Read your first Brief
What an EM Brief holds, where its evidence is, and how your review carries up the chain.
Last updated
An EM Brief covers one week of one team's systems. It is a good first revision, not the final word: you know things no integration can see.
What it holds
The top of the page carries three things: the Waltz mark, the headline (the week's most important change, in one sentence) and the last day of the week covered. Then, in order:
- Summary: the headline and up to four bullets, most important first.
- How your system changed: a map of the team's services, with what was added, removed or moved: services, interfaces, data stores and vendors.
- Agent work: the share of changes made by AI coding agents, where they landed and what they cost.
- Risks that need a decision: breaking interfaces, new vendors, loosened access, new secrets, end-of-life runtimes and vulnerable dependencies.
- Technologies and vendors, and Delivery this week: merged changes, and releases and lead time when deploy data exists.
- Key terms: every name the Brief uses, with a plain meaning. Terms are also explained in place where you first meet them.
A section without data is named under Not in this Brief yet, with what would fill it, such as connecting Jira.
Evidence
Every number and claim traces to facts: commits, pull requests, deploys, tickets. Open an item's drill-down to see the evidence, down to the code. A model writes only from the findings it is given, and every number is checked; when a check fails, the Brief keeps its template text. Maps and charts are computed from facts.
Review it
Open Review queue in the console and choose the Brief. Select any sentence, row, number or term, then:
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| React | Thumbs up or down, with a reason: wrong, not important, already known, missing context, great |
| Comment | A threaded discussion on that element |
| Edit | Rewrite it, hide it, reorder it, lead with it, or move it to "Also this week" |
| Correct | Rename something, give it a meaning, approve a vendor, or say what's wrong |
| Decision | Record what you decided, in your words |
Any member can react, comment, correct and record decisions; the Brief's recipients and the org's admins edit, resolve and revert. Every change is tracked and every edition kept.
How your review carries
- Edits change only your Brief. Each edit makes a revised edition.
- Corrections teach Waltz. A correction resolved as incorporated joins your org's memory. Every Brief reads the same facts and memory, so it reaches every Brief that shares the fact: this week's are rebuilt quietly, without new emails, and later weeks start from it.
- Facts stay facts. A correction never rewrites a fact; it takes the findings that rest on it off the Brief.
- Up the chain. The VP Brief is built on Wednesday from the week's EM Briefs and their review. What you lead with gains weight, what you mark not important loses it, and escalations appear as decisions needed. Executives see the reviewed result, never the annotations.
- Briefs ship on time. A Brief nobody reviewed contributes as it was written.
Memory stays in your org and never shapes another org's Brief.
Delivery
Email. The subject is the headline; the body holds the date, the summary bullets and Open the Brief, a link signed for you alone and valid for 14 days. Stop getting this Brief unsubscribes in one click.
Slack. On the Brief's subscription, choose direct messages instead of email, or a channel post besides it: the headline, the date, up to three key points and Open the Brief. Anyone Slack can't find is emailed, and revisions reply in the message's thread.
To make every link ask for sign-in, an admin turns it on under Settings → Security (Paid and Enterprise).
Next: Briefs for the other levels.