Blogchain: Goal → Expectations → Updates
Updates. If you imagine an organization as a brain, updates are the electrical signals that travel up and down the neurons. As a product manager, you're responsible for making your organization function like a healthy brain. This means you must make sure that (a) all signals travel accurately and quickly and (b) painful signals travel fast.
Share your painful signals (aka bad news) in plain English. Be brief and precise, using numbers and dates. Avoid vague adjectives, like “significantly.” Make every sentence and every word mean something. And, most important of all, make sure you explain the high level implications of your update upfront. Nine times out of ten this will be:
Set statuses deterministically using the following criteria, so we can all understand what we mean when we say something is At Risk or Off Track.
| Status | Criteria |
|---|---|
| 🟢 On Track | Current > 0 and expected >= target |
| 🟡 At Risk | Current = 0 or expected >= 90% of target |
| 🔴 Off Track | Expected < 90% of target |
Example updates
On Track. If the current value has changed since the last update, explain what drove that change. Then share the next release that will close the gap between expectations and target as well as when that work will land.
We expect to end the half with 5.75M MAU, ~5% above our target of 5.5M. Recent wins include <explain>. We expect to close the 0.45M gap to our target on <ETA> by <explain>.
| Goal | As of | Status | Current | Target | Expected |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grow MAU | 03/01 | 🟢 | 5.05M | 5.50M | 5.75M |
At Risk. Share (a) the date you expect to land impact and (b) what change you expect will drive it.
We will be on track on 3/15, after shipping our first milestone of <explain>. This release was delayed by 2 weeks because <explain>. In light of this delay, we accelerated our other two milestones by <explain>. We continue to expect we'll ship all 3 of our target milestones.
| Goal | As of | Status | Current | Target | Expected |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ship GPT-4 (milestones) | 03/01 | 🟡 | 0 | 3 | 3 |
Off Track. Share (a) what date you expect to ship impact and (b) what change you expect will drive it. Then explain what caused your expectations to drop and what you're doing to increase your expectations. This is a good place to ask for what you need to get back on track.
We are 50% confident we will show stat sig impact in our holdout by 4/2, after shipping the unsend feature. We expected to see impact sooner, but have not yet because <explain>. Our current expectations are now 28M sends, below our target of 30M. To get back on track, by next Friday (3/15) we will <explain>.
| Goal | As of | Status | Current | Target | Expected |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grow messaging (sends) | 03/01 | 🔴 | 0 | 30.0M | 28.0M |