What's the best way to get visibility on my work?

I recommend you watch this Taro Premium Session which covers the tactics I used to keep everyone on my team updated, and I shared some real examples.

Your point about the mechanism for communication/broadcasting updates is interesting (given that you don't have Workplace). My understanding is that Teams is almost identical to Slack. If that's the case, I'd highly recommend that you do NOT use Teams to send meaningful updates about your work.

Inherently, messages in Teams are ephemeral, which means your post won't get the distribution it needs to have an impact. I'd instead suggest a regular email, and I'd also reinforce your messaging with some combination of standup updates and team meetings. The medium where you communicate, and the frequency, is so important to get the visibility.

Finally, make sure you tailor your update to your audience. The details that your PM cares about are going to be different to your tech lead, and your messaging should reflect that. What I usually did in my posts was:

• tl;dr at the top which had relevant info for everyone
• more details for people who care enough
• link to my previous update, or share when folks can expect the next update

I actually disagree with Rahul here. Slack (and hence Teams as well) has its problems, but it can definitely be an effective mechanism for sharing project updates. Back at Robinhood, we didn't use Workplace, so we used Slack and things went just fine IMHO. There are just so many downsides with email compared to Slack:

• You can't easily or richly react to it like you can with Slack emojis.
• It's not easily shareable: Email starts off with a defined list of people, and you have to forward it to share it more. On Slack, you can just cc other people on the thread.
• You can link a Slack message. You can't really link an email for super easy sharing. This is very relevant when you're doing performance review write-ups and are linking proof of impact.
• People check email often, but people generally check Slack even more often given that it's an instant messenger.

How it worked at Robinhood is that we had bigger and bigger channels for sharing. So for smaller updates (e.g. a standard weekly update), you would share the update with the channel that's just your team, and for larger ones, you would use the one for all of Robinhood engineering or your entire org under your VP.

At the end of the day though, I recommend just talking to your manager to see what they prefer. 🙂