Fortnightly Updates FAQ

What is a fortnight?

(noun) BRITISH a period of two weeks

Used as “biweekly” is ambiguous.

What is the TLDR?

Every 2 weeks we walk up the org tree, writing a short number of bullet points of wins and challenges for the last 2 weeks. By “Walk Up” it is meant at each level up, the most important, interesting and/or impactful points get reused, although often rewritten for a broader audience.

What is the purpose?

Firstly, trying to find a lightweight, regular way for everyone to have an appropriate amount of information about what other teams are doing. Secondly for some people/teams, it should work as a nice record of “what really went on that quarter”. Thirdly it is a mechanism for forcing managers to regularly account for “what really happened the last 2 weeks”, in a way that sprints (and otherwise) fail to do.

Do I have to stick to a hard format?

At the highest level, yes for consistency across a broad audience. At a lower level, doing your own thing is fine, e.g. doing it weekly, having more categories/text, etc. The main thing is having the information to share at the next level at the needed time.

What is the process in detail?

Every 2nd Wednesday, each line manager either:

• Knows from daily stand ups what each team member has been up to
• Asks their team to send them an update for the last 2 weeks by lunch on Thursday, by either a shared document, email to the team, or email.

By end of the next day, Thursday , each Manager takes the 2–4 most interesting/impactful wins and 2–4 challenges, augmenting with any they have themselves, and publishing them with a document that everyone under their Director can see.

Then by the end of the Friday, the Director takes the ~4 biggest Wins and ~4 biggest Challenges, augmenting with their own, and publishing them in a doc which everyone under the VP can see.

Then on the next Monday, the VP writes their own takes the ~4 biggest Wins and ~4 biggest Challenges, and sends that out, with a link to the full doc to:

• Their full org
• Their peers, and the senior ICs/managers below them

What is a win or challenge?

These should be 2–3 sentences, written so someone outside the team can understand what it is, and what is its impact. At the VP level-doc, most should be:

• People: Someone leaving/joining team, being promoted. Team splits.
• OKRs: A KR hitting a key milestone, or being delayed.
• Operations: Acknowledging an incident or a bad week, celebrating a good week in terms of incidents or pages.
• Engineering/Product: Letting people know when a RFC or Product brief has been published.

At levels below VP they may be more tailored towards specific milestones for a team, or individual. Examples of good writing are:

• Team X has now delivered feature Y. This was a big ask of customer Z, and we think this allows us to have much more success in market alpha going forward.
• Team X has now fully migrated to the company wide platform Y. This involved many difficult challenges we have documented at alpha and beta.
• Team X has deep diced on issue Y, and found that it delivers a Z% cost improvement across our full customer base.
• Team X is having challenges hitting the company-wide deadlines in delivering Y due so specific issues alpha and beta. We have escalated this to the respective management, but are now doubtful to hit goal Z.
• Team X has had multiple sev 1 operational issues the last week, all root cause issue Y. We are actively implementing z to stop the bleeding, and full long term post mortem action items is at alpha.

Can I have a template?

This is a sample doc for an org.