By now, nearly every business operates some form of a weekly business review or "WBR" as it's commonly known. Made popular by the Amazon WBR process, the meeting usually consists of all relevant stakeholders getting together in person or on a video call to review a set of metrics or project status updates relevant to the business. In the following post we cover the basics of the WBR, our experiences with WBRs at Amazon, and how we built Row Zero to be the best tool for WBRs.
- What is a Weekly Business Review?
- The Amazon WBR approach
- How to implement a WBR at your organization
- Best WBR tools
- Common challenges in Weekly Business Reviews
- Conclusion
What is a Weekly Business Review or WBR?
The WBR is a weekly structured meeting (hence the name), in which a team or organization reviews performance metrics, looks at trends, and makes decisions about urgent topics or weekly plans. Often the metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) are coded red, yellow, and green to indicate whether they are achieving or missing their goal. The objective of the WBR is to provide visibility into and accountablity for the key metrics that drive the business. By monitoring the metrics each week and drilling into deviation, a company can ensure it stays on track to meet it's long term objectives. The outcome of a WBR is typically a set of follow-up questions or investigations for owners of specific metrics that had unexpected results. The team will assign follow-up actions requiring a deep dive into more granular metrics or emergent issues. Some companies also run Monthly Business Reviews (MBRs) that cover the monthly roll-up for a broader set of attendees as well as Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs). Conducting the WBR week after week promotes a culture of accountability, diligence, transparency, and quick decision making. It also ensures a results-driven business and that the company doesn't deviate from it's planned goals.
The Amazon Weekly Business Review approach
While companies of all sizes have been holding weekly meetings for years, the concept of the weekly business review was popularized by Jeff Bezos and Amazon, where the WBR became a core ingredient to every team and org throughout the company. From its founding, Amazon was a data-driven company and Jeff Bezos used the weekly business review to monitor the metrics and deliverables that ensured they were on a path to success. Today, WBRs are used for small and large organizations inside Amazon. For example, large orgs, like the Alexa or retail orgs will run organizational level WBRs while smaller sub-teams, like jewelry, men's apparel, or Alexa devices will run their own WBRs specific to their business. During our time at Amazon, the WBR was often a longer 1-2 hour meeting led by Directors or VPs.
For an Amazon retail org as an example, weekly metrics, like overall sales, returns, or ordered product sales (OPS) will be reviewed for the org, subsets of products, and specific products, referred to by the Amazon Stock Identification Number (ASIN) and product description. When metrics are unexpectedly high, low, or trending down several weeks in a row, the product owners, known as vendor managers in the retail org, will be asked to provide information about why the changes happened. Vendor managers are expected to come to the WBR prepared with this information and be ready to answer questions from leadership. An example might be sales of the Asics Gel-Nimbus running shoe are down 10% for the week. The vendor manager needs to know why. Is it a specific version of the shoe? Was it caused by a specific color or out of stock inventory? Is there incorrect information on the detail page? Are the images of the product up-to-date? Are promotions for other products diverting sales from this product? Succinct answers to these questions need to be ready before the meeting. If a vendor manager isn't prepared with an answer, he/she is expected to say 'I don't know' and follow-up after the meeting. This model for the WBR is common across Amazon orgs where different metrics are monitored but the routine of diving deep into changes in key business drivers is broadly used.
During our time at Amazon, the most common tool used for Amazon WBRs was a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was not only used to run the WBR but was also used by every vendor manager, product owner, and financial or operational analyst preparing for the WBR. The spreadsheet was a simple tool that allowed the owner to aggregate relevant data, color code (red = not meeting goal, yellow = close to meeting goal, or green = exceeding goal) the appropriate cells and manage the entire meeting from one file. These spreadsheets were often so big it took several hours for them to update with the latest week's data. The spreadsheet was also used by all parties responsible for a WBR metric to drill into their own datasets down to the row level and understand why their numbers were up, down, or unchanged. These investigations were not sufficiently served by BI tools and required more fine grained analyses. The central importance of spreadsheets and our frustrations with their performance limitations were a primary motivation for us to create Row Zero as a secure, connected spreadsheet that is super fast and can handle billion row datasets (1000x bigger than Excel's limits).
How to implement a WBR at your organization
Implementing a WBR in your own organization is straightforward. You need two main ingredients, the data to track key metrics or KPIs driving your business and the people responsible for those metrics. WBRs can be for a small team, a business unit, an organization, or an entire company.
- To start, build out a spreadsheet or dashboard that identifies each of the key metrics the scope of the WBR is responsible for. Determine how the metrics/KPIs are tracking relative to your goals and relative to the previous week. We recommend using a Row Zero spreadsheet, connecting it to your data warehouse, and building a live table that automatically updates with your data warehouse.
- Schedule the weekly meeting on everyone's calendars and ensure every metric reported on your WBR spreadsheet or dashboard has an owner in the meeting. WBRs are commonly held on Mondays or Tuesdays but we've also seen them run on Fridays for the previous week to ensure all data has time to update. Allow 60 minutes for the meeting. We've seen some regularly scheduled for 2 hours.
- Run the meeting. The person who controls the data runs the meeting. The meeting should be a methodical discussion about why each metric is red, yellow, or green. Each metric owner should have a concrete answer about the reason for each metric/KPIs color. If an answer is not provided, the owner should be expected to follow-up after the meeting and send a note to all attendees with the answer. The metrics/KPIs tracked in the WBR don't only have to be performance metrics, like sales, returns, conversions, usage, etc... The metric and KPIs in a WBR can also be project management milestones and dates.
- Ensure that metric/KPI owners have access to their data before and after the meeting, giving them autonomy to investigate why they either achieved or failed to achieve their goals. It's important that they have access to the raw, underlying input data, not just the output final numbers, so they can investigate and come back with answers. This is where spreadsheets really outshine BI tools.
- Keep a running log of follow-ups and action items. Send out meeting notes after the meeting and ask for updates the following week. Don't let action items go unfilled. Be the owner and voice of the meeting. In coordinating this meeting you will become a leader within your organization.
Best WBR Tools
- Real-time WBR dashboard - To start, you need a data tool that allows you to build a real-time WBR template. Ideally you want all the metrics/KPIs tracked on one screen so they can all be assessed together. Your data tool should ideally connect to live data sources, like a data warehouse, so you can build a real-time WBR dashboard that's always up-to-date. We built Row Zero to be the best tool for WBRs because it allows anyone with spreadsheet skills to build out a WBR template and lets other participants in the meeting build derivative analyses. BI tools like Tableau and Power BI look nice but are often harder to get set up and more difficult to modify as your WBR format changes. Critically, spreadsheets allow anyone to investigate the underlying data to answer questions quickly.
- Connected to your source data - The other important piece of WBRs is a reliable data source. A data warehouse is typically the most reliable source but you can also use other data repositories, like ERPs and CRMs. It's critical to set up a direct connection between your data sources and your WBR tool so that your WBR dynamically updates with the latest data. Row Zero makes this easy with built-in data connectors to Snowflake, Databricks, Redshift, Postgres, etc. You shouldn't be importing files or copying and pasting, since that would be a big inefficiency each week, introduce the potential for error, and be a security risk with sensitive data.
- Track action items and notes - Lastly, you'll also want a place to take notes and track action items. This can all be done via email or Slack but it's nice to have one common place participants can refer to outside of the meeting. Like other spreadsheets, notes can be tracked directly in Row Zero but other tools, like Notion and Asana may also be helpful.
Common Challenges in Weekly Business Reviews
- Lack of data accuracy - Before your first meeting, build your WBR dashboard and verify the metrics/KPIs align with the owner's expectations.
- Lack of automation - Once accurate, your WBR should be connected to your data sources to automatically update. This ensures on-going accuracy and also saves time vs building one-off static analyses each week.
- Too many metrics - Narrow the focus to only the metrics and KPIs that meaningfully drive the business. Tracking too many numbers complicates the meetings and creates too many owners.
- Lack of accountability - Assign clear ownership for each metric, KPI, and action item. Ask the appropriate person for updates every week.
- Limited data access - If you need a data person to query a database to investigate each question, you're eroding the owner accountability and responsiveness that makes WBRs powerful. Ideally the owner of each metric/KPI can easily access and analyze the raw data that drives their metric/KPI so that they can quickly provide answers.
- Big data challenges - While spreadsheets and BI tools are the most popular WBR tools, many are plagued by speed and performance issues. Excel and Google Sheets have max row limits that don't let you work with large datasets and both slow down with heavy usage. Most BI tools are slow to filter and update and don't make it easy to investigate the raw data inputs. That's why we built Row Zero to be a dramatically faster and more powerful spreadsheet where anyone can easily work with big data.
Conclusion
A well-executed Weekly Business Review (WBR) can be a game-changer for organizations looking to drive accountability, transparency, and data-driven decision-making. By structuring meetings around key metrics, assigning clear ownership, and leveraging the right tools, businesses can ensure they stay on track to meet their long-term objectives. While challenges such as data accuracy and meeting efficiency may arise, a disciplined approach can mitigate these issues and maximize the WBR’s effectiveness. With the right process in place, your WBR can become a powerful tool for continuous improvement and business success. You can also replicate this approach for different time frames - from less formal daily standups to more formal monthly business reviews (MBR) and quarterly business reviews (QBR). Sign-up for Row Zero to get started building your own WBR scorecard in a powerful, connected spreadsheet.