Writing manager status updates (upward)
What you'll learn
- Skip-level is sampling your judgement, not auditing your team's tickets.
- Lead with one uncertain call you made + the reasoning.
- Own bad news; don't launder it through ICs' voices.
Your skip-level reads ~30 status updates a week. The ones they engage with are short, signal where help is needed, and never bury the lede. Your update is not a status of your team's work — it's a status of *your* judgement-calls and where they could go wrong.
Three sections: (1) what we shipped + why it mattered (one or two outcomes, not a feature list); (2) the one call I made this week I'm least certain about + why I made it that way; (3) the help I need from you that I can't get elsewhere.
Resist the urge to launder bad news through the team's quotes. 'Anita feels we're slipping on the deadline' is worse than 'we're going to miss the Sep 1 deadline by two weeks; here's my proposal to recover or descope.'
Key points
- Skip-level is sampling your judgement, not auditing your team's tickets.
- Lead with one uncertain call you made + the reasoning.
- Own bad news; don't launder it through ICs' voices.
Pitfalls
- Long ticket dumps; the signal drowns in the list.
- Hiding the uncertain call so the update feels confident.
Ask your skip-level
In a real Adept rollout this routes to your company's leadership Claude project; in the demo it opens a fresh Claude chat.