Visibility and Communication is The Job
Many of us just want to put our head down and do work. Sending updates feel like a chore. Businesses rely on collaboration to accomplish big goals, and communication is your differentiator.
Early in my career, I preferred to be on my own and get work done. Whenever my manager asked me for an update, I would grumble: “Ugh, why can’t he just let me work and update him when I’m done?” I was a classic black box employee: tell me what I need to do, and you’ll hear from me when I’m done. No ongoing communication, no alignment conversations with other teams, and no updates on risks and dependencies. As a result, I had shaky trust with my managers and did work that didn’t align well with that of other teams (which then led to expensive rework on multiple fronts).
As I rose through the ranks in product, I realized that what made the difference between a top performer and an average one was how I did my work. My technical skills got me a seat at the table, but they did not put me on the path to high performance and leadership. A critical and valuable part of the job was how I kept everyone in the loop and made sure that all the teams the project touched were aligned.
In the age of AI, the value of these soft skills is even more pronounced. As AI can now prototype, design, and perform data analysis, technical skills are increasingly a commodity. Your edge at work is the visibility, alignment, and agency you bring to the work being done.
Visibility and Alignment Create Trust
For many of us, we develop the desire to “put our head down and work” in school. For many of our formative years, getting alone time to focus meant we were more likely to do well. Our parents checking in if we did our homework is, at best, very annoying. However, unlike school, where homework assignments and test questions are set months in advance, work projects are ever-changing.
The business environment and goals shift. Partner teams discover previously unknown challenges and change course. As a result, your tasks change as well. Collaboration towards a collective goal is actually one of the most important competitive advantages of mankind. If everyone worked in a black box without talking to each other, it would tend towards chaos. This is the role of managers and leaders: to ensure large teams are working towards a common goal, and to constantly align and realign teams as changes arise.
Therefore, when you work on your own island, your manager has to do extra work on your behalf. They spend cycles chasing updates from you, checking with other teams on whether it aligns with their work, and calling meetings to keep everyone aligned. In fact, I often see this in engineering, where managers and PMs will ask to take on communication and alignment tasks such that a critical engineer can stay 100% focused on writing code. This extra work adds up quickly, particularly if your manager has six people on their team and needs to do this for everyone.
Now, imagine your leaders have a large, risky project to assign. Would they assign it to someone who will keep them and others informed along the way, or someone who will go away and then come back when it’s done? As the work gets more complex, risky, and involves close coordination with more teams, the value of proactive visibility and communication grows exponentially.
Remove Friction For Others
The person who will land that next career opportunity proactively removes uncertainty and friction for their leaders and partners. To do this, put yourself in the position of someone who needs to collaborate with you and consider what they would not want. For example, imagine working with someone who:
Communicates sporadically about what is happening on their projects when you have a dependency on their work
Let deadlines pass without comments, causing you to have to follow up to see what happened and what to expect
Individually decides the best way to solve unexpected challenges without consulting you or anyone else. And you don’t find out until the work is done.
Sounds stressful? Now imagine the opposite, someone who:
Works against a visible timeline. Sets up checkpoint meetings at critical times for leaders and partner teams. Sends updates before they are asked.
Immediately communicates delays and changes to work priorities broadly. Send out completed work for feedback with time set aside for adjustments.
Raises unforeseen challenges early with key stakeholders. Explicitly states assumptions and lays out potential options logically and clearly for decisions.
The first person will likely be in performance conversations due to a lack of visibility into their work. The second person is the one that I would want to delegate more important projects to. Proactive visibility and communication are how you build trust with your partners and leaders.
Finally, proactive communication allows you to gain back time. I’ve seen too many junior PMs get randomized and overwhelmed by all the updates. When you have ten people randomly pinging at random times for updates, questions every decision that was made (and then needs to be remade), it introduces quite a bit of work. You feel like you spend all your time giving updates, rather than doing actual work. Investing in a communication system that answers those questions in a scalable way before they are asked. This gives you the ability to control what gets communicated and when, and on the whole, time back.
As we approach the end of the year, take a look at your communication system with your leaders and teams. How can it be improved to be more efficient? What can you adjust to get ahead of asks and give yourself time back?
That’s all folks! See you next week at 3:14 pm.
Yue
great read.