How we 🎉 our team’s Weekly Wins
I recommend reading through Monday Commitments and Friday Wins from Elegant Hack as a companion to this. That article helped me get started. Below is a walkthrough of the updates I’ve made to tailor it to our culture.
Our teams deserve at least one meeting a week that is free of status. A meeting that gives them a space to share the amazing things they have created, tested and learned.
I’ve found a great way of creating that space is hosting a show on Friday where the agenda is driven by our team’s accomplishments, their learnings and the things that got them excited that week.
My role on this show is to step back and make each member of the team feel like they are a guest in front of an audience; an audience that is hype to hear what they have to share.
Below is a walkthrough of how I run this show each week along with resources to help you run your own.
Tenets
Here are the tenets I use to frame & create the show each week:
- Everyone has a voice. Create a space for any team member to speak about the wins/learnings they are excited about (both from the individual and team level). This can and should be anyone on the team from any part of the org (e.g. engineering, product, design, editorial, etc…)
- “Be our guest”. Create a low barrier to participate. Demos & simple one-line learnings (i.e. “check out this thing I found”) are equally welcome. The message is… “If you tried something new, learned a new insight, launched something or found something we could all learn from then please be our guest”
- No status questions. This session is not about what is left to do or when something is going live. It’s about sharing things that make us excited each week.
- It’s a “Show” not a meeting. Make each person that shares something feel like they are a featured guest in front of an audience. Make it feel like a podcast with music, sound effects and create a light vibe with the tone of… “check out the awesome things your peers are doing”.
- Cross team insights. Give the audience access to info they won’t get from other meetings. For example, In other meetings we may only hear about teams’ launches. This session is meant to show off the wins/learnings that got them to that launch and help inspire cross-team conversations after.
It’s a “show” not a meeting
Since our teams build unique things every week, I make a point to create a unique intro to announce them and introduce the show each week too. The vibe is meant to make it feel like the start of a podcast.
My intros are composed of 4 things:
- A song with an energizing vibe (any era, any genre)
- A “throw” based on the song’s title or lyrics
- A slide with an image or animated gif that evokes a similar vibe
- An introduction of the week’s guests
Here is an example of one…
The song
When selecting an intro song each week I look for something that would make us want to dance, high five, laugh, smile or some amazing combination of “all of the above”.
The throw
Then I write a unique lead-in each week and I use the cadence and lyrics of the song to help inform what I say.
In the example above you can hear the format is pretty straightforward…
“Hello and welcome to Friday [Date]” / [A throw related to the lyrics in some way] / “Welcome to Weekly Wins” / [Music sting] / [Announce the guests for the week]
The main thing I focus on is timing out the words and getting them to match up to music hits.
When it starts to sound like the intro to a podcast 🎙 it’s on the right track.
Here are a few more examples of what they can sound like…
The image
From there I find a unique image to lead off each week (sourced from any of the many places to find gifs or I make my own). I look for something that would make the team smile and something that matches the theme of the song + throw.
The guests
And then I work in the announcement of each week’s guests. This helps frame the order of the show for the audience and also helps with the next aspect…
Make the team feel like guests of honor
As I noted earlier; one of the reasons for doing this is to give our teams a space to share the amazing things they have created, tested and learned. As part of that I think we should celebrate the people too.
Right now you might being saying… “well couldn’t this be done through a regular demo meeting?”
Sure, but I think we have all been in demo meeting that runs like this…
- “Ok so it’s time to go through demos for the week. Who has something to share?”
- (…silence…)
- (…more silence..)
- “Anyone?
- (…a bit more silence…)
- Someone: “Okay, I guess i’ll go first”
That silence always felt odd to me and it brings in a sentiment of reluctance to a session that should simply be about celebrating the awesome things our team has accomplished and learned.
The aim of the show format is to remove that reluctance by showcasing each person that has something to share as “a guest”.
You can hear a sample of this in the intro example above. Each person/team is introduced as part of “this week’s guests”. This helps give the session a structure and flow which enables each guest to get a clear space to talk and for me as host to move the session forward from one win to the next.
As part of each win I also use sound effects and quotes to accentuate each win presented. I use a soundboard to thread in sound effects and famous quotes to each guest’s section.
Here are a few examples…
So…
- goodbye awkward silences + wondering who is going to go next
- hello clear flow, fun transitions and nostalgic movie quotes
Create a low barrier to participate
To make it easy for guests to participate I made a simple google form that automatically generates a slack announcement and a google slide for each entry.
The form asks for 3 things:
- The guest’s name (this can be a person or team name)
- If the win is something quick or a demo (both are equally weighted in importance — the intent is simply “share something that you are excited about”)
- A short description of the win
Guests can fill out the form at any time during the week when they have an idea for something to share. It’s meant to take less than 2 minutes of time.
After an entry is made the automation I set up takes care of the rest:
- A slack message is created in our weekly wins channel (which is also where I post about the show each week)
- And a google slide gets automatically generated that I use to run each week’s show
My message to the team is:
“If you tried something new, learned a new insight, launched something or just have something you think we could all learn from please share it with us each week. We all benefit as a team from your knowledge and excitement and it’s awesome to close out each week hearing from you.”
Our guests simply need to have an idea that they want to share and fill out a simple google form. Everything after that from the slack announcement to the layout and design of each slide is automated through two Zapier “Zaps”.
If there is interest in a post that walks through how the automation is set up please let me know.
How I pull it all together
Overall, each week these are the things I do:
- Pick an intro song and image to lead with + write an intro
- Collect the automated guest entries into a full set of slides (this is essentially copy/paste as my automation handles all the styling and layout)
- Run the show, have fun and learn a lot from our awesome teams
The above only takes about 15 to 20 minutes to prepare each week.
The slides
I have created a set of templates to build the slides each week. You can find those here. It includes templates for (1) an Intro Slide, (2) Guest Slides, (3) Hello/Goodbye Slides and (4) an Outro Slide.
Essentially I create a new empty presentation each week and copy (1) an intro slide, (2) the automated guest entries and (3) an outro slide. If there are new people joining/leaving the team I add in a hello/goodbye slide to call that out as well.
I also keep all our previous shows in a yearly archive so anyone at the company can see what we shared at each show.
The audio
The most important thing I had to do was find a way to combine my microphone with the audio from a soundboard.
Here is a quick walkthrough of how I do that…
High level this is what you need:
- A microphone
- A soundboard (I use and recommend Farrago — though I have a few examples of physical ones I have built in the post script below)
- A way combine your mic and soundboard audio together (I use and recommend Loopback)
- If you are remote… a way to host remote meetings with audio
- If you are in person… speakers with the volume up to 11 😊
And you only need to do the above one time — after it’s set up it will work for any session you run.
A quick summary or “How can I run my own?”
Here is a quick walkthrough of everything listed above. If you are interesting in running your own I am glad to jump on a zoom and walk through any details.
Also, the concepts described in this post can be used for other types of sessions as well. For example: Have a session where you are talking through OKRs for the quarter? — bring in sound effects to accentuate each Team and Key Result.
- Make a soundboard and set up your audio to combine it with your microphone
- Add any sound effects that you want to your soundboard (check out my resources below for help on this)
- Create an intro for each show (this doesn’t need to be unique each time, its just fun to change it up every so often).
- Coordinate your guest list for each show and create slides.
- Have fun and don’t take yourself so seriously 😄
Why I do this each week
Because I care deeply about the people I work with and the culture we get to work in.
We all have plenty of meetings each week — some are focused on status, some on collaboration. But I found it was rare to have a session where we just got to sit back and smile with each other for a while.
Yes our work should be about outcomes; we all get that. I believe it also needs to be about the people we work with and giving each of them a place to share their findings that got them to those outcomes.
Some of my favorite moments from running these shows have been hearing from people on the team that would typically stay in the background. Seeing people that would never present become some of our favorite guests to hear from has been incredible. So I do this to continue to provide everyone a space to present ideas and help them understand that the people they work with each day are hype to hear what they have to say.
Essentially, we are all here to share as one team.
If you are interested in setting up your own show I am here to help and if you are doing something similar already I am here to learn.
Looking forward to any feedback and thank you for reading this 🙌
Appendix
Resources
Here is the list of resources I have built since starting this. Please feel free to use anything below. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask.
- My Github Repo (Sound effects, loops and quotes to use. Please feel free to PR any that you create, I am glad to add them.)
- Slide Templates (Google Slide templates to get you started.)
- Intro Slide Examples (A running set of intro slides I’ve made to start each show.)
- Outro Slide Examples (A running set of outro slides I’ve made to close each show.)
- Intro Song Ideas (a collaborative Spotify playlist with ideas for Intro Songs. It’s open for editing so please feel free to add your own.)
Additional Reading
- Monday Commitments and Friday Wins (“…you start to feel like you are part of a pretty special winning team. Two, the team starts looking forward to having something to share. They seek wins. And Three, the company starts to appreciate what each discipline is going through...”)
- What is the best way to motivate my team to share their wins at weekly status meetings? (“Members of an effective team with good rapport generally enjoy sharing their successful efforts, ongoing work toward accomplishment, and even (with particularly excellent and supportive leadership) failed attempts with their colleagues”)
P.S. old soundboard experiments…
I have built a few iterations of my soundboard before settling on the digital one I use now. The physical ones are a lot of fun for in person sessions and I miss using them. For now the digital one is my go to but one day i’ll bring one of these out again.
The “fun with capacitors and a breadboard” version:
The “I had extra arcade buttons from a different project” version:
The “in a pinch… just write your own HTML” version:
