“Shipped This Week” – Our Way of Communicating the Value of the Product Team

During my time building AXDRAFT and AiSDR, one thing has been constant.

The Product team always tells the entire company what they built for the week.

We call this practice “Shipped this week”, and there are 3 reasons why it’s worked for us (and why it should work for you).

TLDR: 

• The goal: Show the value of the Product team
• The tactic: Send a weekly “Shipped this week” email to everyone in the company
• The result: Other teams learn about what’s new and the Product team stays motivated

Our journey to finding the right channel

Our approach to communicating what we’ve done has shifted a few times over the years.

We first tried out a monthly synchronous “Product demo”, but this didn’t stick because people were focusing on their own work during the call. And even though we recorded and shared the demo, people never watched it because it was an hour long.

We then shifted to a summarized email containing a simple list of 10-20 bullet points.

This worked great as people could read it on their own time, and it was small enough that people wouldn’t skip it.

But if our first try is best described as “too much information”, our second try was a huge overcorrection because it ran into the issue of not having enough details.

That’s where we landed on our third and final iteration, which is what we use at AiSDR:

• Email with 10-20 short bullet points, grouped by type of improvement (e.g. usability, research)
• Link to an internal document with GIFs and descriptions

And after 4+ years of this approach, it’s safe to say that it works and checks all the boxes.

Here’s a closer look at why.

Reason 1: Shows the Product team’s accomplishments

The items that make it into the “Shipped this week” email are already live and available in the product.

There’s no trickery. No equivocality. No ‘progress medals’.

What you see in the email is what you’ll see in AiSDR’s application.

We’ve also structured the internal document so that it recaps all updates made during the quarter and the year, with the most recent changes at the top.

So not only do we share what we did during the week, but we also have a clear record of all the progress we’ve made throughout the quarter and year.

Reason 2: Informs other teams about new features

Keeping our Customer Success, Marketing, and Sales teams up to date on the latest changes is 100% essential. They’re relying on this information for their own responsibilities, such as:

• Explaining to customers how to use new features
• Answering customer questions
• Creating content like social media posts and product updates
• Running customer demos and addressing concerns in real time

This keeps all teams aligned and boosts inter-team collaboration as each team sees how their work fits within the bigger picture of AiSDR.

Reason 3: Keeps the Product team eager to keep cooking

We structure our work into week-long sprints. Each team member receives a large task (or set of small tasks) that they should complete by the end of Friday. For very large tasks, it’s okay to spread the work across 2 or 3 sprints, but there needs to be a logical stopping point. 

We don’t want people to do just 20% the first week and 80% the second. This will lead to bad results (not to mention, it’s the wrong way to use the 80-20 rule).

That’s where our “Shipped this week” updates really help. They manufacture a sense of urgency because everyone expects to see this email on Monday. And no one likes to send (or see) an empty email with no updates.

Besides, the other teams are counting on us, and we can’t let them down.

Result

Our “Shipped this week” updates have helped drive strong performance in many areas:

• Our Customer Success team’s ability to communicate updates effectively has been highly valued and a key factor in strong client satisfaction
• Our Marketing team creates weekly product updates, and their content is written with greater knowledge and authority (if you know the product well, you’ll write about it well)
• Our Sales team can confidently run demos and show how AiSDR solves specific customer needs

And last but not least, our Product team continues to push more and better features each week for rapid product velocity.

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