GC Mouli's Blog

Response to Exec Escalations at Work

I am writing today on something that I learnt from a senior Product Leader at Microsoft (JJ Cadiz) a few years ago, when I used to work with the Outlook team. Today, I applied that learning today, and I remembered JJ and sent a note of gratitude to him.

This is focused towards Product folks in large organizations, but if you have a similar situation in other functions (engineering / design etc) and/or in smaller organizations, it might probably be useful as well. Use at your discretion.

Situation:

This is fairly common. If handled well, this is actually a good thing because, now you know the importance of the criticality of the project, and so does your team. You also get to (in some cases) get an unfair advantage in getting this thing done quickly from your teams.

Ok. Now lets look at some observations on this scenario:

The First Response template

I acknowledge your concern and understand the importance of this project / feature. We have already started working on it. I will be on point to send you regular updates as we make progress on this.

And then in subsequent updates, up-level the discussion on summarizing the need, the challenges, where the team is, and how the progress is happening - in a maximum of 3-4 bullets. This is what would make the leaders on the email confident and relieved.

Trust me, their team folks got them to +1 on their escalation. They have a ton of other work to do than follow up on this, and understand deeper on who messed up, or why things are getting delayed (in most cases). Always build up on the previous mail and give line of sight to when it is going to finish. Name the updates as "Update 1", "Update 2", ... etc.

All the best. Hope this helps in diffusing any escalation that might come your way. You now know how to handle it.