Let the pipeline review write itself

The weekly pipeline review has a peculiar economics. The meeting is an hour, and half of it is spent establishing facts that were already written down somewhere, by people reading them aloud.

Everything up to "so what should we do" can be prepared in advance.

Decide what the meeting is actually for

If the answer is "so everyone knows where we are", it does not need to be a meeting. If the answer is "so we decide what to do about the deals that are stuck", then the review's job is to arrive with those already identified.

Write the sections you want, in the order you want to discuss them. That list is the prompt.

Build it before the meeting

Every Monday at 6am, write the weekly pipeline review.

  MOVED        deals that changed stage since last week, and why
  AT RISK      deals with no activity past our normal cycle, biggest first
  CLOSING      anything expected to close in the next two weeks
  NEW          deals created since last week
  ASKS         where somebody needs a decision from the room

Under 500 words. Numbers where numbers help, sentences where they do not.

If a section is empty, say so in one line rather than padding it.

Do not editorialise about anyone's performance. Report what happened.

The ASKS section is what turns this from a report into a meeting agenda. Everything above it is context that could have been an email; the asks are the only part that genuinely needs the room. Putting them last means the meeting ends on decisions rather than trailing off.

Send it the night before if you can

A review everyone reads in the meeting is a review read badly. Sent on Sunday evening or Monday at six, it gets skimmed by people on their own time, and the meeting can start at the asks.

Let it be boring

The instruction against editorialising matters more than it looks. A generated report that starts characterising why a deal slipped will be read as an accusation, and the meeting will be about the report rather than the pipeline.

Flat, factual, and short is what makes it survive past week three.

What good looks like

The meeting starts at the third item because the first two were read in advance, and it ends with decisions rather than with a recap.

The honest test: if the review stopped being produced, would anyone notice? If not, it was reporting facts nobody was using, and it should be shorter.