Ask HN: What system do you use to keep key people updated on a project?

Hi everyone,

after a long history in the dev field I decided to help my company as a Product Manager (I also own a company that produces a "real" product, so I have some hands on experience too).

The transition is taking too long so I'm still having duties from other roles (Tech Architect/Leader and another one).

Which leads me to managing a quite diverse group of people and having different key referrals that I need to update.

Meetings and calls work fine (with a doc recap at the end), but I also do think that it would be best to find a tool that allowed the stakeholder/pm/whatever to check in a project status only when they need to, so I could save some of their time.

Mail is not organized enough and we lose track of the history, a simple google doc might work but I'm not sure it will be efficient.

What works for you?

3 comments

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[dead] treeface9000 5y ago ↗

Any agile tracking board tends to work. Big names like Jira or Trello but there are tons out there. Github even has a project board. Assuming your engineers can keep it up to date, a quick scan at any time will show you exactly what's Done, In Progress, Still Todo, etc.

croo 5y ago ↗

History of these things never mattered where I work, phone/mail/chat message seemed sufficient so far.

andrea_sdl 5y ago ↗

I agree, history is not important, but using phone/mail/chat always implies some kind of "requiement of attention" and given the many groups I need to update I wanted to give them more time instead of reducing it.

Right now scheduling calls diminishes time on the people you involve, so if it's a simple update why not give them the choice?

It might be a result of our former structure that leads to this issue I am experiencing (or it might be an issue I only have :) )