Weekly Business Review Template

Start with the numbers your team can move. In Amazon's 2009 letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos wrote that new senior leaders are often surprised by how little time the company spends discussing financial results. He explained that focusing on the controllable inputs to the business¹ is the most effective way to maximize financial outputs over time.

Keep revenue in the pack, but spend the talking time on what drives it, such as trial conversion, delivery time or support backlog. Give every metric one named owner, a threshold written as a number, and the decision it informs. Without a threshold a metric can never breach, so nobody is ever asked to explain it.

Ask each owner what they would do differently if their number moved 20%. If there is no answer, the metric belongs on a dashboard. Write each definition down once, in a metric catalog, so the number means the same thing every week.

Then show history beside each number. The NHS guide Making Data Count warns that comparing this month with last tells you nothing about trends and how much the data varies naturally². Cedric Chin, who learned Amazon's WBR from former Amazon executive Colin Bryar, reports that its most common chart puts the trailing six weeks beside the trailing year³.

Assemble the numbers on the Thursday before a Monday review, so owners have Friday to explain anything that breached. In a 2013 study of quarterly performance reviews in federal agencies, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that data must be fully vetted prior to the meeting⁴. That way the discussion can focus on trends, not on whether the data is correct.

Ask for commentary only on breached metrics, and only from each metric's owner. A request covering the whole pack gets restated numbers back. Good commentary gives a cause, says whether the gap is closing and by when, and says whether the room needs to decide anything this week.

An honest "we don't know yet" beats a plausible guess. In Chin's account, an Amazon owner who is still investigating says so, and the facilitator makes a note to follow up³.

Open with five minutes of silent reading, so nobody presents the pack. Then discuss only the metrics that breached. At Amazon, Chin writes, an owner whose metric shows only routine variation says "nothing to see here"³, and the meeting moves on to the next graph.

Guard the decide block. When exceptions run long, the extra minutes come out of it, so log them. If it gets no time four weeks running, the review has drifted into a status meeting.

A common failure in weekly reviews is the topic that comes back every week. Everyone knows it keeps coming up, but nobody knows for how long. So give each issue one more number: the consecutive weeks it has been raised without a recorded decision.

Escalate at four weeks. By then the room has failed to decide three times, a sign that the decision needs something the room doesn't have. GAO's leading practices for performance reviews include having key players attend to facilitate problem solving⁴. If the person who can decide isn't there, invite them or take the issue to them.

The escalation names what was missing in one sentence. It is usually one of these:

• A spend above the room's approval limit, with the amount
• A person who doesn't attend, by name
• A call reserved to an executive or the board
• A third party under contract
• A queue with a fixed lead time
• Two owners with no tiebreak

If the same two owners keep deadlocking, settle who decides with a RACI matrix. Keep an age count on each escalated issue until an answer comes back, and track total weeks raised, since skipping a week resets a consecutive count. Don't raise the threshold the first time an awkward issue reaches it.

Write each decision as a sentence someone could act on. "Move $40,000 from paid search to partner events in April" is a decision. "Agreed to review budget allocation" is not. Every action needs what, who and by when, or it is only a topic.

GAO lists naming the individual or office responsible for each action item⁴ as an important follow-up step, along with putting follow-ups on the next review's agenda. In the same study, Treasury's performance budgeting staff wrote a memo right after each review naming action items, owners and due dates.

If you record the review, the meeting minutes generator pulls decisions and owners from the transcript. Each month, roll the weekly numbers into a monthly management report. To start faster, open the template on this page in River, which can backfill the issue log from your past notes.