Reporting vs Visibility: Why Doing Great Work isn't Enough.
To the people that "keep their head down" and just do the work. Stop thinking this is painting you as special. It's painting you as aloof. Or even worse, you are invisible.
Someone once said something that I took too seriously: "Your boss doesn't care about effort, only updates." I found out that's only half true. Of course, your boss needs updates, not intimate details. But your work also needs company-wide airtime. Why? Because if you don't demonstrate your value, your impact, you risk getting lost in the noise, regardless of how good the work actually is.
The difference between merely "reporting" and creating "strategic visibility" can mean the difference between success and failure at a company.
“No matter how talented you are, your reputation and career progression are based on one simple truth: people need to know what you’ve accomplished.” – Harvard Business Review (on building a reputation)
What Your Boss Needs to Know
Reporting is your operational handshake. It’s a mandatory, factual function, primarily serving your manager, your immediate team, and the project's health. It’s about status and risks.
The best skill you can develop is the ability to explain something in 3 bullets, one minute, five minutes, and thirty minutes. That covers everything from a quick daily sync to a deep-dive.
- The Three-Bullet Update: This is the most critical format. It forces you to distill your progress, blockers, and next steps into their most essential, high-impact form.
- The One-Minute Elevator Pitch: Your ability to quickly summarize the so what of your work when your manager bumps into the VP in the hallway.
- The Five-minute Overview: This is the high-level summary of a project's objective, current status against that objective, and any key decisions needed from leadership.
Summarizing is hard. It's one of the reason tactical people remain tactical. It takes objectivity and thought to back away from an initiative and remove the drama and details. Practice makes perfect.
Strategic Visibility: Treating Your Work Like a Product
The best operators I know treat their updates like a product. They don't just report; they market their impact.
Strategic visibility is about moving your work from an activity (I wrote code, I ran a meeting) to an outcome (I launched feature X, which is projected to increase revenue by 10%).
Visibility is an offensive strategy designed to influence senior leaders, cross-functional partners, and executives who aren't in your daily stand-ups.
Bridge the Gap: Former Bain consultant Julie Zhuo (author of The Making of a Manager) advocates, a key part of leadership is making sure the impact of your work is legible to people three layers up. Your strategic updates are the bridge. They connect your detailed work to the company's biggest goals.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Your work quality matters for your craft, your team, your customers. But your work quality is a table stake. You need it to be good, but that goodness is silent if not amplified.
The tragedy is watching brilliant people get let go, passed over for promotion, or denied resources because their impact was invisible. They were high-effort, low-visibility. Their brilliant work stayed in their lane, never crossing the company goal line.
The quality of your work is the engine. The clarity of your reporting and the reach of your visibility are the fuel and the map. You need all three to get where you want to go.