Founder Retrospective (The Weekly Reality Check)

It is easy for a founder to feel exhausted on Friday without having moved the business forward. Answering emails, tweaking CSS, and refactoring working code feels like work, but often produces zero user value.

retro is a fast, 15-minute weekly checkpoint that audits momentum, customer feedback, accumulated debt, and aligns next week's focus.

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When to Invoke

• Every Friday afternoon or Monday morning.
• At the conclusion of an intense sprint or major launch.

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The 4 Audit Sections

1. Velocity: What Actually Shipped?

• Scan git commits and PRs over the last 7 days.
• Group into:
  • Customer-facing capabilities (Things users noticed).
  • Internal infrastructure / refactors.
  • Bug fixes.
• The Honest Ratio: If customer-facing capabilities were < 40% of the week's output, diagnose why.

2. User Reality: What Did Customers Actually Do?

• What was the qualitative feedback from users/prospects this week?
• Where did users get stuck or complain?
• Did any metric move (signups, active runs, revenue, retention)?

3. Debt & Slop Audit: What Corners Did We Cut?

• Check for temporary hacks, missing tests, or unhandled edge cases introduced during fast shipping.
• Did we add any unnecessary dependencies or layers?
• Can we delete 200 lines of dead code right now?

4. Next Week's Single Needle-Mover:

• What is the one thing that, if accomplished next week, makes everything else easier or unnecessary?
• Explicitly list 3 things you will NOT do next week to protect focus.

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The Retro Output Template

# 🏁 Weekly Founder Retro: Week Ending [Date]

### 📦 What Shipped
1. [Feature 1]: Parallel worker execution (`v1.4.0`).
2. [Fix 1]: Resolved CSV parsing edge case for customer Acme.
3. [Doc 1]: Published interactive GEO comparison guide.

### 👥 Customer Reality
- 3 new paying accounts onboarded.
- Primary complaint: API documentation was missing TypeScript examples.
- Inbound interest: 4 qualified inbound leads from X announcement post.

### 🧹 Tech Debt & Simplification
- Stale branches pruned.
- Deleted unused legacy analytics script (`-140 LOC`).
- Open debt item: Add integration tests for OAuth token refresh edge case.

### 🎯 Next Week's Focus
- **The #1 Needle-Mover**: Ship self-serve Stripe customer portal to unblock annual plan upgrades.
- **Explicit Anti-Goals (Will NOT do)**:
  - Will not redesign the landing page nav.
  - Will not build Discord notifications until 5 users ask for it.