PM Manager 1:1 Template

Your review is decided in the twenty 1:1s before it, not in the packet. A weekly structure for making your work visible upward, in ten minutes of prep.

What's inside

Five weekly sections, ordered by what managers actually remember and repeat:

• Shipped / moved: what landed, one line each, with the number if one exists.
• Decided: decisions and reasoning, including what you cut or said no to. The highest-value section; "I decided X because Y" is what travels into your manager's calibration conversations.
• Blocked / need: specific asks, not vague concerns. Specific asks get acted on.
• Visibility: the work no dashboard shows (alignment brokered, conflicts defused, mentoring done). Name it or it never happened.
• Looking ahead: next week plus early risks, surfaced before they're fires.

Plus a monthly add-on: one career question, one piece of upward feedback, and a scan for decisions worth promoting into formal impact entries.

How to use it

1. Fill it in before the meeting, not during. Ten minutes, same time every week. The consistency is the signal.
2. Lead with decisions, not activity. Status is forgotten in a day; judgment compounds.
3. Send it async when the meeting gets cancelled. The document is the product; the meeting is the delivery mechanism.
4. Keep a running copy. Twelve of these is your quarterly self-review, pre-written, and each week's "shipped" and "decided" rows are brag document entries you've already captured.

The double-entry trick

This template works because it makes one ten-minute habit feed two artifacts: your manager's weekly picture of you, and your own permanent record. The failure mode is the same as every documentation habit: it survives three weeks, then dies.

Prodlog closes that loop: log each entry once, from Slack, email, iOS or the web, as it happens. Before every 1:1, Prodlog fills this in from your log: entries since the last one, gaps, and what you need from your manager. The same entries draft your review later, with no reconstruction. 1:1 prep is free and never metered. See a sample or start free at prodlog.app.