How Do Two-week Reviews Keep Deel Product Teams Aligned?
Aaron Goldsmid says a business review every two weeks keeps product, engineering, and design from diverging for longer than two weeks. The group covers what happened in the last few weeks, what shipped, what is planned, how things are going, and where the blockers are. It is not a time for pretty presentations. Teams can bring as much dirty laundry as they have. They do not have to agree, but there can be no daylight between them on what the opinions are.
Ops and sales sometimes join line-level leadership, one level above, or him. Side conversations create the drift: product gets one set of advice while design and engineering hear the same point in slightly different words. At a certain scale he is not in the room for every decision, and the decisions should be better when he is absent. His litmus test is whether his leaders ask all the questions he would ask, or better ones. When they do, he steps back.
After talking with someone from another company last night, he started building a little bot overnight. It took the reviews and listed the questions he would ask. He was disappointed to find he is wildly predictable and can be reduced to a soundboard. Line-level product managers can prepare answers before the review instead of obsessing over what they missed and beating themselves up afterward.
