Rituals
Intentional, repeating interactions designed to produce outcomes
In Dotwork terminology, a “ritual” is any intentional and repeating set of interactions designed to output decisions, actions, or outcomes. Examples range from synchronous quarterly business reviews involving lots of prep and “meetings before the meeting,” to lightweight agreements like “post your updates in Slack.”
They might happen on a cadence, for example monthly, or they might be triggered by certain events, such as learning reviews that happen 30 days after the completion of a bet. If the word ritual turns you off, swap in meeting, sync, update, or whatever works for your company.
Why do we care about rituals at Dotwork? One way to think about tools like Dotwork is that a key measure of impact and success is the degree to which they can:
- Make your rituals easy to prepare for
- Improve the quality and effectiveness of those rituals by bringing in more up-to-date data, connecting the dots, and surfacing important insights.
Note: The goal here is not to lock down every ritual or document every ritual in depth. Rituals are like products—they evolve. They adapt as teams learn, as priorities shift, and as new information comes to light. The point of mapping is to create a shared foundation so we can have useful discussions, spot opportunities for improvement, and understand how Dotwork can help reduce friction and improve outcomes.
Ritual Definition Table
| Area | Description |
|---|---|
| Name | How do team members refer to the ritual? Capture the actual name people use in conversation, not an idealized label. Examples: "QBR", "Monday Planning Sync", "Launch Readiness Review". |
| Ownership | Who "owns" the meeting? This could include the owner of the outputs, the leader who sponsors it, or the organizer. Examples: "Head of Product sponsors it, PMs run it". |
| Attendees | Who attends or participates, and what is their role? Clarify contributors, decision-makers, and observers. |
| Frequency / Cadence | When does the ritual happen? Fixed cadence or triggered by events? Examples: "Happens monthly on the first Thursday", "Triggered after each experiment completes". |
| Inputs | What information do people collect, synthesize, or analyze? What decks are prepared? What updates are described? |
| Outputs | What comes out of the ritual? Decisions, insights, documents, or action items? |
| Artifacts | What decks, docs, spreadsheets, dashboards are used as pre-reads, during the meeting, or afterward? |
| Health of the Ritual | Is the ritual well worn with lots of history? A work in progress? New and still emerging? Needs redesign? |
| Areas for Improvement | What is working and not working? Where is it hard to prepare or take action items? Where are insights missing? |
Example: Monthly Initiative Review
The “Monthly Initiative Review” is a recurring ritual that teams refer to by that exact name. It is sponsored by the VP of Product, with PMs responsible for preparing the content and Product Ops organizing the agenda and pulling everything together. Attendees typically include PMs, Engineering Leads, Design Leads, the VP of Product, and a Finance Partner, with Marketing or Support joining occasionally based on topics.
The ritual happens monthly on the second Tuesday, with an additional session triggered whenever an initiative enters or exits the current-quarter slate.
Prep generally involves assembling a 10–12 slide deck that includes KPIs, initiative status snapshots, Jira exports for delivery progress, customer insights from the past month, and short written narratives from each PM. In practice, this usually means copying and pasting data from Jira, Looker, Notion, and Slack threads into a single deck.
The outputs include alignment on sequencing for the next 4–6 weeks, a refreshed priority list, and a set of follow-up owners. Sometimes decisions about scope adjustments or deferrals also emerge.
Several artifacts support this ritual: the shared Google Slides deck, initiative briefs in Notion, a Jira board filtered by initiative, a Looker dashboard with KPIs, and a running action-item document. The ritual is mature, with a predictable flow, but it carries a heavy prep burden. PMs spend many hours collecting data, and the discussions often run long. Some decisions are not documented well, data can be stale due to manual copying, and ownership of follow-ups is sometimes unclear.
You're Done When
- You've listed the rituals the org actually performs.
- You've captured the purpose, cadence, ownership, and attendees for each ritual.
- You've documented the prep work, inputs, and outputs.
- You've gathered examples of the artifacts used in these rituals.
- You've noted friction, confusion, or improvement opportunities.