Following up on my post about writing personal weekly summaries, this post explains how you can scale the process to your entire organization. In doing so, you create a “pyramid of radical candor” that directly combats insular communication.
But wait, there’s more! If you have reasons to share your org roll-up externally, the leader of that org can filter the document to make an external version. Pyramids within pyramids…
This is especially valuable if you are in a remote environment or in an organization where different roles report to different leaders. This mechanism maximizes communication flow and minimizes your time spent in status update meetings.
As TPMs, we are often asked to provide regular status reports on ongoing projects and programs. While sharing personal weekly summaries may avoid the need for formal status reports, there are differences between the two that different situations may call for. That said, one should not assume that a recurring status report is necessary for every project! Rather, think through the overall communication strategy for a project and consider if status reports make sense within that – they often do!
This post defines a best practice around status reporting, starting with first evaluating if status reports are a good fit for your situation before then sharing how to source the content and format your report.
After reading about ScarletInk’s dissatisfaction with Ghost and migration to Substack and a former colleague’s dissatisfaction with Medium, I figured it was time for me to do another update on Wordpress (.org, not .com) and how it’s going.
My honest summary is I love WordPress and can’t imagine me changing to another platform. Ghost was the one platform I had some FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) about, but after reading the ScarletInk’s post, that FOMO has been replaced with JOMO (Joy Of Missing Out).
As Technical Program Managers (TPMs), we often end up as meeting note takers. While TPMs are not just stenographers, note taking is a valuable exercise, and thus taking notes is something to be encouraged. It is OK for note taking to be TPM led, as we often are the best suited to distill down complex, cross-functional, and cross-organizational topics. However, the reality is note taking is meant to serve a purpose, and all meeting attendees should be encouraged to partake in their own way to ensure maximal value of the exercise.
This lightweight post simply defines a best practice around collaborative note taking, where the note taking responsibility is shared across all members of a meeting.
If you read tech blogs at all, you’ll come across hundreds of “do these simple things to elevate your career,” or some other buzz-worthy headline. And you’ll read it, and if you’re like me, think “thanks for the high level information I already knew with no examples or data to explain or prove the value…” /sarcasm. So, what’s this post, then? Well, my own version, of course! But with a few key differences…
Earlier this year, I started blogging for the first time on Medium. This is great, I thought. So easy; why haven’t I done this before? But then I quickly ran into issues with the Medium paywall. Ah; there’s the catch, I realized. While I am not against Medium having a paywall, it didn’t make sense for my use case – I didn’t want any of my stories to be behind a paywall of a company that wasn’t mine, after all!
