I developed this document because I often find myself advising first-time CEOs or founders, people who have never managed a team larger than X number of employees before—X might be 15, it might be 1000—and they need to be able to understand what performance occurred in the previous week. How is that tracking relative to plan, and more importantly, what levers can they push or pull to improve performance across a variety of functions? Now, let’s say they’re managing to monthly financials. Realistically, they’re not going to see those numbers until three or four weeks after the fact, which means that they’re probably not going to remember the specifics around what actually happened. When you don’t have that clarity, it’s easy for review meetings to get derailed, and it takes away all the capabilities they have to actually influence outcomes. The goal of this approach is to give people a way to influence outcomes on a real-time basis and have a structured cadence that lets them improve performance as quickly as possible, while simultaneously having a clear understanding of how things are stacking up relative to their earlier planning.

While there are some numbers here that might look like they belong on a financial report, that’s not really the audience for this document. This is something that exists so that any functional leader can look at it and understand what’s happening with the business.

An overwhelming majority of start-ups aren’t profitable: they’re being funded by investors, which implies they have a certain amount of cash runway to achieve a given goal. Given that they’ve only got so many months to hit those metrics, they have to go and get a budget approved by their board that’s in line with those goals. That generally occurs either in Q4 or Q1, which means that they’re locking in numbers from the end of one year at the beginning of the next. The purpose of being able to look at performance on a weekly basis is that it allows you to adjust and revise plans upward or downward, rather than whiffing on them at a quarterly board meeting. If you’re waiting on those quarterly meetings, you’re going to have a lag of months in between a decision and a new plan being implemented, which means that you lose the ability to quickly go and get the additional efficiency you need to drive output. You literally have to crank this every single week, otherwise it’s too late and the cycle time is just too long.

Is NPS the end all, be all? Of course not. But I think it’s accepted enough in the common market that you can get some reliable data, and it’s also useful in terms of being able to frame a story for your investors.

Marketing is the largest expense area in any company, so there’s no excuse for what’s typically referred to as “jazz hands marketing,” where people just say “this is happening and that’s happening,” with no metrics to back it up. The fact is that the biggest companies in the world, like Meta and Google, have made an entire business out of making marketing quantifiable.

When it comes to tracking progress around technology and engineering functions, I’ve seen a variety of different methods. I’ve seen people use poker with Scrum. I’ve seen very long Kanban plans in a variety of productivity applications. In my experience, the most effective method is a simple red/yellow/green framework around bi-weekly releases. Is the team on track to deliver their next upcoming release? If you’re green, then you’re set to deliver on a given date. If you’re yellow, then you’ve run into some blockers and there’s an opportunity to change the delivery date. And if you’re red, then you’re effectively letting everyone know that there’s going to be a significant delay around this release.

In your weekly review meeting, there are three sets of information that you’re dealing with: there’s the spreadsheet with your KPIs; the central narrative, which includes action items from the last meeting, highlights, and lowlights; and the items that you’re tracking to do for the next meeting.

Having such a structured approach, where people’s time is defined down to the minute, might sound unorthodox and very top-down command and control. But in 2023, when no one wants to waste time on Zoom, I think it’s a breath of fresh air to avoid having to tell long stories and just be able to say, “Here are my goals, here’s what I’m responsible for, and here’s what good looks like.”

One added benefit of having these weekly meetings that focus solely on numbers is that it gives you the leverage to hold broader, more freeform monthly meetings to discuss performance and revise plans as necessary.

Kishan Shah

I’ve developed this approach to reporting across years of working with orgs of all sizes. Having a clear view of weekly performance lets you respond to what’s actually happening in real time and ensures you’re not missing opportunities to pivot or double down.

I developed this document because I often find myself advising first-time CEOs or founders

While there are some numbers here that might look like they belong on a financial report

Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Annual Reporting Template and WBR Agenda by Kishan Shah

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Weekly

Monthly/Quarterly/Annual

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