One of the most important skills for a product manager is communication. Communicating with stakeholders are a key part of your job in keeping products and roadmaps aligned. It’s always best to over communicate otherwise, some information may be missed or misunderstood. Studies have shown that we are now in a world where the average person spends less than 2.5 minutes reading an email. With that in mind you need to be aware of ensuring that the communications that you are writing get the key points across within that timeframe. Effective communication can help you keep your team, stakeholders, and customers informed and engaged about the progress and challenges of your product development. In this post, we will highlight how you can optimize your status updates to your stakeholders and become a more effective communicator.
Know your audience
If the audience for your status updates are your engineering team, they are already deeply involved and have an intimate knowledge of the project. For this audience, more granularity on the tasks should be part of the communication. Whether that is showing the tasks that have been completed, remaining, or that need more attention, this granularity helps everyone on the team align on what the next steps are. If the audience for these updates are managers or executive level members, you need to up-level the updates. The capacity of managers or higher is limited, they need their emails to be as streamlined as possible. Showing them a task list is not a good use of their time and will likely result in them not reading the entire update. Here are some ways you can optimize your updates for this audience:
Be detailed but brief in the subject line
The subject line of your update is the first thing people will read and will be deciding factor in determining if the open it or not. Email subject lines should be attention grabbing, but not alarming and should match the content of the status update.
Use subheadings, numbered and bulleted lists to highlight key information
Most people will be scanning through emails, multi-tasking in a meeting or in a call. Keeping your updates organized in subheadings and bullets allows your stakeholders to scan and easily determine what’s important and makes it an overall easier read.
Important details at the top
If there are changes in scope timelines or resources, this needs to be at the top. Impactful changes need to be the first thing people should read even if they read nothing else. Knowing where the project stands is the most important part of a status communication. If there are changes you also need to communicate why. Were resources moved to higher priority projects? Did scope change because of customer requests? These are items that should be added not only for transparency but in the event your stakeholders can do something about it. They may think that the other high priority item isn’t as high on your project or may be able to add a new resource from somewhere else to keep the project moving forward. If you need help to make progress, make that abundantly clear.
Note: You may occasionally get managers that like to dive into the details, don’t make it the focus of your update link to a query or another page where they can see for themselves but for this audience you should highlight the business outcomes and where the project stands today
Develop a strategy
When new products are getting off the ground there is so much communication going on. Between decision making, asking questions, clarifying questions, talking to customers, clarifying misunderstandings, there’s a lot happening and can feel repetitive. This repetitiveness can delay products potentially even cause cancellations to the product. As a product manager it is your job to make sure that there is always forward progression and to keep everyone aligned on the outcomes. To do this successfully, you must come up with a communication process. We are all humans; we forget things, we perceive things differently, we may even miss a meeting or two where decisions were made, you name it, it happens. Understand the questions and discussions that happen frequently and come up with a strategy to keep everyone aligned on previous decisions. To do this you must understand where the misunderstandings are coming from. Are they happening because not everyone was there when the decision was made? Are the questions things that were already answered? This repetitiveness can be helped if you come up with a plan to centrally store decisions that were made, even include an FAQ on those decisions and refer stakeholders to that content whenever they try to derail a discussions or slow down progress. If someone brings up something that was already decided on pointing them to decisions helps them gain clarity. Do not close this door completely on questions or feedback, it is also possible that there could be faults or inconsistencies of that decision that someone is noticing, and it can be a legitimate concern. Keep an open mind, but also keep project aligned and progressing.
Establish a format and cadence
Using a consistent format for your updates make it easy for stakeholders to understand the key points and find the information. Initial status updates may change as you get feedback on what information may be missing or what’s not clear, but after the first few updates, you should have an established format that is consistent for everyone. In addition to format, you need to determine frequency. Sending out sporadic updates can create confusion as to what’s going on with the project and may cause you to receive more questions. Determine a cadence whether that’s daily, weekly, bi-weekly, or even monthly, this cadence should be determined based on project’s urgency, complexity, or sometimes, visibility. If you are unsure about how frequently you should provide updates, you can start with bi-weekly updates as a middle ground. If you find that you get more questions throughout the week about the status, change to weekly. The most important thing is to establish a consistent cadence, whether there’s a lot to report on or not much change, consistency is important for managing expectations and building trust.
Be open to feedback
There’s always going to be room for improvement when it comes to communications. In every update you send, always include align to encourage feedback. This feedback can help you tailor the updates and refine the content based on what your team finds most useful. Communications is a part of continuous improvement process. You may find that some status updates require different formats, different presentation, different tools from another update. What worked for one project may not work for another. It’s an iterative process and being open to feedback from other will help you improve this skill and become a better product manager.
Good communication is a skill, whether you naturally have it or not, you can work on it and improve. For product managers, communication is a critical area that you should invest time in to improve this skill. Effective communication can help you keep your team, stakeholders, and customers informed and engaged about the progress and challenges of your product development. Developing a strategy for communication, internally and externally, will help you grow in your role and become an amazing collaborator and shows your consistency and creates a huge amount of trust.
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