Direct Weekly Report

To provide greater clarity of the progress of our Engineering, we will start creating a lightweight Weekly Report, with the highlights and lowlights of the work for that week. We will review them in the following 1:1, so the week does not have to align with specific weekdays. It’s more “from previous 1:1 to today.”

Why?

  1. As mentioned by Steve in Product Planning Planning, the Ship organization was “left alone” to do its own planning and execution:

    ”Eng-only/infrastructure projects

    First up, we have budgeted for infra work. Through this planning we have basically preserved the Infrastructure org and let Nelson define its shape. And we’ve also budgeted for some pure-infra projects (i.e. sponsored by Eng), things like rate limiters and finishing gRPC, which you can see green-lit in the final list.”

    That freedom comes with the responsibility to unequivocally demonstrate the value of the work done.

  2. We need to “build a profile” for each Engineering with their current great achievements – and not defer that to performance review time only – so we quickly fine-tune the staffing towards our goals.

    There’s still the plan to keep the teams focusing on impacful things to their conclusion, and not randomize Engineers “every five minutes.” At the same time, we need to balance the business needs and the rapidly changing environment we’re in.

  3. These reports will also help you (and your lead) “remember” your achievements during the period and provide breadcrumbs of your journey.

  4. You and your lead can have more fine-tuned conversations about career advancement.

Report Data

The report is meant to be a summary. It’s okay to add links to reference documents and related material. But let’s not require the reader to navigate through all the documentation to reach the conclusion. In other words, by reading your report the reader will reach the same conclusion as you if they dig through all the evidence data.

These are some points you may want to include:

  • Major work items delivered or progressed during the week

    • Brief description of the work
    • Description of the outcome of your work
    • Was it planned or unplanned?
      • If unplanned: why? will it happen again? what did you do to make this mainstream?

  • Major huddles / risks found and actions taken to overcome them

  • What do you need from leadership (Nelson and above), or from other org leaders, to unlock the risks / opportunities you identified?

Feedback and Improvements

This is a first attempt to build the report. It’s content and form are proposed above, but they are not set in stone. We count on you to help refine the report, provide more useful and actionable data, and improve the process overall.

Also

Remember to update your objectives in Infrastructure OKRs @ go/infra-okrs.