The Weekly Success List

My latest obsession: the weekly success list.

A few people on the team like to make fun of my ever-growing love for lists. Don’t care what the haters think — I love them. And the weekly success list in particular is such a remarkably simple way to over-communicate priorities and hold the team accountable.

But first, some context.

beehiiv has grown up a bit — we’re now 75 employees scattered across nearly a dozen different countries. Despite having a bunch of different teams and processes in place… we’re still moving a million miles per second.

For me personally, my day-to-day still feels like we’re back in the grittiest earliest days of the company. The days are just an ever-evolving game of context switching from one problem to the next: launching the next initiative, putting out the current fire, resolving the latest escalation. One step forward, one step backwards.

Monday through Friday I am entirely in it: 5:30am wakeup, gym, at my desk by 8am, and blocking and tackling until about 9 or 10pm each night. Repeat.

Balanced lifestyle? Not exactly.

Worth it? Absolutely.

I love building this company, it’s the most challenging and gratifying thing I’ve ever done. And fortunately the numbers speak for themselves — we launched just 2.5 years ago and are currently on pace to do $20M in revenue this year.

Anyway, all that context was more to give you a glimpse into my state of mind on any given day (chaos). I’m sure most founders reading this can relate.

By the time Friday afternoon rolls around I typically find a moment to decompress and think back on the week. And more often than not, I have absolutely no idea if the week was a successful one or not. It typically looks like…

• We increased MRR by $20K, but we also have a large backlog of support tickets.

• We launched an awesome new feature, but discovered a bug that’s impacting a lot of users.

• We closed a massive enterprise deal, but fell behind on some of our core initiatives for the quarter.

Is that a good week? I really don’t know.

And as the sobering realization settles in that it’s a Friday afternoon and the week was what the week was… I can pretty easily identify everything that’s stressing me out.

So I began compiling a list of things that, if completed, would solve our current problems and push forward the progression of the business.

Thus, the weekly success list was born. A compilation of the top priorities, initiatives, and milestones we need to accomplish in the upcoming week for it to objectively be considered a success.

It sounds so remarkably simple, but by formalizing the process, it has provided a tremendous amount of clarity and alignment across the organization. The last sentence reads like something in a corporate training program… but I’m keeping it.

Slack just so happened to launch their new Lists feature around the same time I began formalizing this. So here is how it looks in practice…

Each week I create a new List in Slack that consists of the top priorities and initiatives across the company, and assign who is responsible for each.

I share the list with the team via email, pin it to our main Slack channel, and update it in real-time throughout the week. By the end of the week it looks a little something like this…

Since starting the company, I have always spent about an hour each Sunday writing an update to the entire team. We’re entirely remote, so this email is a mechanism to re-align everyone on the top priorities, issues, metrics, etc. heading into the new week.

Since launching the weekly success lists I also include:

• A screenshot and analysis of the previous week’s list. It creates accountability and transparency into what we accomplished, and where we need to improve.

• A screenshot and overview of the new list for the upcoming week. This aligns everyone across the org on exactly what our top priorities are for the week ahead.

Again, I’m aware this isn’t rocket science, but it’s been so remarkably effective for our team (and for my own mental sanity).

Ultimately, the weekly success lists are a forcing function for the following:

• Prioritization. At any given time there are dozens of possible initiatives and requests being made of your team. This forces you to narrow the focus for the upcoming week to only a handful of top priorities.

• Alignment. Similarly, your team is likely being pulled in several directions. By over-communicating the top priorities you can better align everyone across the company.

• Accountability. Each initiative has a clear lead who is ultimately accountable for it being completed.

• Feedback. At the end of each week you have an objective scorecard of what was and wasn’t done. This forces a recurring feedback loop to consistently improve the performance of the team.

• Progress. With broad and ambitious long-term goals, it’s easy to overlook the continual progress you’re making as a team. This brings all of the progress to light on a weekly basis.

Two weeks ago I wrote a deep-dive about the framework we utilize to run the business, called Traction. Here’s how I described it in a single, over-simplified sentence:

While the Traction process is typically owned by the leadership team, the weekly success list is a simple way to stretch the accountability to everyone on the team.

Long story short: just create more lists. They’re awesome 👍🏾.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/weekly-success-list

Shoutout Omar for probably the most realistic and detailed reader submission to date — there’s even tons of tangled wires behind the desk.

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Some of my favorite content I found on the internet this week…

• The rise and fall of Outdoor Voices (Twitter)

• OpenAI enters the search game by introducing SearchGPT (OpenAI)

• HubSpot’s trajectory and revenue growth is a reminder that great companies take time. Took them 5 years to crack $10M in annual revenue…

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