THE FIRST THIRTY DAYS

Start with what the team looks at every week, because that’s where the most time goes to noise. Then the habits that need the new charts to work. By day thirty, the Monday meeting runs on signals and every live bet has a written exit.

1. Week one: the limitsChart revenue, orders, conversion rate, revenue per recipient and the latest cohort’s repeat rate with 12 normal weeks each (chapter 3). Add denominators to every rate, label small samples, and take open rate out of decisions (chapter 2). Freeze any flow with more than two bad-week edits (chapter 4).
2. Week two: the winnersRun the meeting in the four parts (chapter 13). Put your last three winning campaigns or SKUs through the tool in chapter 5 and resize any budget or reorder built on the headline figure. Run the persistence test on your biggest allocation decision (chapter 6).
3. Week three: forecasts and exitsBuild the reference class of your past launches and compute the median ratio of actual to plan (chapter 9). Write kill criteria for every live bet (chapter 10). Answer the six questions for any tactic you’re about to copy (chapter 7).
4. Week four: the premortem and the journalRun a premortem on your next launch (chapter 11). Start the decision journal with the two biggest open decisions, and book the first quarterly review (chapter 12).

At day thirty, you won’t know yet whether your decisions are better. That takes a quarter of journal entries and a few kill dates. What you’ll have is a meeting that spends its time on signals, forecasts that start from what usually happens, and a written record that will show you, in ninety days, where your judgment is good and where it’s lucky.

Limits before stories. Base rates before plans. Records before hindsight.

Do this

• Put the four weeks on the calendar today, with an owner for each line. Give the owner of week one this guide’s Appendix A.