Awarenesses, Issues and Opportunities Meeting Agenda
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
A three-bucket agenda for the weekly leadership meeting that fixes the failure mode of Traction-style 'issues lists' going empty. Issues are metrics that have been red for two weeks and must be addressed. Opportunities are things running unusually hot that deserve more attention. Awarenesses are things coming down the pipeline — a founder's month off, a product launch — that are neither problem nor upside but need collective visibility. Roughly 45 minutes of a one-hour meeting is spent on the three buckets, opened with wins and driven by the scorecard, with red and amber metrics automatically feeding the issues list. Gray's cultural enforcement is blunt: if a leader arrives with no issue, no opportunity and nothing anyone should be aware of, he does not know what they are doing.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Keep the leadership meeting small and weekly
One meeting a week with the core system owners, ideally around six people — Bezos's two-pizza rule — running 45 minutes to an hour.
Pro tip Departments can run their own meetings afterwards; the founder does not need to be in those.
- 2
Open with wins from the past week
Start with what people want to share from the week before, so the meeting does not become an hour of pure problem-solving.
- 3
Run the scorecard and auto-escalate reds
Walk the dashboard and pull anything red or amber into the agenda. Any metric off target for two weeks running automatically becomes an issue.
Pro tip Colour-coded conditional formatting against weekly targets makes this mechanical rather than a judgement call.
- 4
Split the agenda into three named buckets
Issues are metrics red for two weeks that must be addressed. Opportunities are things in the green and growing that you are barely touching. Awarenesses are upcoming events and bird's-eye context.
Pro tip Using all three means nothing gets dropped for not fitting the label — the reason single-bucket lists go silent.
Watch out Only tracking issues makes the meeting relentlessly negative; only tracking opportunities means you miss the fires.
- 5
Require every leader to bring at least one item
Every attendee comes with something in one of the three buckets. If you see no issue, no opportunity and nothing worth flagging, you are not really engaged in the business.
Pro tip Tell people not to show up if they haven't filled theirs in — attendance without contribution is what makes the meeting performative.
Watch out If the founder and GM are pulling items out of a hat every week, the meeting has become a charade.
- 6
Spend the bulk of the hour solving bottlenecks together
Dedicate roughly 45 minutes of the hour to working through the three buckets, with the founder and GM moderating rather than generating the content.
In the wild
Ali's team ran Traction-style issues lists for two years and found people wouldn't raise things because they weren't technically issues. They renamed them 'awarenesses' — a term picked up from Daniel Priestley — and got the same silence: is it really an awareness? With all three buckets in play, the metrics automatically issue-ify themselves, opportunities give the founder an outlet to bring back something like setting up Instagram DM closing after a trip, and awarenesses cover the founder's upcoming month off. Ali's reaction was to clip the segment and send it to his GM, who had been chasing the team every week for awarenesses that never came.
→ The three-bucket framing removed the excuse of an item not fitting the label, and gave every kind of input a home.
A platform sits in the green for four weeks and is growing fast despite the team barely posting there. Under an issues-only agenda it never gets raised — nothing is broken. Under the opportunities bucket someone flags it, and the meeting concludes that with real attention the channel could be 10x'd. The same slot in the agenda would also catch the reverse: something quietly compounding that nobody would otherwise mention until it was too late to exploit.
→ A fast-growing but neglected channel gets deliberate resourcing instead of being invisible to the agenda.
Common mistakes
Calling everything an 'issue'
People self-censor because the thing they want to raise isn't technically a problem, so the list empties out and the meeting looks healthy while nothing is surfacing. Renaming to a single softer word has the same effect — you need all three buckets so nothing has an excuse to stay unsaid.
A meeting that is only problem-solving
If the agenda is nothing but issues, leadership meetings become uniformly negative and drain optimism from the people running the business. Opening with wins and reserving space for opportunities keeps the same hour honest without making it grim.
Leaders arriving empty-handed
Treating the leadership meeting as a spectator sport means the founder pulls items out of a hat and the whole thing turns performative. The expectation should be explicit: bring an issue, an opportunity or an awareness, or don't attend.
From the transcript
“let's just say it's an hour team meeting and and about 45 minutes of it is dedicated to issues opportunities and awarenesses if you're not…”
“and then an opportunity could be hey something's been in the green for four weeks it's growing like crazy who knew it”
“we're not showing up to the basketball game just to sit on the sidelines this is the leadership meeting”
From the episode
Scale Your Business From $10k to $100k Per Month - Matt Gray
Matt Gray