S3
The Growth System

How we plan, run
and learn.

A walkthrough of the operating system that sits underneath Road to Launch: what the pieces are, where each one lives, and what we need from each of you.

S3 Sensitivity Science · Team walkthrough Thursday 6 August 2026
01Why a system at all

We have a plan. We do not yet have the machinery.

Road to Launch says what has to be true by September, and the scorecard tells us every Tuesday how close we are getting. What sits between them is the actual work, and today each of us runs that part our own way. This is the bit we are unifying.

Work lives in heads.

Who is doing what this fortnight is knowable only by asking. Nothing rolls up to “is Reviews engine on track for September?”

What we learn evaporates.

We run a test, we read the result, and six weeks later somebody proposes it again. Nothing catches it.

We settle things twice.

A choice gets made in a meeting and lives in whichever document it was made in. That document gets rewritten each phase, and the reason we chose it goes with it.

None of this is a tooling problem. It is a missing set of shared words and a place to put each one. That is the whole of what follows.

02The shape

Four layers, each one smaller than the last.

Strategy Map The phase plan: one objective, the stage gate, the scoreboard. Road to Launch is the current one. The pre-read
Initiative Six weeks, one owner, one outcome by September. Scoped by that outcome rather than by channel, and small enough to answer “is this on track?”. It runs across several sprints. Road to Launch names 22. Initiatives · INI-n
Sprint Two weeks. The prioritised chunk of work we commit to next, to move one or more initiatives forward. Sprints
Card The atomic unit of work anyone actually does. Experiment, Project or BAU, all on one board. Backlog · EX-n

Read it downward and it answers “what am I doing today?”. Read it upward and it answers “and why does that matter in September?”

02The shape · the collision

An initiative is not a sprint.

This is the one word we were quietly using for two different things, and it is the collision most likely to resurface in this room. So we have settled it.

Initiative · six weeks

A workstream with an owner and a September outcome.

It spans several sprints. It is the thing the Strategy Map tracks and the thing the room asks “is this on track?” about.

Reviews engine → Trustpilot live and climbing toward 150 reviews.

Sprint · two weeks

The prioritised chunk of work we commit to next.

One objective, a committed set of cards, a start and an end date. It is the progress we are committing to make on one or more initiatives over the fortnight.

Get the review request flow live and measure reply rate on the first cohort.

Initiative is the word from the pre-read, so the pre-read wins. Nothing in here uses “initiative” for a two-week thing, and nothing uses “sprint” for a six-week one.

03Where everything lives

Four places, and only one of them is new to you.

Notion

The databases.

Everything with a row and an ID. Under Growth & Marketing, seven databases, four you already use.

Initiativesto build Sprints Backlog Issuesto build Learnings Decisionsto build Customer Insight
Cloudflare

The scoreboards.

The L10 scorecard, live and editable by anyone with the link. The team dashboard for the outcome numbers.

s3-l10-scorecard.pages.dev S3 dashboardswork in progress
The Brain

The context.

Our warehouse numbers plus competitor reviews, customer interviews, Slack and the business docs. It answers questions, it is never where work is recorded.

The team plugin

The skills.

Ten commands you type into Claude. They do the moving of work between the databases so nobody is hand-filling forms.

The scorecard is already live and already yours. Nothing here replaces a tool you use today.

03Where everything lives · four words

Four words we are going to use precisely.

Each one gets its own database because each one behaves differently. The test for which is which is the sentence form.

Learning · LRN-n

What we concluded.

A claim you can agree or disagree with, rated on how good the evidence is.

Sufferers avoid cold drinks rather than manage the pain.

Insight · the voice bank

What customers say.

Their words, kept verbatim, because that is language you can put straight into an ad, an email or the website.

Like biting into an ice cube.

Decision · DEC-nto build

What we chose, and what it rules out.

Not something you agree with, something you comply with or breach.

Not a log of everything, a place to go back to why. We can always reverse one, with a new row that supersedes the old, never a quiet edit.

Anchor at £24.99, discounts earned through volume.

Issue · ISS-nto build

A problem, not a task.

Raised for IDS at the L10. Solving one creates cards, it does not become one, which is what keeps the list short enough to rank.

Google is not showing on Shopping and we do not know why.

04The weekly rhythm

The L10, every Tuesday.

90 minutes, same shape every week. Most of it is not status, it is solving.

10 minScorecard read. Each owner takes us through their number, its RAG and a line of commentary. No solving yet. Anything red or amber drops onto the issues list.
10 minCard updates by owner. On track or not. Not a walk through the board.
The restIDS on the issues list. Identify the real problem, discuss it once, solve it with an owner and a date.
2 minRate the meeting out of ten. If it was not a ten, say what would have made it one.
The part that matters

Solving an issue creates cards.

One problem routinely produces three or four actions across three or four owners. If the issue simply became a task, we would lose that, and the list would grow until nobody ranked it.

So the issues list stays a list of problems, short enough that we can always argue about which one is worst. A new skill, s3-ids-issue, files one in the right shape, so raising a problem takes a minute.

Come to Tuesday ready. Scorecard numbers in and issues raised before the meeting, with the list already ranked, so the 90 minutes goes on solving rather than filling in. On the weeks a sprint opens, planning runs straight after, same room, same morning.

05The fortnightly rhythm

14 days, Tuesday to Tuesday.

Built around the days we are all actually on, with two team meetings a week at most.

Mon
Tue
Wed
Thu
Fri
Sat / Sun
Week
one
Grill finishes Last cycle's proposal lands, ready for tomorrow. Async
L10, then sprint planning The grill's proposal is on the table and we commit to cards with owners. Team · sprint opens
Week
two
L10 Scorecard, card updates, then IDS on the issues list. Team
Sprint review Committed versus shipped, how far out our estimates were, and what we now believe. Team · sprint closes
Grill starts Plus finishing off anything outstanding. Async
Grill continues Review the inputs, settle the focus, scope the candidates. Async → Monday

Two team sessions a week at most, both on days we are all on. The grill is not a meeting: it is preparation brought to planning, it runs Friday to Monday across the seam, and bringing an unprepared one into the room is what makes planning long.

06The ten skills

Ten commands, in the order you would use them.

Plan
s3-sprint-grill Async. Reviews the inputs, then grills one question at a time until the focus for the next two weeks is settled.
s3-to-sprint Writes the Sprint page. No second interview, it uses what the grill settled.
s3-to-backlog Creates and scopes the cards the sprint commits to.
Do
s3-scope-card Takes a loose idea to a card good enough to commit to.
s3-do-card Executes one card, across any surface we own. Builds, never launches.
s3-ids-issue Files a problem into Issues in IDS shape, ready to rank before Tuesday.
Learn
s3-capture-insight Turns evidence into the voice bank. One survey becomes two or three insights, not 300.
s3-distil-learnings Turns evidence into beliefs. Adds freely, but asks before it weakens a claim.
s3-review-sprint Committed versus shipped, the estimation delta, what we now believe.
Improve
s3-growth-audit Monthly, across every surface. A ranked report that comes out as proposed cards.
06s3-do-card · the safety rule

s3-do-card builds. It never launches.

s3-do-card is the one that does the work, on whatever surface the card names. One rule governs all of them, no exceptions, and no per-card setting anyone can get wrong on the day it would spend money.

Shopify

Lands on a draft theme, with a preview URL.

Meta & Google

Campaigns created paused.

Klaviyo

Flows built unpublished.

Discounts

Codes created disabled.

Every card finishes at To Review, and a person flips the switch.

To Review is a status the Backlog already has, so there is nothing new to learn. On an experiment it means the result is waiting to be read. On a project or BAU card it means the work is built and waiting to be published. Which one it is, is obvious from the card's type.

It applies to the harmless things too, a dashboard, a doc, a Notion tidy-up. Slightly redundant on that half, and worth it for having one rule instead of a boundary anyone has to reason about at speed.

Underneath it will sit a skill per surface, build a landing page on Shopify, build a Meta campaign, write the ad copy. How far each of those goes is still to be scoped, and s3-do-card is the layer above them, so the rule holds whichever one it calls.

07What exists, what we build

Rather more than half of this already exists.

Already live
  • Backlog, with every card carrying an EX-n
  • Sprints, with an objective field already on it
  • Learnings, with the evidence ladder
  • The L10 scorecard, 42 input KPIs, editable by anyone
  • The Brain, answering questions across the warehouse and the docs
  • s3-experiment-scoping, which becomes s3-scope-card
To build
  • Initiatives, so the pre-read's table becomes a live view
  • Issues, so IDS has somewhere to point
  • Decisions, so a choice outlives the phase it was made in
  • Customer Insight, re-grained to one row per recurring thing customers say
  • The ten skills, written into the team plugin

The design is settled and written down: a glossary, eight decision records, and this. The build starts after today.

08What we need from each of you

Four things, starting Thursday.

01

Claim your initiatives.

All 22 owners are blank in the pre-read on purpose. Come and take the ones you want, and say out loud which ones you are not taking.

02

Bring problems, not tasks.

If something is off track or in your way, raise it as an issue and bring it to the L10. Do not quietly turn it into a job for yourself.

03

Say when you learn something.

A number that surprised you, a thing a customer said, a test that did not work. That is the raw material, and it is the part that goes missing.

04

Put your work on the board.

If you are working on it, it is a card. Not because we are counting, but because it is the only way the Tuesday conversation is about the real list.

S3
The Growth System

First sprint opens
Tuesday 11 August.

Closes Thursday 20 August, with the review. The next one opens Tuesday 25 August. Between now and then, the databases get built and the owners get claimed.

Glossary and decisions · s3-operations/growth-system Questions welcome, especially the awkward ones
← → to move