You know the drill. Every X weeks every project in the company has to fill out a status update, sometimes with a sprinkle of RAG status, target completion date, or similar.

This gets rolled up into a summary email that gets sent around. Management now have an overview of who is working on what, and which projects they should apply pressure on (the late ones, or at-risk ones).

This process sucks for a few reasons:

1. The format of these status updates is such that you are providing an upper bound to the team’s velocity. You set a due date, and this effectively gives the team permission not to do it any faster than that. (More on this in my previous post “Give your team permission to overperform”)

2. Providing a status update becomes a chore. It should be a pleasure! “I have just deployed the Ethereum deposit watcher to testnet, check it out!”, “Giving a demo of the new rewards API at Engineering Show&Tell tomorrow!”. Instead of taking responsibility and sharing cool updates you are proud of, you are sending a high-level 1 paragraph and a RAG status because it’s Friday and a project manager compiling the status update pinged you three times to do it.

At Kiln we don’t mandate any project status updates. Instead:

– We trust engineers to share updates about what they’re working on. They can share in the format and level of detail they deem relevant.

– We trust them to come to the weekly customer calls for customers they should be concerned by (eg who are about to use the feature they’re working on)

– We trust them to let product / the customer know if they think the expectations are misaligned, eg on timelines or feature set.

Product management’s role at Kiln is to support in this process: when there are conflicting priorities, when a piece of analysis needs to be done, when launch and support materials need to be prepared (yep, this is product’s job).

(We don’t hire project or delivery managers, whose role is typically very geared towards this regimented internal reporting we don’t do.)

So, yes, this means management don’t get a summary email every Friday of the status of each project. But it’s not too much to ask for management to be on top of the updates coming through Slack, Linear and Github, and they can always ask precise questions in 121s.

Overall we feel this empowers engineering, speeds us up, and reduces the risk of stifling bureaucracy settling in. It’s working for us, long may it last!

PS: for context we are a 42 people company. Approx 30 Eng (including 5 product), 5 sales & marketing, 7 finance and ops.