Most people don’t track their work—until they need to prove their value.

By then, it’s too late.

Whether you’re starting a new role, navigating a big transition, or want to grow into leadership, one of the most powerful things you can do is create a system for reflecting on your work, tracking your impact, and communicating with your manager.

This post isn’t about over-optimizing.

It’s about building the kind of habits that make you calm, clear, and confident in what you’re doing—and who you’re becoming.

Here’s how to do that—step by step.

Build a Personal System for Tracking the Impact

Most people don’t track their work unless they’re forced to.

And then, when someone asks “What did you actually do last month?” — they blank.

You don’t need a fancy system. You need a place to reflect.

Step 1: Start a private doc (in Notion, Google Docs, or even voice memos) and log weekly or biweekly:

• What did I work on?
• What problems came up, and how did I navigate them?
• What invisible things did I do that made a difference?
• Who did I collaborate with, and what shifted because of it?

👉🏽 This isn’t about looking impressive. It’s about staying connected to your growth.

Step 2: You can use this later to:

1. Share regular updates with your manager
2. Communicate progress and context back to your team or org
3. Create a package to pitch yourself for a contract extension or full-time role (6–8 months from now)
4. Identify collaborators who could vouch for your work
5. Prepare for new job opportunities and interviews so you can answer tough questions.

Step 3: Take note of the systems your team or company already uses to make updates:

• Will your General Manager ask you to provide updates on behalf of your team, in an email to the CEO?
• Does your manager post a weekly update in Slack or other internal systems, that he’ll ask you to contribute to?
• Will you be asked, or probably want to share an update with progress on behalf of the team? Especially important if you are in product management or marketing?

👉🏽 The above matters, because you can reuse all of the documentation you’re doing just for yourself, to start showing your work within the company direction (if you’re sharing it) or indirectly (if you manager or peers are sharing it.

Document What You’re Creating—Even If It’s Small

You’re going to come up with new ideas.

You’re going to fix broken workflows.

You’ll find a better way to onboard someone, write tickets, run a process, or manage escalations.

Don’t just do it—document it.

Start keeping a list of:

• Systems or templates you improved
• Processes you helped redesign
• Tools you created (or even just suggested)
• Insights you had that helped unblock a team

Even if it feels small, it matters. Because down the line, you can say:

• “I introduced this system”
• “I helped improve this workflow for our pod”
• “I created a process that other teams started using”

This is how influence builds.

This is how leadership shows up early—before the title changes.

Learn Your Manager’s Style (and Design Around It)

If you want to build trust with your managers, learn how they operate before trying to impress them.

Don’t just ask what they want—observe how they work. Are they hands-on or hands-off? Do they love jumping into problems with you, or just want the bottom-line summary?

“Some managers are just managing you as a person. Others are side-by-side with you, pitching ideas to VPs. You need to figure out where they fall on that spectrum.”

Start simple:

• Ask what their priorities are this quarter
• Notice how they give feedback (direct? scattered? through Slack?)
• Track whether they care more about velocity, outcomes, collaboration, or something else
• Ask what success looks like for your role in the context of their goals

Then build your 1:1 agenda, documentation, emails, and what you say in your 1:1s to match that.

For example:

• Are they strategic? Show how your work drives business outcomes
• Are they detail-oriented? Show your ability to execute and unblock others
• Do they never read anything? Keep it short, bold key points, and say it out loud

Tailor Your Updates to Your Manager’s Style

First use an agenda document in your 1:1s, before you send emails.

Start by creating an agenda doc—a Google Doc you can link in your 1:1s with sections like:

• Progress
• Key updates
• Questions
• To-dos

Tips:

• Make it clean, structured, and reflective of how your manager likes to work.
• You don’t have to walk through every detail in the doc. Usually your manager will read it before or after.
• This isn’t just a doc — it’s a system to design a relationship with your manager that is collaborative, respectful and useful to them.
• Put relevant insights, and the link to this doc in your monthly updates to your manager over EMAIL (don’t make them more frequent)
• The documentation that sucks is when someone lists 20 tasks. A better version highlights results, value to the team, and how you solved real issues.

Email a Monthly Update to Your Manager

A client of mine asked —

“People are telling me to email my manager…but I’m not sure what to say and how to do it?”

Yes, It’s important to update your manager but how you do it matters!

• Don’t add every detail into the email — only what is important:
  • Focus on key wins. Key results. Key insights that matter.
  • Share what would be helpful for your manager to hear — to make decisions, to update their manager.
• Send the email monthly:
  • There’s no need to send an email every week or even bi-weekly. It might get overwhelming for the manager, and YOU since you have to take time to write it.
  • This ensures that you only mention things that are high-level and important for the month.
• Reference goals, metrics, and roadmaps:
  • If you had goals set with your manager or team reference those and how you’re tracking towards them:
    • I made X sales out of the Y target for this quarter.
    • We shipped 3 new features out of the 10 planned on our roadmap.
    • Our product gained 300 new users. We’re aiming for 1,000 by the end of the year.
• Link to larger documentation or any work you’ve done like presentations, documents, etc.

Balance Initiative and Flexibility

When building a relationship with your manager you should:

1. Take initiative. You show up already thinking, acting, and documenting like a professional.
2. Stay flexible. You make it clear you’re here to support your manager’s goals, even when priorities shift.

That means your updates should reflect both confidence and openness.

You might say:

“Here’s what I think is most useful for me to focus on—based on what I’m seeing. But I’m completely open to shifting based on what’s most helpful for you or the team.”

Show a really good balance of—I’m a product manager who knows what I’m doing—and I’m also flexible to shift priorities if you need me to.

You want to come off as someone who already makes a difference but is still here to support the team’s direction.

That tone shows initiative and adaptability—two traits managers love.