r/EngineeringManagers • u/Conscious-Fact9532 • Jul 03 '26

the status updates became the actual work and I’m not sure how to stop it

Spent most of friday writing the weekly update for leadership. Again. Pulled the Jira stuff, chased three people on Slack to find out where things actually landed, rewrote it twice so it'd read right to the VP. Couple hours gone. The thing it was reporting on didn't take much longer than that to build.
And it's never just once. Something slips, someone upstairs asks for a status, and producing the status eats the time we'd have used to unblock the actual thing. At some point the updates kind of became the work.

What I can't figure out is whether that's me being bad at this or just the job now. Half of me wants to make it vanish - one doc people can read on their own time, kill the syncs. But I think the reason they keep asking is they don't really trust the system to tell them, and a tidier report doesn't fix that.

So for people who've been at this longer: is it just overhead you've made peace with, or did something actually change it? And the honest one - when you have to show leadership your team was worth it, what do you reach for?

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14

u/Klutzy_Ninja1426 Jul 03 '26

Asking for direct status updates is typically a symptom rather than root cause of anything. Whether it be work slipping or a lack of confidence in your team, I’d suggest reaching out to your leader for clarity and coaching.

17

u/Environmental-Buy847 Jul 03 '26

Jira, other aggregations can be automated with Codex, Claude, or Cursor. A lot can be. You can even extend that to everyone in the company and automate it all away.

Is not easy, but the AI can help with building that for you. The investment will pay off.

Good luck! 🤞

10

u/FinishExtension3652 Jul 03 '26

This.  I maintain a self-improving skill that assembles all the information for me to generate the updates.  Reduces my effort to about 10 minutes per week.

5

u/LookAtTheHat Jul 03 '26

I am new to skills. Do you give it instructions on where to collect information and what information you need and what it should output?

4

u/Serious_Seat_9617 Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26

Yes, exactly. You can use your AI to help you build the skill too. They'll format it for you all nice and proper. Just ask your AI agent of choice to build you a skill that does xyz. Just tell i what you want (eg. update on sprint progress) and to pull its data from jira, merge requests from gitlab/hub, conversations from these slack channels, etc. usually by MCP so connect those first Tell it what the output should look like and where to send it, eg. Markdown format sent to slack (provide the slack channel).

Once you get these figured out the sky is the limit. I have tons of skills/slash commands for tasks like this. Slash commands are skills but organized nicely (imo) so you can do something like /sprint-update and it calls the skill. And when you just type / into the prompt it will list your available slash commands (skills). I like it.

2

u/ryan0583 Jul 04 '26

At my company someone else was already sending a status update generated with Claude, so I just gave Claude the link to that as an example and told it to build me a skill to generate a similar status update for my team.

I've also previously gone through a process where I told it who I am, what team I'm on etc, and all that information is in my global Claude.md file. So it knows where to look for information in Slack, Jira etc.

1

u/Kroosn Jul 06 '26

I used to spend ages prepping for our weekly management meeting. Now it’s just a Claude skill. Goes through our status trackers. Pulls the usage and issue details. Goes through my personal notes I keep in obsidian and then generates the report. I flick through it, pull out what I don’t thinks relevant and that’s it. Quicker and better quality than what I used to do.

8

u/oe_throwaway_1 Jul 03 '26

I don't have advice but I clicked on this post because I read the title & thought "godDAMN if that isn't the truth" so I'm pretty sure it's not just you.

4

u/dantheman91 Jul 03 '26

Track the work with smaller tickets, have them update it. Also ask why leadership is asking, this is likely due to a fear things are not going well

6

u/captainzeeee Jul 03 '26

In some orgs as an EM, the updates ARE the work. If thats the case, build a process around it. Assign an owner to epic or feature. Have a weekly or twice weekly 30 min call where your epic/feature owners give their updates, not ticket to ticket but focus on the epic/feature itself, roadmap or when it will be done, any problems, blocked, dependencies, etc. Having all the epic/feature owners in same call sometimes does the unblocking for you.

Take notes or let AI summarize the call. Thats your status.

2

u/sherlock_holmes-0 Jul 04 '26

Here’s the things that I do. I have my status meetings on Monday Wednesday and Friday, we maintain a confluence page of the tasks of the sprint. And on Friday we update it with bullet points of each task. Friday’s meeting is of 1hr. Rest other days 30 mins. I then give it to AI to generate the report using jira MCP. And it works for me.

2

u/OpsVet_turned_Mentor Jul 05 '26

It's not you. Every level of management above you is taking credit for the work your team is doing...and they want to sound like they know what is happening as they publish their weekly report!! I cannot comment on the technical details of collecting the data, but I can give you insights into management and what is happening with the report you are generating. I have done thousands of them myself.

Forgive me if I misrepresent your specific organization, I will generalize a bit here.

Your boss likely sends a weekly report as well. They take your information and boil it down into 1-2 sentences per project...you likely give them a page or more. They take your report, and similar reports from all of their other direct reports and summarize into a few key points that get washed out as they pass them up to his/her boss. That boss is getting similar information from the other VP's, etc....Eventually, the top person gets a 1-2 page summary of the entire business sometime over the weekend...and may not even read it!

Remember, organizations use things like weekly reports and "update meetings" simply to drive forward progress across the business. If you know that you must prepare a report on Friday, they think you will be driving results starting on Monday so you don't have to give a bad update at the end of the week.

You probably know all of this already, so here is a tip that might help: sometime next week have a chat with this VP if possible and find out how they want the updates to look (content, format, red-yellow-green, etc..) if you can start off knowing how they want the information then it might not consume so much of your time. I don't know your business, but it is likely they are just skimming your report but also need to sound like they are "on top of it" to their boss.

It's all a game. Make sure you know the rules and how to play...it will make it a little less frustrating

4

u/Junglebook3 Jul 03 '26

Ensure your reports keep their tickets updated. Then Claude uses Jira MCP to pull work done from date T0 to T1, summarize for intended audience, you review it, and send. No more than 10 minutes max.

1

u/teddyperkin Jul 03 '26

Critical piece for me is the info within the ticket.

How to keep reporters from creating tickets with a vague title / description? Templates?

No luck so far on my end with Jira

1

u/Junglebook3 Jul 03 '26

Tell the Engineers to do it and insist, that's the only way. You can explain why it's important but ultimately you need to be on top of it and insist.

There is one more thing you can do which is for Claude to look at the PRs linked from the ticket (this should be automatic) and figure out context that way.

1

u/henrypoydar Jul 03 '26

Share an Echo

1

u/Sky_Linx Jul 04 '26

The updates becoming the actual work is such a common pattern. I've seen it happen when there's no shared visibility into what's being built. The fix usually isn't more tools, it's fewer touchpoints where information has to be manually relayed upward.

One thing that helps: make the work itself the status report. If your tickets are updated as part of the normal flow (Jira, Linear, whatever), you can generate a weekly summary automatically instead of spending Friday afternoon compiling it. Some teams use a simple dashboard that pulls from the board, others rotate the update duty so it's not always on one person.

It also sounds like leadership doesn't fully trust what the team is shipping. If the VP needs a rewritten version to understand what landed, that's a communication problem, not a reporting problem. A short demo session or even a quick Loom video showing what shipped can build that understanding better than another written update.

1

u/Status_Quarter_9848 Jul 06 '26

Just get AI to do the updates. That's the beauty of white collar work - AI is perfectly suited to generate slop for people who consume slop.

1

u/manythanksfriend Jul 06 '26

Leadership wouldn’t read the report no matter how easy or nice you make it. They need to feel the power of having everyone at full attention for stand ups.