Weekly business review (WBR) template: the Amazon-style deck, ready every Monday

A weekly business review is a recurring meeting where a team reviews a fixed set of metrics, explains the exceptions, and agrees on actions. Amazon's version, described by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr in Working Backwards, is built around a metrics deck that rarely changes shape. That stability is the point: when the charts are always the same, anything unusual stands out.

The core idea of an Amazon-style WBR is to separate:

• Output metrics, which you care about but cannot move directly this week: revenue, orders, profit.
• Input metrics, which the team controls and which drive the outputs: site traffic, conversion rate, in-stock rate, delivery speed, support response time.

Most of the deck should be input metrics. That is where this week's decisions live.

The download adds a cover and a how-to slide you delete before presenting.

The two-window chart on slide 2 is worth copying everywhere. Six weeks shows the recent trend; twelve months shows the seasonality; the prior-year line shows whether this week is actually unusual.

• Don't change the deck without a reason. Add or remove a metric only when the team agrees.
• Explain exceptions, not everything. If a metric is within its normal range, nobody needs to talk about it.
• Every metric has an owner. The owner explains the exception, not the deck builder.
• Definitions are written down. A conversion rate with a changed denominator is a new metric.
• The deck arrives before the meeting. People read the charts in advance, and the meeting starts with questions.

• A WBR that is really a dashboard tour, with no exceptions slide and no actions.
• Charts that show this week only, so nobody can tell normal from unusual.
• A deck rebuilt every Sunday night by one analyst, who becomes the single point of failure.
• Regional teams copying the deck and editing their own versions until the numbers disagree.

A WBR is the clearest case for automation: the structure is fixed and the refresh happens 52 times a year.

In Rollstack:

1. Open this template or your own, and connect the sources behind each chart: your BI dashboards, Snowflake tables or spreadsheets.
2. Map slides 2 to 6 once, keeping the trailing 6 week and 12 month windows as filters in the source.
3. Schedule the refresh for 7am Monday, after your weekly data loads.
4. Rollstack can draft the exceptions slide from the data, labeled for the metric owners to review.
5. For regional WBRs, a Burst creates one version per region from the same template, so the numbers never drift.