An operating update is more than simply what happened If you asked five high performing people in your company what a great operating update looks like, you’ll almost always get a template. “Focus on the bottom line up front. Include…
Why can’t organizations remember the “why”? Does this sound familiar? Someone in a meeting asks a question that the company already answered. Maybe it’s something simple like “why did we pick that vendor?” or “when did we stop offering that…
Your updates list activity, not ingredients to drive change What job is an operating update actually supposed to perform? We usually assume the answer is obvious and that the update reports project status only. That assumption might not be right,…
It’s time to describe the components of a great update You probably attend one or more meetings where a lot of effort goes into telling each other how things are going. The goal is to get a status update and…
On a Toyota assembly line, there’s a cord that runs the length of the floor, and any worker can pull it. Pull it and the line stops. Not your station, but the whole line. It sounds reckless, like handing every…
learn how to build repeatable processes that you grade with Evals We just finished annual planning at work, and there’s one small moment that keeps coming to mind. It was a Wednesday morning, and other product managers updated the shared…
You’ve met AI as chat. It looks like Claude in the sidebar, or ChatGPT in a tab, or perhaps a Sparkle icon. The first interaction feels magical —> you type something, and get a response that almost seems like a…
Every customer operations team eventually develops a “figure it out” queue. It fills up with problems that don’t cleanly map to the organization: confusing edge cases, multi-team failures, strange customer behavior, broken workflows, and issues nobody fully owns yet.…
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” – Mike Tyson, 1987 People have been paraphrasing Mike Tyson’s boxing quote about about business plans since he said it. If you think it doesn’t apply in software,…
If your house had more simple information “radiators”, would it be easier? Every remote worker has the same problem. Somebody in your household (a kid, a spouse, a roommate) needs to know whether you’re in a meeting right now. The…
