Product Management Tip: Archive FYI Emails in the Wiki

Good product managers frequently send out brief, informative email updates to their stakeholders. Save these update emails in your wiki to create a permanent record of the information you’ve sent out. If it’s worth sending, it’s worth saving!

Communication is a core product management skill. Good product managers communicate regularly with stakeholders including engineering, sales, and customers. Obviously, in-person communication is preferable when possible, but given many stakeholders and limited time, email notifications are sometimes the only feasible option for quickly, cheaply communicating information to a distributed target audience. Common FYI topics include: correction of misunderstandings that have developed; clarification about product functionality, positioning, or intended target markets; notification about the availability of new resources; notification of changes to the plan of record; and so on.

Make sure you clearly indicate that an email is an FYI message not requiring a response by starting the subject line with “FYI:.” This way, busy recipients know they can read it at their convenience. (Contrast this with subject prefixes like “INPUT NEEDED BY MM/DD” or “FEATURE DROP PROPOSAL” or “REVIEW NEEDED BY MM/DD” that make it clear the email is important, it needs a response, and there may be consequences you don’t like if you fail to respond.

Use the “Stop Reading Here” technique to let busy users extract only the most critical information from the top of an email while enabling curious ones to read on and learn more details.

Finally, make sure to archive your FYI emails on a single page in your company wiki for permanent reference. This serves many purposes:

• New hires can read the historical FYI emails in one sitting and quickly get up to speed on important updates that the employees around them have already read. This reduces the staff time required for training new hires while making them more effective sooner.
• Employees who recall you sent out an FYI email but don’t recall the details can refer to the FYI email page to find the email and refresh their memories.
• The FYI email archive serves as proof that you notified relevant stakeholders about important issues if people later forget that you did so and wrongly say you left them in the dark.
• You can conveniently link to an FYI email from other wiki pages that are related to it in some ways. (Rich cross-linking between related pages can make a wiki a rich tool for efficient information discovery and learning, particularly for new hires.)

I put the URL of the wiki page archiving the email right at the top of the email itself as a visual reminder to everyone that they’ll be able to find the email later in the wiki for reference.

Archive your FYI emails in your wiki. If it’s worth sending, it’s worth saving!