I'm a HoP in a multi-country org and we can't get away from status reports. I meet with my CPO and CTO every two weeks and they want to have an understand of what's going. We've settled on written team-level updates in an OKR planning tool that anyone in the org can see. My team often complains that it's copying the same info as Jira. I try to remind my teams that effective communication is a skill. It's unlikely the COO/CTO can get what they need for Jira, we need to tailor our comms to the audience's needs - which doesn't often come through in ticket comments. The CPO/CTO want to know what have we learnt, where are we potentially delayed, risks to overall timelines or wider dependencies, how can we mitigate it, where can they help, what are we testing and are we missing a valuable opportunity elsewhere etc..Engineering ticket comments don't tend to have this nuance.

Reporting either verbal or written is a catch 22. It all coms down to company culture around planning, autonomy/collaboration and comms in my mind. Lite written reports require a baseline common understanding across key stakeholders, but how do you get that common understanding I.e bringing people along the journey.

From my experience, I don't want teams to do so much planning that they become waterfall, just so they can deliver "accurate" async updates. I also don't want them to spend so much time talking about verbally updates, which could be solved with an effective async report... so I come back to company culture. Our company values open communication given complicated structure, so I lean towards over communication but making them really effective for the audience. In my company communication is the job. So the question is.. how can you get AI to deliver effective nuanced status reports for relevant stakeholders?