What is an executive summary? (and how to write one)

An executive summary is the “top of the funnel” for your work.

It’s the page (or 1–2 slides) that helps a busy leader decide:

Do I care?
What’s the recommendation?
What decision is needed (if any)?

If you do it well, they keep reading.

If you do it poorly, your doc might as well not exist.

Scene

One of my first days in my first job, I got handed a messy spreadsheet task: pull insights and patterns out of a giant Excel file.

The analysis part was hard… but doable.

The real “oh no” moment was realizing I didn’t even have the basic tooling fluency yet (pivot tables were still a mystery at the time).

This was pre-YouTube-explainers-everything era, so I did what was available: went to a bookstore, bought a chunky Excel guidebook — with an actual CD-ROM — and taught myself.

Then came the second challenge:

Not “do I understand the data?”

It was: can I explain the point fast enough that someone busy will actually use it?

That’s what an executive summary is.

Not more work.

Translation work.

Promise

You’ll get:

a plain-English definition
a checklist of what to include (in order)
a copy/paste template for docs and 1–2 slide versions
the most common mistakes (and how to fix them)

What prompted this

People reinvent “TL;DR at the top” forever, and the comments get surprisingly heated because it’s really about respect for time: leaders want signal, writers want nuance. Two good snapshots: a Reddit thread debating TL;DRs in company-wide emails (https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/111gyb1/does_anyone_else_think_that_adding_a_tldr_to_a/) and Ask a Manager on getting shorter answers from a rambling employee (https://www.askamanager.org/2017/02/how-to-get-shorter-answers-from-a-rambling-employee.html).

The definition (plain English)

An executive summary is a short, decision-oriented snapshot of a larger document.

It’s not the whole story.

It’s the trailer that convinces someone the movie is worth watching.

Aim for:

~1 page for a doc
1–2 slides for a deck

The goal: reduce the leader’s work

A leader reading your summary is doing mental triage.

Your job is to make triage easy by giving them, in order:

context
the problem/opportunity
the recommendation
the decision needed
risks / trade-offs
what happens next

If you bury the recommendation on page 3, you’re forcing them to hunt.

Don’t make them hunt.

The executive summary checklist (what to include)

Use this as your default structure:

Overview — what is this about?
Problem / opportunity — what’s changing, what’s broken, what’s at stake?
Recommendation — what do you want to do?
Decision needed — what do you need from the reader?
Key points / evidence — why is this the right move? (3 bullets max)
Risks / trade-offs — what could go wrong and how you’ll mitigate
Next steps — owner + timeline
Financial snapshot (if relevant) — cost, ROI, headcount, savings

My preferred template (copy/paste)

## Executive summary

**Context (1–2 sentences):**

**Problem / opportunity:**

**Recommendation (1 sentence, BLUF):**

**Decision needed (be explicit):**

**Why this / key evidence (3 bullets max):**
-
-
-

**Risks / trade-offs (2–3 bullets):**
-
-
-

**Next steps (owner + dates):**
-

If you’re doing this as slides (1–2 slides)

Slide 1: the call

Headline = the recommendation
3 bullets = the evidence that changes the decision
Decision needed (one line)

Slide 2: the reality

3 bullets = risks / trade-offs
Next steps (owner + dates)

If your deck needs 12 slides “to explain the summary,” you don’t have a summary yet.

The easiest way to write it: do it last

Write the full doc first.

Then write the exec summary last.

Why: you don’t actually know what matters most until you’ve done the work.

A mini example (what “good” looks like)

Context: Customer support tickets for login issues increased after the last release.

Problem: It’s driving churn risk and burning support hours.

Recommendation: Roll back feature X this week and ship a smaller fix by next Friday.

Decision needed: Approve rollback today; approve one engineer allocation for 5 days.

Why:

Top 3 ticket themes point to feature X as the trigger
Rollback is reversible and reduces immediate customer pain
Smaller fix preserves the upside without the current risk

Risks / trade-offs:

Temporary loss of feature X benefits
Release schedule impact on Project Y (mitigation: de-scope one non-critical item)

Next steps:

[Me] execute rollback today
[Eng lead] assign owner by EOD
[PM] comms to support by tomorrow AM

That’s the bar: tight, explicit, and decision-forward.

Common executive summary mistakes (and how to fix them)

Mistake 1: “Background” takes the whole page

Fix: keep context to 1–2 sentences.

If it needs a history lesson, put it in an appendix.

Mistake 2: no recommendation

Fix: make a call.

Even if the recommendation is “do nothing,” say it.

Mistake 3: unclear decision

Fix: write the decision as a sentence that starts with a verb:

“Approve $X budget.”
“Choose Option A.”
“Confirm timeline.”

Mistake 4: claims that aren’t backed up later

Fix: only summarize things you can support in the full doc.

Mistake 5: too many bullets

Fix: if you have 12 key points, you don’t have key points.

Pick the 3 that actually change the decision.

Two quick notes, depending on where you sit:

Early-career: writing an executive summary is how you get credit for your work. If the summary is unclear, the work might as well be invisible.
Manager: a good exec summary is a force multiplier. You can make better decisions faster — and coach clearer thinking by pushing teams to write the recommendation up top.

Edge cases

No decision needed: still write the recommendation (“Here’s the conclusion”) and the next steps.
Highly complex topics: keep the exec summary simple and put nuance in an appendix or linked doc.

Next step

Take the last doc you wrote and rewrite the top as a 7-line executive summary using the template above.

If you want a repeatable “leader-friendly” weekly format, use the Status update template.