status reports useful, once again!
Now on to the must-read news from the past week…
5 “Must-Read” Tech News for the Week
GitHub launched Copilot Workspace which aims to assist developers throughout the software development process by leveraging “Copilot-powered agents.” These agents help developers brainstorm ideas, plan, write code, test, and run it, all using natural language.
An empty AWS S3 bucket took the internet by storm! (Medium post)
Maciej was just another developer, who created an empty S3 bucket. He woke up the next day to find a $1300 bill against it! AWS charging you for unauthorized access to your buckets took the internet by storm.
Apple is apparently poaching Googlers and building a secretive AI team in Zurich. With pressure mounting to bring in more AI features into iOS and macOS, it is inevitable.
Freshworks’ star CEO Girish passes the baton and redesignates himself as an executive chairman (MoneyControl)
Girish Mathrubootham founded Freshworks in 2010, a home-grown SaaS platform, and grew it to a billion-dollar firm, including a Nasdaq listing. He announced his redesignation as an executive chairman to focus more on long-term product vision.
But the market didn’t react very well and the stock price went down by 20%+ before mildly recovering.
WhatsApp and Meta threaten to leave India over encryption row (Business Standard)
In a dramatic turn of events, WhatsApp and its parent company Meta have issued an ultimatum: they will cease their services in India if forced to compromise end-to-end encryption and disclose user data to the government. The clash unfolded at the Delhi High Court, where WhatsApp and Meta challenged India’s 2021 IT rules for social media intermediaries, specifically objecting to the requirement to identify the initial source of information.
That’s it for now and I will be back next week. Goodbye, until then!
In case you missed the past articles, feel free to read them from here:
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