Presenting data efficiently in emails

Chao Zhang
2 min readJan 29, 2021

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A simple trick to write an email report for your readers

Image by Hermann Traub from Pixabay

Recently my team wrote an email report to the leadership team on the executive summary of Android Gradle Plugin upgrades. Below is the initial version of the reports in the exec summary section:

- We have migrated to Android Gradle Plugin from 4.0 to 4.1.
-We have observed a reduction in CI build by 50% at 50th percentile and 32% at 90th percentile.
- Our APK size is also reduced by -17%

The above looks pretty ordinary. But let’s compare it to the following:

Less text, larger numbers, much easier for readers to get interested in reading them 🎉

Testimony: I have received more than 5 “wow”s from readers across the company hierarchy for the bottom version.

The inspiration is actually from the COVID-19 dashboard of where I live. I came to realize how often it is used in public versus how rare it is used in company emails.

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