Amazon mechanism — Weekly Business Review

In a prior post, I talked about how good intentions create organizational chaos.

The antidote? Mechanisms that turn intentions into outcomes. From my experience, the Weekly Business Review (WBR) is one of the most powerful mechanisms. It builds the operating discipline every week.

My first Amazon WBR was 100 pages of detailed metrics with VPs debating variations on page 47. I thought: “Why are these leaders in the weeds?”. I missed the point entirely.

The WBR wasn’t about easy consumption — it was about learning from variations in the details. A great resource is the Working Backwards book / website. https://lnkd.in/eVctmtV4 from Bill Carr and Colin Bryar.

The challenge when you are in a business outside of Amazon, is that you will struggle to copy the mechanism verbatim. I’ve watched WBRs who tried to copy Amazon process, where the graphs presented were so confusing, the presenters forgot what the actual point of the data was. I’ve watched WBR meetings getting stuck on slide 4 of 50, because of a blip on the data, that caused one of the leaders to go into a tangent. I’ve also seen businesses with no reviews, just vanity metrics presented monthly, with the leaders not sure why the numbers are up or down. In a lot of these cases more data doesn’t equal more insight.

You need to build a culture of curiosity on data and insights.

For any business considering introducing the WBR mechanism, I encourage you also use a “4-Blocker Framework”. This compliments the data. The 4 parts of this 1 page 4 blocker are:

1. Key Call-outs — What’s working, is the customer experience correct, what we learned this week,
2. Major Risks — What could derail us (with owner and date to resolve),
3. KPI Variations — what’s changed in our data that is outside acceptable variation, and
4. Upcoming Improvements — What we’re doing next to improve the business and meet our goals (with specific dates).

The one page constraint on the 4 blocker forces narrative synthesis around data, not just data presentation.

The overall WBR deck should also have weekly goal updates, with where do we stand on the business goal for the reported week, with Red, Yellow, Green status on goals. This creates accountability that quarterly reviews can’t match. The deck should also have a record of the action items from the prior WBR meetings.

I also encourage the CFO / VP Finance to lead the actual WBR meeting. They own the compiling of the deck, they run the meeting on schedule, and they facilitate discussion where needed. The WBR meeting should have silent reading up front, and then a page by page review of the WBR deck.

You can start small — just pick one area of the business (i.e. Top of funnel, Awareness metrics on traffic to website), and build up your capabilities for data collection and reporting over time.