The $100,000 Status Report
A status report template to prevent middle management from costing your company millions
The Process
Every Friday, my engineering manager writes a detailed status report. He even takes time to find a random “fun fact” to make them more interesting and encourage people to read to the bottom.
On Mondays, my job as Product Manager is to take that report and condense it down into our group’s preferred format and also make sure our roadmap, our project plan, and the project plan of several department-wide initiatives are up to date.
On Tuesdays, he and I sit in an hour-long meeting with our group’s leadership; 11 leaders across three teams review the summarized status report in detail. I’m reasonably certain that of the nine other attendees, at most three of them are paying attention at any given time. All the people who have any reason to care were emailed the original format from the engineering manager, but I’d bet money they didn’t read it. The presentations from the other three teams do not impact my work in any meaningful way, so I return the favor of their highly-divided attention and tune them out.
On Wednesdays, our VP summarizes our status report and those of the other groups in our department and sends a company-wide status…
