If you don’t communicate the results, how are you growing / learning / improving?

Personal story

For years my wife and / or I have enjoyed hosting various events (ex. friends Thanksgiving meal, board game night, camping trip, etc.)  During the pandemic we stopped hosting many of those events.  Fast-forward to the past year and separate friends made comments about feeling left out at not being invited to these types of events (thinking we had continued to host but not invited them).  Our lack of communication led to misunderstandings.

Applications to work

Recently I completed the Growth Series program from Reforge.  One of the modules covers experimentation.  The idea presented is that our growth system has a cycle of:

• Growth model – Growing engagement, retention, etc.
• User Psychology – Understand our users and how they make decisions
• Experimentation – Tweaking variables to improve our product and reinforce growth model

Through the process of running experiments, we need to communicate out the results, otherwise it breaks the cycle and leads to a useless process.  This can apply to experiments run, feedback gathered, or status on OKRs (objectives and key results), and more.

Methods for communication

How and what you communicate will depend on a number of factors.

• Asynchronous or synchronous?
• Targeted or broad audience?
• Narrative story or metrics?
• Etc.

For example, my Microsoft Graph CPx team has used a number of mechanisms including monthly newsletters, stakeholder briefing meetings, Power BI dashboards, customer story emails, and more.

Systems for success

Taking ideas from the book Atomic Habits, how can you set up systems for success, or what I like to affectionately call “fall into the pit of success”?  Make your communication mechanisms visible, easy to complete, and easily motivated.  This might include:

• Setting a recurring team-level calendar reminder X days before due date
• Create a template for how / what you want filled out
• Use workflows / dashboards to collate information

Conclusion

Doing the work is important, but we must remember to complete the cycle by communicating out the results.  This will help inform how we iterate and improve the next cycle.  Personally, I’m keeping this in mind to improve on each project and effort I’m leading or participating in.

Please share in comments what techniques or approaches are helping you be more effective at communicating results?

-Frog Out