Playbook

The weekly team update that writes itself

Writing a weekly team update is one of those chores every manager puts off. Here's how to hand it to Navi and get back an hour of your Friday.

Need help? Join the Navi community on Discord, r/naviwork, or the Facebook group — that's the fastest way to get answers.

If you run a team, you probably owe someone a weekly update. Your manager, a sibling team, a cross-functional partner, the board. The update is always the same shape: what shipped, what's in flight, what's blocked. And you always write it by going through your team's tracker, your team's Slack, your team's PRs, and stitching together something that sounds coherent.

Which is exactly the kind of glue work Navi is good at.

The recipe

Connect Linear. Open a dedicated chat in Navi ("Weekly update" works). Then:

Prompt Every Friday at 3pm Pacific, pull every Linear issue my team closed this week. Group by project. For each group, write two to three sentences summarizing what shipped and why it matters. Flag anything that slipped from a previous week. End with a short "next week" section listing the top three in-progress issues. Draft this as a Google Doc titled "Weekly update — week of [Monday's date]." I'll review and send it.

Navi will confirm. Approve. The next Friday afternoon, a Google Doc is ready for a 10-minute read-through before you share.

What a good draft looks like

Weekly update — week of April 13

Checkout flow v2 (3 issues closed)
Shipped the new payment method picker to 20% of traffic. Early read is promising — cart abandonment down ~8% in the test group. Team is holding at 20% through Monday before deciding on full rollout.

Search infrastructure (1 issue closed)
Switched the primary index to the new backend. No user-visible change yet; unblocks the relevance work planned for next week.

Growth experiments (2 issues closed)
Two small wins on the onboarding tutorial — a copy change worth ~1.4% on day-one activation, and a fix to the skip button that was causing confusion.

Slipped from last week: "API rate limit dashboard" pushed to next week; blocked on a Grafana permission issue that Infra is resolving.

Next week:
• Relevance v2 experiment — kicks off Tuesday.
• Checkout rollout decision — Monday afternoon.
• Rate limit dashboard — blocked unblock expected EOD Monday.

Nine times out of ten, the draft is 80% right — the 20% is usually context only you know ("the real reason relevance matters is the board meeting in three weeks"). Adding that in is minutes, not hours.

Teach Navi your team once

The first few drafts will feel generic because Navi doesn't know your team structure. Fix that with a one-time memory prompt:

Prompt Remember: my team is Dan, Priya, and Sarah. Our main Linear projects are Checkout, Search, and Growth. My manager is Alex — they read these updates. Write for that audience: assume they know the business but not the code. Keep each project section under three sentences. No emoji.

From then on, every weekly update inherits that voice.

Variations

The broader point

Every recurring written artifact in your job — weekly update, monthly review, quarterly board note, post-mortem — follows the same recipe. The raw material is scattered across your tools. The write-up is always a summarization. Both are jobs Navi does cheaply.

Pick the update you most dread. Set it up once. Feel the relief.

Questions? Stuck? Want to share something you built?

Come join the Navi community — the fastest way to get help or compare notes with other users:


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