Thanksgiving week: how we staff three active pursuits
Our ten-minute Monday huddle that keeps the short week from collapsing. Three active pursuits, three owners, one rule about Wednesday at noon.
We have three active pursuits going into Thanksgiving week. A short week with an unusual rhythm: most buyers are quiet, some SMEs are off, and the people who are in are working with a tailwind because their inbox is emptier than usual.
This is what our Monday huddle looks like. It runs ten minutes. It changes what the week feels like.
The setup
Three pursuits, three proposal-owner names. Each owner lists, in thirty seconds: what ships this week, what does not, what they need from someone else by when. The manager writes it on the board (a shared doc). No discussion in the huddle — questions land in Slack after.
The rule about Wednesday at noon
Wednesday noon is the hard cut. Anything that needs a SME review, a color-team comment, or a compliance sign-off has to be in the reviewer’s queue by noon Wednesday. After that, people are either traveling or disengaging, and the next realistic touch point is Monday.
This rule is the reason the week doesn’t collapse. Without it, sections get drafted on Wednesday afternoon, reviewers don’t see them until Monday, the Monday-after-Thanksgiving becomes an emergency, and half of Tuesday goes to rework. With it, reviewers spend Wednesday morning doing reviews and the team has Thursday and Friday to rewrite in peace.
Who works, who doesn’t
Two of our three pursuits have SMEs who are off Thursday and Friday. Those pursuits plan around that — anything needing a SME decision is made by Wednesday noon. The third pursuit has a SME who is in all week (by choice); we still hold the Wednesday-noon line because the reviewer and the compliance lead are off. One unavailable person on the critical path is enough.
What we don’t do
We don’t ask people to work over the holiday. We don’t send Slack DMs to people who are marked off. We don’t schedule a “quick call Thursday” that isn’t quick and isn’t optional. The Qorus research on the SME bottleneck — 48% of teams citing SME collaboration as their top challenge for five consecutive years — is partly a scheduling-respect problem. The teams that get the best SME cooperation are the teams that ask least often on the worst days.
What the huddle actually produces
One shared doc with three rows, one per pursuit. Each row has: owner, this-week deliverable, Wednesday-noon check, next-Monday check, anyone needed from outside the team. The doc is 400 words. The huddle took nine minutes this morning.
The alternative — which I ran for most of my first decade as a founder — is entering Thanksgiving week with vibes and a vague sense that things will work out. Vibes cost more than the huddle. We do the huddle.
See also the rolling Q4 capacity plan for the weekly version of this same discipline.