| 1. Block time to review PRDs, designs, and strategy docs your team produces. 2. For each, ask: What's the real problem we're solving? Is the solution the simplest one? What's missing? What would break... |
| Critical |
| Your job is to improve output quality and develop your team's thinking - not to produce work yourself. Every hour you spend writing a spec is an hour you're not multiplying across your team. Edit ruth... |
| 'Think of yourself as an editor, not a writer. Editors take raw content and make it better. They don't produce. Most people in leadership positions want to write - they want to produce the strategy do... |
| 2-3 hours distributed |
| End-of-Week Reflection | Friday | 1. What was the One Thing? Did we make progress? 2. What surprised me this week? (Surprises reveal gaps in your mental model.) 3. Where did I add value? Where did I waste time or add negative value? 4... | Standard | Deliberate learning. Without explicit reflection, you repeat mistakes and miss patterns. Take 20 minutes to honestly assess the week and extract lessons. | Rabois emphasizes that leaders must be learning machines. Reflection is how you compound learning instead of just accumulating experience. | 20 min |
| Identify the One Thing | Monday or Sunday evening | 1. Ask: 'If we could only accomplish one thing this week, what would have the biggest impact?' 2. The answer should be specific and completable, not vague ('improve retention'). 3. Communicate this On... | Critical | Force clarity on what actually matters this week. Most teams diffuse energy across too many priorities. Identify the single most important problem and ensure disproportionate attention goes there. | 'There's always one thing that matters most. Everything else is a distraction. Your job as a leader is to identify that one thing and make sure the whole organization is focused on it.' | 30 min |
| Input Metrics Check | Wednesday or Thursday | 1. Define 3-5 input metrics for your team (e.g., PRDs completed, experiments launched, user interviews this week). 2. Track them weekly alongside outcomes. 3. If inputs are healthy but outcomes aren't... | High | Outcome metrics (revenue, retention) are lagging indicators - by the time they move, it's too late to course-correct. Input metrics (features shipped, experiments run, user interviews conducted) are l... | 'You can't control outcomes directly. You can only control inputs. If you get the inputs right, the outputs follow. Most people obsess over outputs and ignore the inputs they can actually change.' | 30 min |
| Office Hours / Open Door Time | 2-3 times per week | 1. Block 2-3 recurring 1-hour slots on your calendar as 'Office Hours - drop in for any topic'. 2. Make it explicit: no appointment needed, no topic too small. 3. Be physically or virtually present (c... | Standard | Be accessible without being interrupt-driven. Office hours let anyone surface problems directly to you while protecting your deep work time. Visibility builds trust and surfaces issues that wouldn't r... | Rabois emphasizes that leaders must balance accessibility with focus. Office hours solve this - you're available on a predictable schedule without being constantly interruptible. | 1 hour blocks |
| One-on-Ones with Direct Reports | Weekly (fixed schedule) | 1. Never cancel - reschedule if needed, but the cadence is sacred. 2. Let them set the agenda. Their problems, not your status updates. 3. Ask: 'What's the most important thing we should talk about?' ... | Critical | Surface problems early. Coach your team. Build trust. One-on-ones are the primary mechanism for information flow and people development. Skipping them signals your team doesn't matter. | Rabois maintains rigorous 1:1 cadence and uses them to detect problems before they become crises. Information that makes it to group meetings is often stale or politically filtered. | 30 min per report |
| Skip-Level One-on-Ones | Bi-weekly or Monthly | 1. Schedule recurring 30-min skip-levels with ICs 2+ levels down. Rotate through the team quarterly. 2. Frame it explicitly: 'This isn't about your manager. I want to understand what's working and wha... | High | Get unfiltered signal from the front lines. Your direct reports filter information - intentionally or not. Skip-levels expose ground truth about execution, morale, and problems your managers might not... | Skip-levels are essential for leaders of growing organizations. Rabois emphasizes that the information quality degrades with each layer between you and the work. | 30 min per person |
| Stack Rank and Cut | Weekly (during planning/prioritization) | 1. List all active and proposed initiatives. Force-rank by expected impact. 2. Draw a line: everything above gets full resources, everything below gets killed or paused. 3. The line should be uncomfor... | High | Prioritization is saying no. Most teams have too many projects, not too few. Ruthlessly cut the bottom of your stack to ensure the top gets resourced properly. Unfinished projects are waste. | 'Prioritization is not about what to do. It's about what not to do. If you have a list of ten things and you're doing all ten, you have no priorities. You should be doing three.' | 1 hour |
| Tight Feedback Loops Check | Friday | 1. For each active initiative, ask: How quickly would we know if this is failing? 2. If the answer is 'months' or 'when we launch,' you need faster feedback - user research, earlier metrics, staged ro... | Standard | Speed wins. The faster you learn whether something is working, the faster you can course-correct. Audit your feedback loops weekly - are you learning fast enough? Where is information getting stuck? | Rabois obsesses over cycle time and information velocity. Slow feedback loops mean slow learning, which means competitors who learn faster will win. | 30 min |
| Weekly Metrics Review | Monday | 1. Pull your core product metrics (activation, retention, engagement, conversion). 2. Compare to prior week and targets - flag anything >10% variance. 3. For each miss, identify: is this noise, a real... | Critical | Understand exactly what happened last week. Surface problems early. Hold the team accountable to outcomes, not activities. You cannot improve what you don't measure rigorously. | Rabois runs rigorous weekly business reviews at every company he operates. He believes metrics expose reality that narratives hide. 'If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.' | 1-2 hours |
| Weekly Team Meeting / Product Sync | Monday or Tuesday | 1. Keep it short and structured - no meandering updates. 2. Open with the One Thing for the week. 3. Review: key metrics (from your Monday review), major milestones hit/missed, blockers. 4. Each initi... | High | Align the team on priorities, surface cross-cutting issues, and build shared context. This is your primary mechanism for broadcasting information and ensuring everyone is rowing in the same direction. | Team meetings should be decision-making forums, not status updates. Status can be async. Use synchronous time for things that require real-time discussion. | 1 hour |
| Written Strategy/Decision Review | Weekly (as needed) | 1. For any significant decision (new feature, strategy change, resource allocation), require a written doc. 2. Distribute docs 24+ hours before discussion meetings. 3. Read the doc silently at the sta... | High | Writing forces clarity. Fuzzy thinking hides in verbal discussions but is exposed on paper. Require written proposals for significant decisions to elevate the quality of thinking across your team. | 'If you can't write it down clearly, you don't understand it. Meetings without pre-written documents are usually a waste of time. The document forces the author to think clearly before they consume ev... | 1-2 hours |
Activity Name | How To Execute | Purpose | Day of Week | Priority Level | Rabois Original | Time Commitment |
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