At first let get on the same page here. We refer to early stage startups as companies that have been founded for >12 months and usually consist of a team from 3 to 10 members.Currently we are an early stage startup ourselves and therefore know how things work in that state of team and company building.
Having its origin in the silicon valley, the weekly review is a method to help teams stay on track with their progress and it enables better teamwork. A weekly review a quite simple way of managing remote or modern teams in general. Every week, each employee gets a set of questions. This could be for example: What went well last week? What did not work out? What is your main focus for the next week? The team leader therefore gets an overview of what everyone has been working on. This process can be repeated, as the name indicates, on a weekly basis.
Using the weekly review method brings many benefits with it and can easily be implemented in every team. I will focus on the three most important benefits.
Everyone knows the long weekly meetings every Monday which can be really inefficient and time consuming. When using the weekly review I can tell from experience that they can be reduced by around 50% as the team leader/founder already knows the most important things about the last week and can directly address them.
Self reflection is a really important part of productivity. When reflecting on your personal progress and focussing on what really matters the productivity of every team member increases and it enhances the overall team performance and teamwork.
When using the weekly review we noticed that you actually get really interesting insights of what everyone has been doing which might have not come up during a regular weekly meeting. Furthermore, you always have an overview on what your team has been working on and can see if your team is moving in the right direction.
We have been using weekly reviews since the beginning. Mainly organized in word sheets or just by texting. However, this becomes unstructured really quickly and you always have to remind everyone to actually do their weekly review.That is the reason why we actually developed a simple tool which lets you run weekly reviews without actually running them.We are currently having an early access program of which you could still become part of! Sounds interesting? Check it out!