🚢 Ship It Friday - A battle-tested communication method

How to communicate internally so people pay attention

Straight Wharf - Nantucket, MA

Note: This is a shorter post than I’d normally send but I wrote it on vacation so 🤷‍♂️.

Introduction

Recently I had the pleasure of joining Harry Stebbings on his 20Growth Podcast. We covered a variety of topics and our discussion on cross-functional communication is one of the topics I’m especially proud of.

Communication and Influence is one of the four quadrants in the Growth Competency Model and it’s critical to a leader’s success in any function. Expert-level communicators get more attention, resources and support. The best part? It’s a lifelong skill that you can continuously improve.

Today I want to share a template that I’ve used to communicate weekly team progress throughout my career - from Product to Growth to Marketing. This is a tool that you can start with and modify as you see fit; you can even use it as a tool for communicating with your boss (you are sending your boss weekly updates, right?).

The end result should be a well-informed organization (or leader) that understands what you’re doing and why you’re doing it as well as what you’re learning and where you’re headed.

🚢 The “Ship It Friday” Newsletter 🚢

I’ve introduced this weekly communication tool at several companies with great success such as Zimride (then Lyft), WyzAnt, Patreon, and Imperfect Foods. Each time it took on a slightly different format that was adapted to fit the culture and tone of the company, but it was always in my voice.

Subject Line

I recommend the following format – and to keep it consistent from week to week. Makes searching for it in the email archives a lot easier. 

[Name of Communication] [Date] [Special Highlight]

Example

🚢 Ship it Friday - The #Growth & #Marketing Newsletter 5/8/2017 - Experiment Results 📈

Note: I find a healthy use of emojis makes this email a lot more scannable and approachable for your Millennial and GenZ audience (GIFs also help). For that pesky Boomer CFO you can just send a fax or an excel spreadsheet.

Body

My approach was always a pithy introduction that teased the content below. Often I’d include a tl;dr summary at the top (1-2 sentences at most) in case people really didn’t have time to read more. One way to increase your chances that they will read the entire message is quick, bulleted statements and an organized structure.

At Patreon we used a framework that we called “lean in” and “lean back”communication—you could just skim the information and understand the general premise (lean back) OR you could lean in to learn a lot more detail with avenues provided by the writer.

I followed this format:

• Update on what we just completed. One sentence summary with a link to learn more. (Provides that lean in / lean back experience).

• Quick context setting for a reminder of “where we are” in our roadmap. This was often a link to the roadmap with a highlight of where we were in the journey.

• A look ahead to what is coming in the next 1-2 weeks. Don’t promise much more than 1-2 weeks of delivery (you’ll thank me later).

• A section for important lessons learned and a callout for which teams should pay close attention to those lessons. One of the key Growth Competencies is “Productizing Learnings” so this is very important.

Brief Examples

Final Thoughts

• People are more likely to read something that’s entertaining and enjoyable. Put some personality into it. At the same time, don’t let the personality distract from the information.

• It’s helpful to attach a name to the various initiatives you’re providing updates on - that way people know who the responsible party is should they have questions.

• Continuously providing context setting via a reminder of your strategy is very helpful. People have the memory of a goldfish and you need to repeat and remind regularly.

• I always used this update as a way to distribute credit to my team. It’s important to highlight the great work that is happening across your organization.

• I also dropped a brief version of this update into a specifically named Slack channel for easy archiving. This helped with folks whose primary method of communication was via Slack.

Here’s hoping that this communication tool is as helpful to you as it has been for me. Would love to see some screenshots of your own internal communications in action. Reply to this post and share them!