Simple system for weekly goals

A standard and repeatable way to create clarity around next milestones and goals.

I was chatting with another product leader recently, and they asked me how I stay on top of what teams are doing week to week.

There are several ways, but the first thing I thought of was a very clear system that our Core Product team uses to communicate their weekly goals to the company. The team has several sub-teams, and each of those sub-teams have multiple efforts running at any given time. On any given week, there may be 20+ efforts running full steam ahead.

Keeping up via watching Slack channels is too chaotic, and updates to OKRs often aren’t granular. But because the company and our customers care a lot about what the Core Product team is working on, the team devised a useful way of communicating their goals, next milestones, and progress.

Instead of 20 efforts with 20 different formats for updates, there’s one templated format for updates across the whole team that makes updates easy to create and easy to consume.

Here’s how it works: the team decides on goals for the week at their Monday standup. They fill out the table as they discuss each item. Then the table is sent out via Slack. As you might notice, the column headers are intentionally chosen to pre-answer questions from the customer, partner, and executive teams.

Their template makes it easy to see what the team is shooting for next, their confidence for that milestone, and what they are doing this week to get there. And at the same time, it’s a clear artifact to hold themselves accountable. It’s a great example of a repeatable system.

Below is a redacted version of one of our awesome PM’s, Teresa, and a team she leads.

The key is how the carefully chosen columns create clarity (instead of ambiguity):

• Project — what the team is working on

• Team — who’s responsible

• Next milestone — what they are working toward next

• Confidence in milestone — how confident they are in their next step

• Goals for the week — what they are doing this week to hit the milestone

And here’s the template that the team uses:

If you want to try it out, click the button below for the template:

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