If you are sold on the concept of Input Metrics and are ready to implement an automated Weekly Business Review (WBR) process in your organization, this page will help you get started and quickly develop your WBR.
The Amazon WBR process is a powerful process-control tool for tracking and improving your business through data-driven decision-making.
Each week, Amazon executives review hundreds of metrics in a WBR to obtain data-driven answers to three fundamental questions:
1. How did our business do last week?
2. Are we on track to hit our targets?
3. What did our customers experience last week?
Most companies do a good job answering the first two questions but fall short in answering the third each week. The WBR helps you ensure accountability, identify trends, understand “the why” behind those trends, and take action to improve outcomes.
A successful WBR process depends on consistency, automation, and effective visualization. Key attributes include
While the Amazon WBR report might seem complex, its core purpose is straightforward: to present data in a manner that is both accessible and actionable. One distinctive feature of an Amazon-style Weekly Business Review (WBR) is the 6-12 chart. Here’s an example of one.
Notice the non-linear x-axis. Unlike traditional charts that display data in evenly spaced time intervals, the Amazon-style WBR arranges the x-axis to emphasize key timeframes for analysis. Specifically:
This combination of visual trends and numerical summaries allows teams to connect short-term results with broader patterns quickly. Moreover, since the format does not change with each metric, you can review hundreds of them in a one-hour meeting.
Here’s a typical WBR Report for a business-to-consumer e-commerce company. Note that this is automatically generated fictional data.
Custom data transformations are required to prepare metrics for the 6-12 and related charts. While tools like Looker or Tableau can generate these reports, they often require manual configurations or scripting. If your organization has scarce development resources, you can use the WBR App we created to simplify this process.
The WBR App is a free, open-source tool available on GitHub. It is designed to streamline the creation of Amazon-style WBR reports. It automates the data transformation and visualization to create Amazon-style WBR reports without additional effort. The sample, b2c WBR Report listed, was generated with the WBR App.
If you are comfortable customizing with your internal tools, please do so. The important thing is to get started. Don’t let tools become a barrier—Amazon initially used Microsoft Excel for WBRs, even at a billion-dollar+ scale.
The WBR User Manual is an invaluable resource regardless of your chosen tools. It condenses our lessons learned from Amazon and other companies to help you:
Reading the manual will provide time-saving tips and best practices for efficiently designing, configuring, and implementing your WBR.
We aim to demystify and reduce the cost of implementing a WBR so that every organization can take advantage of this powerful process. You can help, too. As you develop and refine your WBR process, let us know how it goes! Here are ways to contribute:
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