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 a win once from Slack or the browser extension in the moment it happens, and it's ready for both your 1:1 doc and your quarterly summary — no reconstruction. See a sample or start free at prodlog.app.