At Plaid, I'm in a unique situation where I manage a division of the engineering team which is dedicated to being distributed; the rest of engineering team is n

At Plaid, I'm in a unique situation where I manage a division of the engineering team which is dedicated to being distributed; the rest of engineering team is not. My goal is to ensure not only that my team is aligned, but also that important information is flowing between my team and the rest of the company. For this, I use a weekly update that's sent to the team and also the "periphery" of the team -- all those who care about and influence the team's success. Each weekly update is prepended to a Google doc, and I send an email out (just with a link to the doc) when I update it. The update has three sections: "Last Week" (everything I experienced last week that I think is relevant) "This Week" (a list of my priorities for the upcoming week with a cut line) and "Biggest Mistakes and Missed Opportunities" (just what it sounds like). It's intended to be comprehensive and often runs more than one page. To make sure "people don't actually miss things," there are two parts: 1) I make sure the update contains all the things I don't want people to miss 2) I make sure the weekly update is valuable enough to everyone so that they read it. On occasions where I've been late in updating it, I've found that I'm repeating the same information to multiple people more often and also having to say, "Sorry, you'd have known that already if I'd gotten my update out on time."