Weeknotes

I built a small tool for teams to write down what they had decided each week, and why. Four lines per decision: what, why, what we rejected, what would change our minds.

I still think that habit is one of the highest-return things a team can do. I was wrong about the tool.

What happened

Six teams tried it. All six said it was a good idea. None of them opened it a second time.

I spent a while assuming the problem was the product, the flow, the onboarding, the fact that it was ugly. So I improved those. It changed nothing, which should have told me sooner than it did.

The actual reason

Teams that already write decisions down were doing it in a document, and a document is free and already open. Teams that do not write decisions down did not have a tooling problem. They had a “nobody has decided who decides” problem, and no app fixes that.

I’d built a solution for the half of the market that did not need it.

What it was worth

More than it cost, in the end. It’s where I learned to ask what somebody does about a problem today before building anything, because when the honest answer is “a Google Doc, and it’s fine”, that’s the finding.

The four-line habit survived. I still recommend it, and I still think it’s what most teams stuck in the same argument actually need. It just does not need me to build anything.