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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.

Why is a WBR important?

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:

  1. Share what happened with key metrics

  2. Understand why things changed (if they did)

  3. Align on actions for the next week

"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.

Why WBRs are hard to get right

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:

  1. Status updates → Purely as a status update (boring)

  2. Witch hunts → others use them as a witch hunt to find who messed up (toxic)

  3. High energy → and the best companies use them as strategic alignment sessions (powerful).

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

Length of meeting

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:

  • Revenue

  • New customers

  • Active users

But then marketing wants to add their stuff:

  • CAC

  • Ad Spend

  • ROAS

Product wants to add their launches:

  • New rollouts

  • Conversion Rates

Operations wants to talk about their constraints:

  • Processes

  • Other boring stuff… just kidding Ops folks. Just seeing if people are paying attention :)

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.

Lack of ownership

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