Imagine you had built a great software product, but never checked that your alleged users were actually using it. There would be a high chance that you built t

Imagine you had built a great software product, but never checked that your alleged users were actually using it. There would be a high chance that you built the wrong thing, they weren't using it, and you wouldn't know that so you wouldn't fix it. Your reports on progress were like that. Because you didn't check with the users (those who should have been reading the report), you didn't know that they weren't a format that was useful to them. I'm not saying you screwed up in the way you wrote your reports; communication about technical topics is hard, and no one should expect to make it easy. But writing technical reports, and then not checking with the intended audience as to whether they were communicating what you wanted, is like writing software without testing it or getting user feedback. I bet you would never write software, not test it, and then expect that it was working, no matter how good you are at writing software. So, in the future, think of communications such as reports as a deliverable in some ways similar to a piece of software. Check with your users, and test it (i.e. see if anyone is reading it, or understanding it if they do).