Weekly business review: how to run a WBR (free template)

My first weekly business review at Amazon changed how I thought about leadership. I’d come from six years at Google, and I expected a room of team leads squinting at spreadsheets. Instead, directors and VPs who ran teams of up to 500 people were digging into product lists, categories, regions and single pages of the website. They asked: what’s happening here? What’s the input for this output? How does this number fit with what customers are telling us?

They weren’t micromanaging. They were learning how the business really worked, every week, together.

A weekly business review (WBR) is how they did it. It’s one of the most underrated tools a leadership team has. It helps you make better decisions at every level, from strategy and priorities down to fixing a single problem. And because everyone looks at all the numbers, not just their own, it breaks down silos.

What is a weekly business review?

A WBR is a weekly meeting where the leadership team, and the people who know the data, look at the key numbers from the business together. You use it to spot problems and opportunities early, to understand how the business works across teams, and to make better decisions.

It has two inputs:

• Metrics. The numbers that show how the business is running, in a simple spreadsheet.

• Anecdotes. What customers, sales and support are telling you this week.

Why every week?

Monthly feels like enough. It isn’t. If a number only moves once a month, it can take you three or four months to spot a trend, and by then half the year has gone.

Weekly builds familiarity. You stop spending the meeting remembering what the numbers mean and what you said last time, and start making progress. My rule of thumb: if it feels a little too often, it’s probably just often enough.

The five steps

1. Decide where to start

Start small, with 10 to 20 numbers that matter. To find them, walk through your business like a machine:

• Your customer journey, end to end. How people find you, buy, start using what you sell, and stay (or leave). Pick a number or two for each step.

• How you deliver. The key activities that create the value.

• Money and risk. The main drivers of cost, profit, quality and risk.

If you’re part of a bigger organisation, include the steps just before and after your own area, and anything your customers would use to judge you.

Some numbers you won’t be able to get yet. That’s fine. Put in a placeholder, use an estimate or a stand-in (customer retention instead of customer happiness), and note when you expect to get the real number.

Then show the list to your peers, your manager, your stakeholders and your team. Does it show the business the way they see it? It doesn’t need to be perfect. You’ll improve it every week.

2. Build the spreadsheet

Use a plain spreadsheet, like Google Sheets or Excel, not a dashboard tool. A spreadsheet is quick to change, easy to analyse, and keeps the attention on the numbers rather than how they look. These days, you can also ask AI to build it for you. It’s amazing what it comes up with when it’s connected to the right data.

• Weeks across the top, newest on the left. This week’s numbers come first, with the history beside them.

• Metrics down the side. Group them by area, with the headline numbers at the top.

• Show what each number is. In my template, blue cells are filled in by hand, grey cells are calculated, and pink cells are numbers you don’t collect yet.

• Add comparisons as you need them. Rolling averages to smooth out noisy numbers, the same week last year to see seasonality, totals for the year so far against your target.

3. Get the right people in the room

Invite the leadership team and the people closest to the data, including whoever builds the spreadsheet. Don’t hand the WBR to one manager or analyst to look at alone. The value comes from reviewing it together.

When your head of engineering asks why a marketing number moved, or your finance lead asks about support tickets, people start to see how the whole business fits together. A marketing campaign six months ago might explain this week’s support queue. Nobody sees that if each team only looks at its own numbers.

4. Talk about the numbers

Go through the numbers and look for patterns and anything unexpected. For each one, ask:

• Is this what we expected, or does it raise a question?

• Is this change real, or just noise?

• What’s driving this number, and can we control it?

When the data doesn’t help you understand what’s going on, change the spreadsheet. Add a number, add some analysis, or split a number by customer size, country or industry. If all your small customers in every country are leaving, you know where to look.

Then bring in the anecdotes. Pick a piece of customer feedback each week that hints at a problem, and look into it before the meeting. Jeff Bezos put it well: “When the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.” The numbers usually aren’t wrong. You’re just not measuring the right thing yet.

One client of mine was seeing more customers leave, and couldn’t see why in the numbers. One customer who had just left complained about a rarely used feature. They split the leaving customers by that feature, and found that many of the people using it were leaving, mostly from one fast-growing industry where that feature mattered most. The fix was simple. Without that one complaint, it would never have been a priority.

Over time, you’ll find that some of your assumptions about what drives the business are wrong. Every time that happens, dig in. It sharpens your strategy and makes your next set of goals much easier to set.

5. Make decisions

Every WBR should end in actions. They come in two kinds:

• Improve the spreadsheet. A new number, a new comparison, a better way to split the data.

• Change the business. A process fix, a bug, a project, a conversation.

Decide small actions on the spot. Bigger ones may need their own meeting. Either way, write down what will happen, who owns it and by when, and check on it next week.

How long should it take?

Give it about an hour, and spend the time on what matters most this week rather than every line. Some teams spend ten minutes on their numbers and the rest of the meeting on other things. Some executive teams spend two or three hours. What matters is that it happens every week, and that it leads to the right conversations.

The WBR and your OKRs

You can’t manage a business with OKRs alone. Your OKRs cover the few changes you’re making this quarter. The WBR covers everything else: the day-to-day running of the business.

Not every important number needs an OKR. If hiring matters this quarter but isn’t an OKR, put it in the WBR, and it will get talked about every week.

Running a WBR also makes your OKRs better. Once you know which numbers drive which results, choosing good Key Results gets much easier. It’s one of the five habits in the OKR Operating System.

Get the template

The WBR template

A Google Sheets template with a sheet for each quarter, made-up numbers to show how it works, and colour-coding for manual, calculated and missing numbers. Make your own copy, free.

Copy the template

When you’ve chosen your numbers, use How to Set OKRs in a Week to decide which few to change this quarter, and the One Page Plan to plan how.

Want help with this?

I help leadership teams set up a WBR and keep it going until it runs itself. Pick the one that sounds most like you.

The startup I run. You want the whole leadership team looking at the same numbers, every week.

The transformation I’m leading. You need to see whether the change is working, week by week, not quarter by quarter.