gtm-operating-cadence

This skill is an operating-cadence playbook for scaling companies, addressing the failure mode where growth brings too many people into too many meetings that produce too few decisions. It provides structure for meeting rhythms, metric reporting, quarterly planning, and decision-making velocity so alignment improves rather than degrades as headcount rises. It is a conceptual management framework, not executable software.

At its center is a five-level meeting architecture — daily standups, weekly functional reviews, a weekly all-hands, bi-weekly leadership alignment, and quarterly strategic planning — each with a purpose, format, time box, and anti-patterns, plus scaling adjustments for organizations from under 30 to over 300 people, anchored by the rule that every meeting must produce decisions or be cancelled. A weekly metric-reporting framework prescribes a consistent dashboard format with north-star and functional metrics, one context sentence per metric, trend arrows, traffic-light colors, an escalation rule for repeated reds, and a discipline of tracking only 8–12 decision-driving metrics. A three-week quarterly planning cycle covers retrospective and data gathering, planning, and synthesis to prevent strategic drift.

The target users are founders, executives, chiefs of staff, and operations leaders at post-product-market-fit companies scaling from roughly 20 to 300-plus people, including distributed and remote teams. Use cases include fixing meetings that don't produce decisions, speeding up slow decision-making, restoring cross-functional alignment, and standing up disciplined metric reporting and quarterly planning.