Every Monday at 9am, there’s a nervous energy at companies. Laptops open. Dashboards firing. People are on the hunt for… “What happened last week?”

Then, there’s a subset of employees that are preparing for the Weekly Business Review: the oft dreaded recurring meeting that no one who attends wants to be at but everyone who doesn’t attend wants to be a part of. I've been able to participate in hundreds of these in my career and they often range from from "mind numbing death by talking" to "holy shit, it’s working!".

Below, I’ll dive into what I’ve seen makes a Weekly Business Review (WBR) successful.

Just in case you’ve never heard of one, a WBR is a regular meeting (weekly) where teams look at the business's performance (business review) over the past week. At its core, a WBR should give everyone a pulse check on the business and create alignment across teams. It's meant to:

"Okay Sundar, that seems pretty simple. Why are you writing a whole article on this?"

Because while the concept is simple, execution is a nightmare.

WBRs usually fall into 4 categories:

You obviously want to be in the top right, but it’s rarely there. The biggest issues tend to be low action. Even high action low reporting is better because there’s inertia you can work with, but a company / team that isn’t action oriented is doomed to fail.

The tone of the WBR can also vary:

All of this stems from the fact that WBRs suffer from 3 big problems:

No one wants to sit in a 2 hour meeting, but somehow WBRs always ends up being a long and bloated meeting. It’s nearly impossible to keep people that engaged and excited for that long.

It usually starts small with the core metrics:

But then marketing wants to add their stuff:

Product wants to add their launches:

Operations wants to talk about their constraints:

Before you know it, you've got a 10 page report (or 75 page slide deck) and you’re spending all of the time sharing updates.

Who owns the WBR? Is it the CEO? Head of Growth? The PM? The data analyst?

Without clear ownership, the meeting becomes a free-for-all with everyone trying to put their spin on what happened. And what happens when no one clearly owns something? It usually turns to shit. Also, ownership = accountability.

If you know you’re on the hook for a metric / update, it’s excusable if you miss it once. If you start to repeatedly miss it then you’re work ethic / productivity comes into question. No good leader wants that so ownership forces accountability.

This is not just true for the strategic part but also the plumbing. If your dashboards are broken / data isn’t correct then you better have a good answer for why it is for the next WBR or eventually it all falls apart. Own your stuff.

Listen to most WBR meetings and you’ll hear a lot of “Here's what happened.” Obviously that’s important… but…so… like… what are we going to do about it?

WBRs can become status reports instead of action alignment meetings. That’s because people too often take the name of the meeting literally and just review the business. However, the goal isn't to just know what happened, it's to agree on what you’re going to do next.

Here’s how to fix all of this.

Now that you know what’s wrong with WBRs, you can attack each problem and I’ll also share how we do it at Bounce so you have tangible examples.

Just in case you need social proof, I took over Bounce’s WBR and here is some feedback from our finance leader:

The structure of your WBR should follow a simple pattern:

That's it. 30 minutes total.

At Bounce, our WBR is 45 minutes (but my goal is to get it to 30):

We document all of this in Notion.

For a WBR to run smoothly, you need:

At Bounce:

Our CEO and CTO are the only 2 that are not either GMs or SMEs but obviously they have oversight and ownership over everything so it’s important to have them in the discussion.

"But Sundar, we have so much to cover!"

No, you don't. You have a few key metrics that matter and everything else is noise. If your WBR is consistently running over an hour, you're doing something wrong.

"Sundar, we have so many metrics to track. How can we focus on just one?"

You can't. And you shouldn't. Not every metric matters. Some are inputs / levers. Some are outputs. You can’t control outputs. You can only control inputs. Here’s an example:

Conversion rate. Conversion rate goes down by 10%. Well why did it?

It’s either:

Sitting there asking why it went down every week is not an easy one to answer because it’s rarely a bug and quality of experience only shows up over longer terms. Quality of traffic also fluctuates week to week but the reason it fluctuates is not often something you control EVERY week. It’s a result of strategy which over time (I don’t mean years) you can adjust.

Reporting on metrics gives the illusion of control but again it’s just something we humans do to make ourselves feel good and in control. Pick metrics that are inputs.

“Our sessions are down this week because traffic from Organic was down. We don’t know why traffic from Organic is down (that’s an okay thing to say) but we’re monitoring it because it feels random”. Trust your SMEs / functional leaders. If there’s isn’t trust then go to another company.

Nothing is more painful than watching someone read slides to a room full of people who can read faster themselves. Send out the deck 24 hours before the meeting. Make it clear that everyone is expected to have read it before they arrive. This transforms the meeting from an information share to a discussion and decision forum.

The last slide of every WBR should be action items with clear owners and due dates. This should account for at least 5 minutes of the meeting.

Action: Fix the checkout flow bug

Owner: Jane

Due: Next Wednesday

If you're not ending with actions, you're just having a nice chat about some numbers. That’s why at Bounce I made a “big” update to call it WBR + Steer Co. Steer Co stands for steering committeee. Every week, the group of people responsible for every part of the business who have full authority and autonomy to influence the business meet and after reviewing the business, we steer it.

Every quarter, take 30 minutes to review the WBR itself:

One company I consulted with found that their WBR had expanded to cover so many metrics that no one could remember what mattered anymore. This quarterly review led them to cut 60% of the metrics they were tracking, focusing only on what drove actual business decisions.

When done right, the WBR becomes the heartbeat of your company's execution rhythm.

Here’s how you keep it in sync:

So, next time you're sitting in a two-hour slide-talking marathon disguised as a business review, send this article to whoever is running it.

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