How to run a killer Weekly Business Review

👋 Hey, it’s Sundar! Welcome to a  paid subscriber only article of experiMENTAL: a weekly newsletter on B2C Marketing & data science how-to guides, frameworks, and stories from 15 years including early Uber.

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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:

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