You’re ready for the big meeting when suddenly an exec starts some tangent on slide #2 that completely derails the conversation. You never end up covering the actually important items, and there’s no meaningful next step.
We’ve all been there. Knowing how to engage executives at the right level can be opaque and incredibly frustrating, especially if you need to adjust in real time when the communication doesn’t go as planned.
During Matt Greenberg’s time at CreditKarma, he worked with an exec sponsor who loved getting deep into the details but was so incredibly busy that it would take many days to get involved. If Matt sent information to the exec that was too concise, he’d get multiple follow-ups for more information, delaying progress by many days. If he sent something too detailed, it wasn't read until it was too late.
This was a turning point in how Matt approached all communications. He needed to make a change in how he communicated by using an executive summary.
Executive summaries are a powerful tool — when wielded effectively. Done well, an executive summary is an overview that helps build credibility and align people around the most important priorities captured in a report. Done poorly, it creates chaos from ill thought-out communication.
In this piece, we’ll show you how to dramatically improve your communication skills with an executive summary. We’ll walk through:
About the Authors:
Natalie Rothfels is an Operator in Residence at Reforge and runs a leadership coaching practice. She has held product leadership roles at Quizlet and Khan Academy and was a classroom teacher before that.
Matt Greenberg is the CTO at Reforge, former VP Engineering at Credit Karma, and co-creator of the Scaling Product Delivery program.
What is the Purpose of an Executive Summary?
Executive summaries aren’t just for executives. Every type of communication can benefit from having a clear summary upfront even if only to help the communicator structure their ideas.
Executive summaries create impact for both sender and receiver. They…
Articulate thinking
Provide rationale
Drive specific action
Articulate thinking
Diving right into problem-solving without taking a beat to set a clear path is fun, but generally a trap. Crafting an executive summary forces you to articulate what you're thinking so it's not just stuck in your head. Context loss — which usually happens when critical information isn't effectively communicated — causes unnecessary friction that leads to inefficiencies. Sharing your thinking sets you on a clear path, and helps you show that path to others so they can support your project moving forward.
Provide rationale
Good ideas can come from anyone, but well-crafted ideas come from those who justify their thinking with clear rationale. Executive summaries help you to link your thinking to the big picture strategy so that it’s crystal clear why you’re doing the work you’re doing, and what impact to expect when it’s done.
Drive aligned action
Every good message has a clear ask. Sometimes you may be asking for clarity, resources, or help solving a problem. Other times you may be asking for someone to clear the path, be an ally, or give you more space to think. Executives summaries help teams move forward by aligning folks around the task, whether that’s to step in or step aside.
For the purposes of this article, we’ll refer to “executives” as the audience for your summary, but you can use these tips to communicate more effectively with any audience.
3 Elements of a Good Executive Summary
Executives are in the business of gathering information, making decisions, and driving outcomes. They do it across many teams with different priorities, juggling problems at every level within an org.
When they come to a product or business review, your audience is looking to remove blockers, provide clarity, and ultimately answer one question: “How can I engage to keep this team on track?”
Executive summaries should be your response to that question.
It’s easier to answer if you know the three things executives are looking for:
Concise big picture, coupled with the right level of detail
Sound judgment and structured thinking
Scaffolding to know how to engage
Let’s walk through each.
Concise Big Picture, and the Right Level of Detail
Executives are looking for summaries that are important, impactful, and concise. Choose your words wisely. Take into account the context of what your audience does or does not already know.
Important: What’s important to you may not be important to someone else (and vice versa). You may need to articulate the bigger picture why, what problem needs solving, and the consequences of inaction. Or, you may need to revise any misconceptions your audience has about the path forward. Tailor your message based on what matters most to your audience.
Impactful: If the reader is left asking “Okay,...what am I supposed to do with this information?”, you likely haven’t accomplished your intended goal. It’s a totally viable goal to send an update where the goal is non-engagement. Just be clear and honest with yourself about that intent.
Concise: Your message should be a tight summary, meaning that the rest of the materials expands the view but does not change or invalidate it.
These elements enable your audience to take action and unblock you more easily.
“People often struggle with a clear articulation of the bigger picture, and then they include a bunch of details that don't really matter,” says Ely Lerner, Reforge EIR and former Head of Consumer Product at Chime. Instead of overloading your message, “share a concise but strong opinion, founded in data. Then support it,” says Joanna Lord, CMO at Reforge.
Sound Judgment, Structured Thinking
Executives are looking for summaries that are credible and coherent.
Just as product specs clarify what you’re building, executive summaries clarify how you’re thinking.
Sharing structured thinking builds trust. And the faster you build that trust, the easier it is to build alignment. In other words, executive summaries are a high-leverage tool for instilling trust with leadership.
“Your executive’s primary touchpoint with you is your exec reviews, so the majority of their perception of you is going to be built on those interactions. Make them count!” – Ely Lerner
Credible: Making assertions or decisions without supporting data is a red flag. Your executive is right-sizing your approach to the problem to optimize for good outcomes.
Coherent: Your arguments should be easy to follow, and structured logically. Provide supporting data that underscores your argument or thesis.
Scaffolding for Easy Engagement
Executives are looking for summaries that are unambiguous and forthright.
Think of your executive summary as an onramp to the freeway. You want to make it easier for your audience to yield into high-speed traffic (your team, executing) rather than hitting traffic or crashing.
Unambiguous: Reduce the cognitive friction that your audience will hit by laying things out in simple, easily readable terms. We all fill in the blanks with assumptions when things aren’t made explicit. The more precise and explicit you can be, the better.
“Knowing what the next step is, what decision needs to be made, or what approval is being requested of me…that’s really important,” says Saleem Malkana, Reforge EIR and former VP Product at NBCUniversal. “Then I have the right frame of reference to engage.”
Forthright: Burying the lead or hiding mistakes in favor of loudly celebrating your wins may save face in the short term but doesn’t end well. Your executive wants to help avoid late-stage blowups while they still can.
These three elements — big pictures + the right details, sound judgment and structured thinking, and scaffolding for easy engagement — help your audience know how to step in and course-correct. In some cases, the best action is no action. In others, executives will choose to step in to help de-risk a critical path or provide additional strategic clarity.
The efficacy of your exec summary is correlated to the ease with which your executive knows how to engage.
5 Steps for Writing a Great Executive Summary
It’s easier to build new skills off of a foundation of your existing skills. Use these five best practices to up-level your communication skills:
Understand your audience
Name the job to be done
Identify what’s out of scope
Focus both on what (content) and how (structured delivery)
Measure success
1. Understand your audience
In product development, it’s a best practice to focus on a specific user group or segment so that we can understand their specific needs, goals, and motivations. The same is true in effective communication.
Narrow your focus to just one audience, or you’ll end up speaking to too many people solving for no one well.
“Your audience impacts what sort of context and level of detail you include in your summary,” says Saleem. “Is it a knowledge expert in this space? Your manager? An executive 3 levels up who thinks about a much broader set of topics? Be specific.”
2. Name the job-to-be-done
The Jobs To Be Done framework is well-loved in product development because it simplifies something very complex (decision-making) into something actionable. The same should be true of your executive summary.
Identify what job your summary is serving. Avoid the temptation to make a list with too many items, like this:
Give context to Executive A about our status
Provide data about what’s working and what’s not from the last test
Share changes to the roadmap based on those learnings
Get feedback on the roadmap from Executive B and Executive C
Ask for approval for shifting roadmap
Just as in product development, it’s better to solve one thing well than five things poorly. Identify the one most important job for the one most important audience, and build everything around that.
3. Identify what’s out of scope
Your job as a product leader is to ruthlessly prioritize. Your job as a communicator is to ruthlessly edit.
It’s okay to not solve every problem all at once all within a single document. Over-detailing is a great way to kill decision-making credibility by wearing people out.
Instead, you can highlight what’s out of scope for the discussion and why, and provide other channels to communicate additional details.
4. Focus both on what (content) and how (structured delivery)
Just as customers go through a journey with your product, executives go through a flow with your information. That flow is crafted by focusing on both what you’re saying and how you’re saying it.
Once you have identified your audience and the job to be done, you can craft a clearer message as the centerpiece of your content. We like the AIM framework:
AIM Framework: Audience + Intent = Message
From there, you can craft the rest of the structure to best support that message.
5. Measure success
If you aren’t proactively thinking of your desired outcome, you can’t effectively measure if it’s worked. You’ll know you’ve succeeded if the audience focused on what you told them to focus on rather than getting sidetracked to something else.
Executive Summary Examples: The Bad and the Good
Let’s look at two example executive summaries — one that could use some work, and another that has the right context, confidence, and clarity.
Bad Executive Summary
Read this bad executive summary example and see if you can identify ways to improve it:
We wanted to give an update on our status. There are a bunch of risks that make us feel nervous about hitting our goals.
Over the last few weeks we haven't been able to effectively deliver what we projected, and engineering is taking about twice as long to deliver on sprint goals than we estimated. I’ve talked with our eng leads and they said they’re working on it.
This executive summary could use some work, because…
It’s not tailored to the audience. It highlights feelings without any data that the audience may care about.
There’s no clear “Job to be done.” What’s the intended outcome from this message? Is it to share how you feel, to gain empathy, or to cause alarm bells to ring?
It focuses on being blocked rather than what’s needed to unblock.
It doesn’t include rationale for any specific asks.
Good Executive Summary
Here’s an example of a good executive summary. As you read it, can you identify what’s working?
Scaling our product to more audiences is the #1 company priority this year. One of the biggest risks to that is effectively scaling engineering work.
We are investigating three of the big hurdles that are slowing engineering work and posing larger than expected risks:
1. Unreliable CI/CD pipelines
2. Minimal shared design system code
3. Speed of onboarding new teammates
At our current pace, we’re now off track for delivery by four weeks. We’ll spend this week spiking on these three hurdles and provide a recommendation at our next Product Review for how to invest across each. To properly spike, we will pause our current investment in Project X. We’d like to hear any veto blocks to this plan from Rebecca and Ahmed, otherwise you can expect we’ll move this forward.
This excellent executive summary features some key highlights:
It’s tailored to a specific audience. Rebecca and Ahmad may be accountable for this work getting done, so they’ve received a specific ask.
There’s a clear “Job to be done” ask. Veto or move out of the way.
It’s focused on clear recommendations. Ideally what follows in the communication is more information about each of the three engineering hurdles listed.
It includes data about impact.
Shift Your Mindset from Prove to Move for More Effective Communication
We’ve already mentioned three main traps of ineffective communication:
Diluting your message
Oversharing
Lacking scaffolding for easy engagement
Avoiding these traps requires a mindset shift. Rather than trying to prove something to executives, try to move something instead. In other words, rather than focusing on looking good, focus on making meaningful progress with your audience.
In practice, that means:
Identify and be explicit about your desired outcomes. Does a decision need to be made, or a risk to be mitigated? Is there new information that requires a shift in strategy?
Reduce cognitive load for the audience. Your executives have to synthesize a lot of information to be effective. Make it easy for them to move, not stumble, through your information.
Gain trust and momentum with honesty. Your audience’s time is limited, so you want to make the most out of it for all parties. That includes you. If it doesn’t move the work forward, it hasn’t been effective.
Is Your Executive Summary Good? Here’s a Checklist.
Next time you’re trying to write an executive summary, tailor your message to your audience by following this rubric:
In terms of including the Big Picture and the Right Details: Is your message important? Impactful? Concise?
In terms of displaying Sound Judgement and Clarity of Thought: Is your message credible? Coherent?
In terms of including Scaffolding for Engagement: Is your message unambiguous? Forthright?
Be careful about falling into the trap of thinking that exec summaries are superfluous nice-to-haves. If you can’t provide a crisp summary, it’s like not time to communicate — and may be an indication you don’t yet understand the problem well enough.
