Your dev team deserves a trophy wall

You do, too.

Amidst a vast sea of product management templates and best practices, here’s something that doesn’t get enough love: team trophy walls.

What it is

A trophy wall is a simple record of what the team worked on and why. Each entry should be short—no more than three sentences. This makes them easy to read and easy enough for a busy product manager (and/or engineering manager) to maintain over time.

Here’s what my team’s trophy wall looked like at my last role:

Why it’s helpful

When you’re part of a fast-moving, forward-looking team, it’s easy to lose sight of what you’ve accomplished, especially over the course of months/quarters/years. Trophy walls help you and your team remember.

When you’ll use them

Having a trophy wall to reference and pull from is especially helpful at the following junctures:

• Quarterly planning, which should absolutely highlight accomplishments from the prior quarter.
• Annual team reflections/retros, where a trophy wall can provide helpful context and additional recognition.
• Performance reviews, especially those with long review cycles that extend beyond one’s active memory.
• Career transitions and all the fun that comes with them, such as updating your resumé and prepping for interviews.

Given how often we’re asked to reflect on what we’ve done, a trophy wall quickly pays for itself. And it’s not just a gift to your future self; it’s a resource to everyone on the team, so make sure they know it exists!

Tips

As with most business documentation, writing the first version is easy; the challenge is in keeping it updated. Here are some ways to keep your trophy wall simple and maintainable:

• Use the same format for each entry: one-sentence summary, one-sentence description, one-sentence explanation of the value, and a link to more detailed documentation. Anything more complicated will be harder to maintain and harder to reference.
• Split authorship by domain/function. For example, the engineering manager can be responsible for entering engineering-led initiatives and the product manager can be responsible for everything else.
• Source your trophy wall entries from the Done column of your roadmap. If you use Notion databases (you should) and your roadmap follows a similarly concise format (it should), your trophy wall can be a self-maintaining database view that simply presents the Done column in reverse chronological order.

When to start a trophy wall

The best time to start a trophy wall is after your team ships its first roadmap-level work. If that’s already happened, simply backfill a few the team’s most recent achievements and maintain it from there; this is especially helpful when joining an existing team and trying to wrap your head around what your team has been working on.

Hopefully the format I’ve presented is easy enough to give it a try. If you do, your future self will thank you. I’ve done them at my last two startups and my only regret is that I didn’t start doing them earlier in my career.