👷 The Weekly Message That Got Me Promoted (And Took 4 Minutes to Write)
Showing your impact and judgement doesn’t need to be a result of big effort.
I was the only data engineer responsible for all the data infra and pipelines. It was all fine in the beginning. We were just building the platform, and I never realized how the demand grew with time.
At some point, stakeholders started asking me all at once what had happened with their projects. I was replying to each one individually, and I started dropping the ball, missing some replies entirely.
My manager’s back then, Serge, plan was to let me manage stakeholders myself, learn the skill properly, and move into a lead role once I could do it good. One stakeholder at a time, I handled this fine, but that many people messaging me seperately, I dropped things I would never normally drop.
Individual Updates Don’t Scale
The dropped threads made me look unreliable. And the problem was that nobody but me could see how many people were waiting on the same person at the same time. Every conversation lived in its own private thread, so every stakeholder assumed they were my only priority and every stakeholder had a fair reason to be annoyed when I went quiet.
I could’ve tried to answer faster or set stricter response windows for myself, but neither one would have fixed anything, because the constraint was never my speed. Ten people’s worth of stakeholder management was landing on one person, and nobody outside those private threads could see it.
The Fix Serge Told Me to Try
Serge’s advice changed how the rest of this played out: stop replying to people one at a time, and post one update to the whole channel insted. We already had an official DataOps channel where I fielded requests from across the company. Every Friday, I started posting the same short message there, broken into three parts, tagging whoever was affected by each line.
It took about 4 minutes to write. I stopped writing separate private updates and started writing one public one.
What Three Bullets a Week Actually Changed
The message changed who could see my workload. Anyone in the channel could scroll up and see every stakeholder getting real updates from the same person, every week, in the same format. Nobody had to ask me how busy I was, because they could read it.
Stakeholders stopped pinging me to ask when I’d get to their request. They could see it sitting under “What’s Next Week“ and knew exactly where it stood. Serge stopped guessing what I was working on too. He was busy, and a four-minute post was the fastest way for him to see what I’d actually shipped.
It became clear to Serge and the marketing VP that one person could not keep absorbing this many stakeholders forever, and the weekly post was the reason it was clear. We hired more people onto the team, and I became a DataOps Lead.
Paid subscribers get the exact message I posted, word for word, with the real screenshot from the DataOps channel, the one rule that kept it from turning into empty promises, and the steps to build your own version.
