Company-building is a founder-CEO’s primary job after a startup has attained product-market fit. In order to do this job effectively, founder-CEOs must learn to excel at three primary tasks:
This document is about the second task on this list: creating purpose and alignment across a company. We describe a simple Mission-Strategy-Metrics framework (or “Mission-to-Metrics”) that you can use as a tool to create better alignment at your company. Itʼs the founder-CEOʼs job to ensure that the mission, strategy, and key metrics of a company are well-defined. Metrics are the most important of the three to have in place, so if youʼrestruggling with writing your mission or strategy, make sure to have the key metrics that define success in place and well understood by your company.
An effectively articulated "mission-to-metrics'' framework fosters alignment within an expanding organization. It aids members in understanding priorities without the CEO needing to be involved. We strongly advise penning your mission-to-metrics document in writing, reviewing it every quarter, and revising it annually.
We recommend taking a practical view on the importance of mission statements. Founders sometimes obsess over the wording of a mission statement, but you shouldnʼt. Great companies are formed around solving a customer problem, not around a grand mission statement. Some founders are lucky enough to define mission statements fairly early in their lives that inspire and endure for a long time.
Some examples are:
But most startups, even the very successful ones, iterate on their mission statement periodically. As Jeff Lawson from Twilio described, "We've gone through multiple iterations of our mission statement over the years. Somewhere between 20 and 50 employees we realized, 'Oh, we need a mission.' So we'd spend time writing one and say, 'OK, good enough. Let's just use that.' Some of them were really bad. It took a while for us to have conviction around the words to describe why we exist. I always had a sense for why we existed: the future of the communications industry is clearly going to be built by the many software developers of the world and will not remain in the hands of a few companies. Today, our mission is to fuel the future of communications, which we settled on after many other versions.”
Grant from Whatnot on using Mission, Vision, and Strategy to drive alignment
“Mission, vision strategy. I wrote the first whole draft of the mission, vision, and strategy at around 40 or 50 people. I tend to view these things mostly as an alignment tool. In the early days, you don't need it that much because everyone in the room is very clear with what they're doing and why they're doing it. But as we started to scale and get bigger, you need to write down those things, so it's very clear what you're trying to do, what direction you're moving in, and what you're going to do, and the things you're not going to do to get there."
It's useful and strongly recommended to have a mission statement written down on paper and communicated to employees because it helps you define your “field of play” as a company and reminds employees (new and old) about the big picture of what you're trying to accomplish. But donʼt obsess over getting the wording perfect or making it sound timeless. Be open to revisiting it and rewriting it from time to time. As one founder put it, "I know I need a mission statement because people want something to inspire them and to frame our long-term strategy, but it can become problematic if the mission statement starts to define what we do too closely and keep us from seeing our customers' biggest problems. It's important to have a mission that's broad enough to be enduring but not distract from focusing narrowly on the customer."
As you scale to 50 people and beyond, a strategy document can become an important way to keep a growing team aligned. It's also helpful as a way to capture your thinking at a point in time about the company and track how your thinking evolves.
In our experience, the best companies have written documents that describe both their product and go-to-market strategies. The first versions of these are almost always written by the founder-CEO or another co-founder. Over time, other executives contribute or sometimes write these documents, with heavy involvement from the founders. The best strategy documents are deeply connected to your customer. They reflect a nuanced understanding of the customer problem you intend to solve and how you intend to solve it. They are grounded in customer observation and research.
Here's a simple approach:
Every six months, you should do an in-depth review of your strategy, budget, and progress towards your goals with your team. As part of that review, measure your progress, set new 12-month goals, and revise your strategy documents accordingly.
Finally, a word about format.
One of the most crucial tasks to ensure alignment across your organization is to determine the key metrics that define your startup’s success.
You can think of metrics as either “input” or “output” metrics. As the CEO, it’s imperative for you to discern and convey the internal factors (“input metrics”) that influence the desired results (“output metrics”) for your business.
Identifying the Magic Moment metric:
To establish your metrics, it is crucial to implement a procedure for reviewing and modifying them as needed. This involves documenting your metrics along with the reasoning behind them; scheduling regular meetings (monthly, etc.) to scrutinize this document; and based on the insights from these meetings, implementing alterations to the business practices and updating the metrics document for the next review cycle.
Here is an example of a monthly review document: Twitch: Monthly Business Review
Metrics can develop and adapt over time, but it’s imperative for everyone in the organization to have confidence in their accuracy to inform actions. Constantly questioning whether the metrics genuinely reflect reality can be disruptive. Achieving accurate metrics often requires engineering investment in the underlying infrastructure to ensure metric quality.
We recommend starting with a smaller number of clear and concise metrics—ideally around three or four—that are communicated regularly, instead of overwhelming the team with details that are hard to remember. It is crucial for every member of the organization to understand the significance and the rationale behind each metric. As the company scales, individual teams can then establish their own sub-metrics.
The world’s best mission, strategy, and metrics are useless unless your team understands and internalizes the message.
Learning to communicate clearly to an ever growing employee base can feel unnatural at first. You should simplify the message and repeat it to a degree that may feel strange. You will be surprised at how often you will have to repeat yourself for everyone at the company to understand.
Writing is a scalable way to communicate. Written documents can be shared with many people and serve as archived reminders of how your thinking changes over time. As noted in the prior section, we strongly recommend that you take the time to write your company’s mission, strategy, and key metrics in long form so that everyone at the company can read it. Some founders also send company-wide emails to communicate what’s important and reinforce key themes, sometimes as frequently as once per week.
Whatever methods of communication you choose, we recommend keeping three principles in mind:
Finally, a key aspect of effective communication is the consistency of your message. As the CEO, your words carry tremendous weight. Everyone is trying to get your attention and please you. Many first-time CEOs have found that a stray comment they make in a team meeting inadvertently scrambles their team’s priorities as everyone suddenly begins to chase the CEO’s latest whim. Even worse is the CEO who can’t commit to a strategy or product direction. CEOs must be decisive. You need to set a direction and stick with it. One of the reasons we strongly advocate for writing things down in long form is that writing forces you to think things through and archives your thinking in a healthy way. It deepens your thinking and commits you to something. Try to set a cadence to review strategy and product direction rather than doing so continually. If you are considering a change of direction, you should always preview it with a small group of trusted people before announcing it to the whole company.
At Affirm, Max Levchin revisits their strategy document annually, viewing it as if it were his first year at formulating a strategy with fresh eyes. Reflecting on a decade’s worth of such documents, he observes that approximately 80% of Affirm’s strategy has persisted since the company’s inception.
Below is an exemplary mission-to-metrics document penned by Grant LaFontaine, the co-founder and CEO of Whatnot written for 2022. Whatnot operates as a peer-to-peer live commerce platform, facilitating transactions between buyers and sellers via live video streaming. The document, edited to protect strategic details, serves as a prime example of what every CEO should compose once their team reaches 50 members.
From Grant La Fontaine (CEO of Whatnot): If you want to deliver a lot in a small period of time, you just need to move fast. You can't be spending shitloads of time debating the merits of going into shops, whether it's possible. And so [defining what we wouldn’t do] was truly for focus. Because we felt we had enough conviction in what we were doing that we were going to go all in on it. And then we, you know, we never thought we were always going to be right, but we always set up mechanisms to be nimble enough that if we learned something new, we would adjust more.
I tend to view strategy as always developing. You take all known information, put it at the best guess as to what the things you should invest in are. We try to carve out about 20 percent of resources to work on things that are off strategy, which are like adjacencies, where we may be able to learn something new that can transform the business. We had less screening guideposts in the early days, just because, honestly, I ran a ton of the roadmap, and I could just do what I felt was right. These days, at a bigger scale, the general guidepost that we give the teams is like 80 percent on core strategy and 20 percent on newer emerging things just to make sure we're always learning something new so that we can expand the market. The impact of being overly focused on the near-term strategy (6-12 months) is you can miss opportunities to lay the groundwork for future growth. This sometimes results in a sudden slow down once your core engine starts to break as you haven’t built the foundations for your next act.
Enable anyone to turn their passion into a business and bring people together through commerce.
Buyers
Here’s what we know/hypothesize about buyers
[Explanation based on user research]
[Explanation]
All marketplaces are built on the trust that you will get exactly what you purchase. To date buyers have loved Whatnot because they trust it. But if this erodes, the marketplace could fall apart.
[Explanation based on user research]
Sellers
Here’s what we know/hypothesize about sellers
Sellers typically care most about generating money, so if we want to keep and retain them we should help them make more money by using Whatnot.
As a function of trying to make money, their presence on Whatnot is largely about business building: They really want to know how to optimize it. How do they best market, when is the best for a show, what supply sells best.
The single most asked for thing on Whatnot is the ability to sell. [Explanation for how we know this]
Our wedge
We’re building a P2P social marketplace by investing in:
We’re going after enthusiasts and power sellers by:
Getting the community talking:
Fix the funnel:
Metrics
North-Star Metric
While this is our North Star metric, this is not the end-all-be-all for prioritizing. We still need to make sure we’re prioritizing a quality and reliable user experience; otherwise, long-term GMV will not materialize.
Build a “machine” that turns our major categories into market leaders
Generate significant sales in W+ categories with X, Y, and Z and enable rapid scaling of new categories
Build a reliable and high-quality core live and marketplace experience
Grant on Planning: Our belief, and I still think it's generally correct. Whatever time you allot, the shorter the time period for planning, the faster people will move. Because they'll see a goal with a tight time window and they'll run to achieve it. And so philosophically We've always felt that we wanted to make planning as short as is reasonably possible, while making good decisions. This began with weekly sprints, then monthly plans until we reached about 150 people when it broke and we’ve moved to quarterly cycles.
Who wrote the mission to metrics doc at Whatnot at every stage?
Developing an understanding of the inputs that drive the outputs is critical to operationalizing your success. This is an iterative process and you’ll add and remove metrics over time. One strategy is to work backwards from key output metrics to understand what drives the business. These metrics will be turned into OKRs that your teams can actively make progress against.
Below is a case study on how Peter Reinhardt set and operationalized Segment’s strategy at $50M to $100M ARR. Peter believes narrative construction is key to communicating strategy. The right narrative drives urgency and alignment at scale
From Peter: Strategy is the layer of the stack of mission value strategy where you have the most flexibility as CEO. If you try to constrain the strategy to any of the strategy frameworks that are out there it's transparently bullshit and not really the right way of approaching it. This is where your skill at synthesis as a CEO is tested the most. Can you create a narrative from scratch of what needs to happen and why that needs to happen? At the highest level that distills things down.
When Segment reached $70M ARR, Peter developed a "100 week" narrative to transition the company to the enterprise. Salesforce and Adobe wanted to launch competing products and were telling customers that everyone needed a CDP (Segment's product). They had distribution, but no product. Segment had a product, but needed to build enterprise distribution. Peter picked 100 weeks as an arbitrary timeline to build distribution before Adobe and Salesforce could build a new and competing product. He communicated this to the company.
Peter on the 100 week narrative: The articulation was that we have a hundred weeks until Salesforce and Adobe have a product in the market. They already have the GTM team, and so we have a hundred weeks until they get a product on the market. And if we don't have a footprint in all the enterprise companies before they have a product in market, we're going to get locked out of all their accounts. So we have a hundred weeks to get a footprint in all the enterprises. This narrative aligned the company and created urgency as it clarified that Segment had 100 weeks to win the most attractive segment of the market.
They broke down this high-level narrative into 1) building a fast growing commercial business (e.g., tier just below enterprise) and 2) an enterprise business
It was a rallying call, it had FOMO and all the things that you would hope for in a strategy. We broke it down into needing a highly efficient and fast growing commercial business and then secondarily an enterprise growth story.
The 100-week plan was then broken into a financial plan with quarterly targets and input metrics that were owned by leaders and teams. They would track progress against the plan through: 1) weekly executive team KPI reviews and 2) all hands (that happened every couple of weeks). All hands are an important communication forum as its your opportunity to highlight progress against the strategy and reiterate the initial narrative you outlined
We broke down the strategy further into metrics. You can write these however you want, but for us this was OKRs. The important part of OKR is just that it keeps breaking things down into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces until you have things that people can actually go do this week. From an operating perspective, we had these weekly E-team KPI reviews, and all hands every couple of weeks. We [outlined] the structure for what was going to happen at each all-hands at the company. Like when we were going to review the last quarter, when we were going to do the board recap, when we were going to talk about the next quarter. And we would show people this is how all these pieces of company infrastructure fit together into an execution model.
Example Q1 KPIs that came out of the financial plan
Keeping External Stakeholders Aligned
Once you’ve written “Mission-to-Metrics” for your startup, and gotten feedback from your leadership and other key employees, you have to start communicating it to everyone regularly. You have to reiterate the Mission-to-Metrics much more than what feels reasonable, which may run counter to your instinct to be efficient. Your employees will not internalize the message unless you communicate it constantly. The real test is not simply whether employees can repeat it, but whether they can make good decisions in your absence based on the context you have provided.
One of the best examples of “Mission-to-Metrics” alignment comes from a friend who visited the manufacturing floor at SpaceX. Seeing a SpaceX employee assembling a large part, he stopped to ask him, “What is your job at SpaceX?” He answered, “The mission of SpaceX is to colonize Mars. In order to colonize Mars, we need to build reusable rockets because it will otherwise be unaffordable for humans to travel to Mars and back. My job is to help design the steering system that enables our rockets to land back on earth. You’ll know if I’ve succeeded if our rockets land on our platform in the Atlantic after launch.” The employee could have simply said he was building a steering system for landing rockets. Instead, he recited the company’s entire “Mission-to-Metrics” framework. That is alignment.
Additional recommended reading: The second job of a startup CEO
A case study on how Josh thinks about planning and driving alignment
As your startup grows, driving alignment becomes a coordination and planning problem. Good planning enables teams to spend more time building and driving progress. Bad planning leads to slow execution and lack of business progress. Josh Reeves, CEO at Gusto, felt the pain of this shift at about 70-100 people. To help address this, he invested in better planning and consistent communication via all hands and other mediums. His goal was to create systems that drove alignment so people can spend most of their building (e.g., actually doing stuff). He describes the shift below and also highlights some rituals of communication he used.
"Why do we need to spend time on this topic that many people call a planning? Why is this useful? And is this just a bunch of BS and things that distract us from building? Because building is writing code. Building is writing marketing copy. Building is answering a customer email. Building is calling a customer for a sales call. What's this whole like planning strategy thing? And the metaphor I used was [following]. Maybe some of you can imagine a similar place near where you live, but like Lake Tahoe is a place that's about four hours away [from San Francisco]. And many folks like to go there in the winter for a ski trip. And I was like, imagine it's a Friday and you and one really good friend are like let's go to Tahoe. Let's just do it. No planning. Spur of the moment. Probably can just do it right? Like two people is talking to each other. Are you driving? Am I driving? Did you bring your wallet? I brought my wallet...You just kind of started driving, right? And it actually works. Now imagine that [same trip] with five people, and you're like, I probably can still fit in car. That's not a big deal. Maybe we need to get two hotel rooms now. Now imagine doing it with 100 people. It will definitely not work. It would just be chaos, right? Like you might all ended up at different resorts. You'll end up in different lodging. You might forget someone. And so that's what planning is trying to solve...coordination and alignment."
"We also did all hands every week where it ultimately ended up being a lot of those common topics. It was like who's joined. It was like open roles, because we want everyone to help with recruiting. It was like, here's how much money we have in the bank. Here was our revenue. Here was our expenses. That was kind of a very basic financial breakdown. It was here's what we've made different and improved in the product. And it was here's feedback from customers, whether it was like the numbers in terms of number of tickets, categorization, and some qualitative quotes. But that was kind of our early I'd say template to all hands and I, you know, I didn't have anyone to help me with it. I just did it all myself because it's not that hard. Right? Just looking at a couple of dashboards, copy pasting a couple of screenshots. I remember putting it together like half hour before each all hands. And we also did a selfie at every all hands that was fun."
"Comms is not just all hands right? Like it's anything you send. It could be a video message that you post in Slack. It could be a memo or that sounds like too fancy just thing you write down half pager of whatever to share some thoughts."
Good planning drives parallel execution so teams can operate simultaneously on multiple products. It also helps connect your "big" vision with the actual execution by making it more tangible and near-term focused. Gusto's Mission was (and is):
Planning broke these big statements down into 3 year, 12 month, and quarterly increments. Gusto first scaled payroll, then launched benefits, and in the last couple of years launched its consumer fintech offering. Good planning helped connect the Mission and Strategy to the actual execution and helped drive alignment. The ideal planning process, per Josh, is one that maximizes time spent building by the team while limiting the time spent planning.
"You end up having artifacts -- that's kind of the term we use...We always had a vision artifact with what's our vision? Where are we going? What do we stand for? What do we hope to go change in the world? And it was very big and ambitious. And we needed to start creating something that was more tangible and near term focus. And it also was a way to think about just going from sequential execution to parallel execution. Again, you know, early on, we just all did one project at a time. We all worked on it, and then you went to the next project. [At around 100 people] We started having what we would call a three year plan, which was a very strong stake in the ground for what we will do in the next three years. And we had our fiscal year plan, which is the next 12 months, which is more of a budgeting exercise. And then we started having, you know, pretty regular check-ins on a quarterly, monthly, and weekly basis that builds up into those goals. So that's something I put in the planning bucket. But a lot of it also is organizational design and it will change and be in flux, but how do you decentralize into different swim lanes so that smaller teams can have autonomy to go execute, and not be waiting for approval or permission to do which can also become a big bottleneck."
A common mistake we see founders make is using output metrics to drive alignment. The reality is output metrics are both disconnected from the actual work and the inputs that drive change in your business. All north star metrics can be broken down into an equation and great CEOs constantly evaluate this equation to understand the drivers of their growth. These drivers are then used to drive alignment and purpose as well as plan your hiring and investments more effectively. Josh, Gusto's CEO, advocates for investing in this process as soon as you have sufficient scale whereby ratios start to show consistent patterns. In the case of Gusto, he hired Andy Toung at 25 people at ~$1M ARR to lead finance. Andy helped Josh (CEO) define the activity metrics of the business and to up-level the planning process.
"I'm just thinking back to early on, it was like we grew 10x last year, we'll grow 10x this year. That's the very simplistic form of FP&A when you're super, super small. But it just becomes a lot more science than art. Frankly, there's a lot more data, there's a lot more cohorts to leverage. And then the numbers just get bigger and so it's just a muscle. It's worth building. I would argue earlier than later and the pitfall there is to think you can actually predict the future. A forecast is a forecast. It's not reality, you know, it's never going to be on target. But it's just again, a muscle you want to own and you only build it if you start the process....Gusto is a high volume, lower touch, inbound, organic fueled, GTM motion is our main direct motion. And then we have a channel relationship with a bunch of accountants. But what that means is, you know, there's still some touch with a salesperson, it's just more reactive."
"You need sufficient numbers to start having ratios, right. So like, how many customers can a salesperson close per week? per month? And what kind of dollar ARR comes per salesperson? In the most basic form, you just take your revenue from that month, and you divide by the number of salespeople to get a number. We all know that if the number is too small, that denominator is too small, then it's just going to be wildly volatile. So think of that [sufficient scale] as like one metric that will be helpful [to indicate when it makes sense to plan with metrics]."
Output: New ARR
"The problem to solve is how many people should you hire in sales right? And if leads goes up by 5x, you have to also have some type of historical on lead volume, your lead sources, what's organic, make some assumptions on how that persists....So these are all just systems it's all math right? The outcome is budgeting like you have finite dollars where do you allocate towards. Is it content programs to drive more top of funnel? Do you allocate towards a salesperson to help with conversion and closing? Do you allocate towards paid acquisition to drive more MQLs or leads into the funnel?"
Output: Customer Support Reps
"How many calls are we getting? how many calls per person are viable to be handled by a human? and you have to make a bunch of assumptions. If you're launching two new products this year, probably it's not going to stay the same. Are you going to have a generalized support team? Are they going to be specialized? And then the action that comes from this is like I said, it's just who should you hire, how many should you hire. If you have a ramp time and it takes you know, 90 days for someone to be effective on the phones, or it used to take you know, 60 days now it's becoming 90 days cool, but now you're going to be offset by 30 days. They're also tracking onboarding, time route tracking, close rate, and all these different things that drive a model [to ensure you can] still deliver the experiences needed, right?"
Output: # of Engineers
Input: No ratio. Driven by 1) how much do you need to accomplish to achieve your goals and 2) target burn profile.
"You have leverage headcount in the company too, which is things like engineering where there is no ratio, but it's like cool, so how much is left to hire? Based on your roadmap? [Do you need] two engineers or five engineers?"
Building a company is a constant question of resource prioritization. In Gusto's case, they squarely focused on scaling with customers with 1 to 100 employees in the first few years of the company. In service of serving their core customer more deeply, Gusto deliberately shied away from serving middle market customers. This let the team build health benefits and financial services products for employees. More recently, they've began to serve companies with up to 500 employees. This focus helped Josh and the team make difficult tradeoff decisions because they had a clear understanding of the customer and business model required to serve them well.
"[Our] opportunity is to serve every business everywhere in the world. So there'll be a future moment when Gusto serves 100,000 person businesses and has you know, customers in Poland and Brazil. We're excited to go serve folks, wherever there's an opportunity. But to the theme of this discussion, the question is not if, but when. When is a very important topic, right? And there's ultimately a lot of trade offs in that process. So I mean, it might be more unique to our business, but I think some of the principles might be generalizable. You know, again, we think of these kind of like his act one, act two, act three. You don't move off of Act One, but it gives you the chance to write the opportunity to go do more than just your act one. And so, maybe the difference for us is, you know, we have hundreds of thousands of SMBs where we have really, really great NDR, we have great cohort performance, we have strong unit economics, we have cost effective CAC payback and gross margin. That's very, very healthy. And so it's kind of like just a way of saying if you can build a business in a large market that's doing well and growing quickly, why wouldn't you want to keep doing it? Now? The reality is for most SaaS companies, SMB becomes not a great market because they can't and it's not usually their fault. It's just depending on the product, depending on the product mix. It becomes a segment that can be hard to scale. And so more of the playbook I would say is to move upmarket and do larger deals. But fortunately, there are examples like Shopify, Square, and Intuit that demonstrate if you are focused on SMB and have the right product mix, it becomes all numbers right? As bigger bigger numbers come in, can you maintain those unit economics? can you maintain that type of funnel? Does your net dollar retention stay healthy? And if so, it's not that controversial of a decision. I would say it's a hey, you have a business that's working. Why would you not want to keep doing it? And then it becomes a choice of when do you layer more on top? And so that's been more of the discussion at Gusto. Today, we talk about one to 500 employee businesses being our sweet spot but there are product differences for some of these different segments. Much like for many of you, I imagine if someone came in from a totally different customer profile, they might have different needs. And then you have a choice, you know, who do you build for? And again, hopefully the question is not if, but when. But you can't build for too many people all at once with finite resource. That's been more of our journey when it comes to company size. When we had 100 to 150 people, we were more [focused on] one to 100 employees and we had a customer that had 850 employees. It was just wildly out of our sweet spot at the time. And they wanted to stay on Gusto. But the reality was the work to serve them would indirectly come away from us doling out health insurance at that point for small businesses. And it's never really a zero sum. But it is all trade offs and prioritization. So I would say, hopefully, that gives folks some context at times you have to just choose one of two things. But as you gain scale, you can start using two or four things or three of six things. That's been more our journey today."
A case study on how Emmett uses monthly reports to drive decision making and continuous improvement
Monthly reports are a mechanism we use at Twitch to drive decision-making and continuous improvement. When done correctly, they are not busy-work: writing one should involve real thought and effort. And they’re not created for other people: you should be writing for clarity within your team, though they can serve the dual purpose of keeping people outside your team informed.
Monthly reports are for your team. While they can be used for the purpose of keeping people outside your team informed, they should be primarily written to help everyone on your team understand your progress and results together.
Monthly reports are not busy work. They require real thought and effort and time, and should generate learning and business decision.
Monthly reports are backwards looking. They summarize things that happened in the past month (examples revenue generated, roadmaps changed, projects launched, conversion rates that changed, etc) and specifically progress towards goals. They aren’t about your future expectations or theories (unless they changed during the month, in which case that’s a result itself…)
Monthly reports are about your customers, not your team. They’re about things a customer would care about, not how the sausage gets made. Use post-mortems or cause-of-error processes to figure out how to fix faults in process. Use performance reviews to drive improvement in people. Use architecture reviews to figure out how you’re going to create API boundaries. Use the product development process to make sure stakeholders are informed of upcoming releases. Everything happens because “we” did it in a monthly report, because our customers don’t care which team internally was responsible.
Monthly reports are a mechanism. Mechanisms are processes which have three attributes: they produce an artifact (in this case, the monthly report itself), they include an audit mechanism (we all sit down and look at the monthly report), and they are under constant change (one of the results from the review is to decide how to change the artifact production in the future, in addition to changes to the business). As a result, one key thing you should do at every monthly review is spend a small amount of discussion about how to change the monthly report next month. If you don't sit down together with your key stakeholders and key team members and review the report, then use the results of that review to make business changes and update what you put in the report in the future, you're missing out. Monthly report reviews are a GREAT way to keep other teams in the company aware and involved in what your team is doing without creating a large burden on them or additional burden on your team beyond the report. Try to avoid doing multiple reviews! One review of the data internally to decide what to write, write the report, a second review of the report with stakeholders and team members. Don't worry about it being perfect.
Monthly reports center around goals and metrics. Choosing good goals and good metrics is hard, and a full explanation is beyond the scope of this document. However, some notes on how to pick and think about them:
The key writing pattern for a monthly report is what, why, so what.
What happened, concretely?
Why did that happen? (Examples corresponding to the ones above)
So what are we doing: (Examples corresponding to the ones above)
Some important style-guide notes on writing in general at Twitch that often apply here:
A case study on how Pedro uses monthly email to align external stakeholders
Dear BoD -
Please find a brief update below on our progress in March, which wrapped up a solid Q1.
Company Growth & Performance
Company Challenges
Hiring
Open Positions
Target Partnership Opportunities
Monthly KPI deck
Best,
Cofounders
Top 5
Qualities (In order of importance)
Previous Experience (In order of importance):
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