Weeknotes are a common form of asynchrouns communication and a great tool for Product Managers to keep their stakeholder up to date.
Weeknotes get their name from sending an end of week note about what happened that week.
There isn’t any official structure as that will be highly dependent on your context, stakeholders and personal preference. Nor do they have to strictly be done on a weekly basis.
But as you can imagine an effective way to use weeknotes would be to send a regular comms to your stakeholders at the end of each week about what was achieved that week, the key challenges, risks and issues and what the indicative plan for the following week is.
The role that weeknotes often plays is to fill the gap of having brief but regular communication and transparency about what’s happening with the product. It supposed to be short, lightweight and frequent.
Below is curation of different weeknote templates that you can use:
This is my go-to format. It follows the following headings:
PAST: Key activities
This is a general section to talk about some of the key things that happened that week and why.
PAST: Wins
What were the wins from this week, if any?
PRESENT: Challenges
What were the key challenges or issues from this week that we're facing, if any?
(optional) Key Decisions/Changes
Any key decisions or changes that were made and why?
FUTURE: What’s ahead?
What are we planning on doing next?
Here's a real example of one I sent for a client:
‘The daily breakdown’ is where you break the week down by each day. Providing a quick summary/overview of the key activities within each day.
Monday
Describe the key activities and what outcomes you achieved on monday.
Tuesday
...Repeat for every other day you worked on the project this week.
Wednesday…
...etc
Flexible, repeatable and concise. Helps you pick out the most important things.
‘3 thing that happened this week’
1. Thing that happened 1
Describe what happened and why it was important.
2. Thing that happened 2
Describe what happened and why it was important.
3. Thing that happened 3
Describe what happened and why it was important.
Note: you can do as many ‘things’ as you like and can flex it each week when more or less things occurred.
The most common form of weeknotes is by grouping your notes into logical themes. For example; good things, learned things, difficulties, achievements, or overarching feeling, highlights, lessons, etc.
Example 1:
Achievements
Describe the achievements of the week
Difficulties
Describe one or more difficulties you faced this week
Learnings
Describe one or more things you learned this week
Example 2:
Overarching feeling of the week
Describe the main thing you’re feeling about this week
Highlights
List or state some highlights
Issues
Describe any unresolved issues or problems that you’re thinking about
Lessons
List or state some lessons you learned this week
Q&A style weeknotes are where you create questions as headings. These are great to help you reflect and think about the week.
For example, I recently started sending out weeknotes to the product-org at a recent client sharing useful links and news about what’s happening in the product industry. The headings I used were:
What is happening in product-land?
Meetups, conferences or general news about things happening in product management.
What did I read this week?
A list of the top blog posts or interesting snippets I from books or videos I watched.
What has been on my mind lately?
A final ‘food-for-thought’ from me about something that is top of mind. This could be from recent conversations or a challenge that I’m helping them work through or simply something on my mind.
Here are some questions to prompt you if you wish to use this weeknotes format.
1. What was your priority this week?
2. What did you achieve this week?
3. What are you proud of from this week?
4. What did you experiment with?
5. What were the big challenges this week?
6. What did you enjoy?
7. Anyone you would like to give a shout out to this week?
8. What did you learn?
9. What would you have liked to do more of?
10. What do you wish you could have changed?
11. What are you looking forward to next week?
Things I read
Things I saw
Things I would like to change
Links to things
Other interesting things
Things I discovered this week
