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Tutorial: The Friday leadership review

Time: ~8 minutes to follow this tutorial; ~15 minutes per week once it’s a habit
Skills used: wins-due → stakeholder-due → patterns-watch
Who this is for: EMs and PMs who already have the wins log and stakeholder files set up. If you haven’t done those yet, start with Set up your stakeholder radar and Log a win and turn it into a story first.

You’ll learn:

  • What each skill surfaces and in what order
  • How the three skills compose into a single Friday scan
  • How to set this up as a scheduled routine so you don’t have to remember to run it

The scenario

Section titled “The scenario”

It’s Friday afternoon. You’re an EM. You have four direct reports, two active stakeholders you’re managing across, and a manager you’re managing up to. You’ve been logging wins and reflections intermittently — more consistently some weeks than others.

This is what a Friday review looks like after 6 weeks of using the system.

Step 1: What did I accomplish this week?

Section titled “Step 1: What did I accomplish this week?”
What wins should I log this week?

wins-due doesn’t wait for you to remember — it probes by category:

“Quick Friday check:

— Any delivery this week? Something shipped, a milestone hit, a metric moved? — Any judgment calls? Something you chose not to do, a decision you made under uncertainty? — Any mentorship? A conversation that helped someone, feedback you gave, a 1:1 that went well? — Any recovery? Something that went sideways that you helped fix or contain?”

You scan the week. You remember:

  • A prod incident Monday that you helped contain (recovery)
  • A conversation Thursday where you talked a junior engineer out of a risky design shortcut (mentorship)

You’d have logged neither without the probe. Both go into the log with wins-log, with the skill pushing you toward specificity on each.

Three minutes. Two entries you’d have forgotten by Sunday.

Step 2: Who am I losing touch with?

Section titled “Step 2: Who am I losing touch with?”
Who's overdue for reflection?

stakeholder-due scans all your stakeholder files and surfaces:

Overdue (7+ days since last reflection):
  → Daniyar Seitkali (managing-up): "What does Daniyar seem to optimize for
    that you haven't explicitly discussed?" — 12 days overdue


  → Mei-Lin Chou (managing-across): "Where have you and Mei-Lin agreed easily
    — and what does that tell you?" — 9 days overdue


Coming up this week:
  → Reports (managing-down): "Who on your team is getting the most of your
    attention right now — and who isn't?" — due in 3 days

You do the Daniyar reflection now — takes 8 minutes. The Mei-Lin question goes on Monday’s list. The managing-down question you’ll do in your next team 1:1 prep.

What you don’t do: let a relationship drift for a month and then wonder why the next conversation felt harder than it should have.

Step 3: What am I not seeing?

Section titled “Step 3: What am I not seeing?”
Any patterns worth noting this week?

patterns-watch scans across your wins log, stakeholder files, and self-reflection entries (if you have them) and surfaces what you didn’t ask about:

“A few things across this week’s data:

— Your last four wins entries are all delivery or recovery. No judgment entries since early March. You have a promo cycle in 10 weeks — judgment is typically the thinnest dimension in promo packets for PMs. Worth probing this next week.

— You’ve reflected on Daniyar three times this month. Mei-Lin hasn’t had an entry in 19 days, and you’re co-planning a launch with her team. Overdue cadence aside, this is a relationship that’s changing fast — thin reflection coverage is a risk.

— Your wins log mentions ‘the platform incident’ twice without a full entry. Either log it properly or note why it doesn’t merit one.”

This is the part of the review that most surprises people the first time they see it. The scan doesn’t just show you what you asked about — it shows you what you’ve been avoiding.

Running it as one command

Section titled “Running it as one command”

Once you’re used to each step, you can run the full review in one prompt:

Friday review — wins due, stakeholders due, and any patterns.

All three skills chain in sequence. Total wall-clock time: 15 minutes, most of which is you thinking and typing.

Setting it up as a scheduled routine

Section titled “Setting it up as a scheduled routine”

The best version of this review runs automatically. In Claude Code Desktop:

Every Friday at 4pm, run /bettersense:wins-due, then /bettersense:stakeholder-due,
then /bettersense:patterns-watch, and post a summary.

Or with the schedule skill:

/schedule "Every Friday at 4pm: Friday leadership review
— runs wins-due, stakeholder-due, and patterns-watch in sequence"

After a month of Friday reviews, you’ll have:

  • A wins log dense enough to support a promo packet
  • Stakeholder files with enough entries for synthesis to surface real patterns
  • A pattern-watch history that shows how your attention has shifted over time

Where to go next

Section titled “Where to go next”