"Everyone opens the same board on Monday"

Before, the Monday meeting started with reconciliation. Six markets, six spreadsheets, six definitions of organic traffic. The first twenty minutes went to establishing whose number was correct, and the discussion about what to do next got whatever time was left.

What the head of organic growth describes

We stopped arguing about whose number was right. Everyone opens the same board on Monday and the conversation starts at what to do next.

The change was not a new metric. It was agreeing one definition and refusing to maintain the others.

What that took

A metric dictionary. One written definition per metric, agreed once across all six markets. Unglamorous, and the single highest-leverage thing in the programme.

Devolved execution. Each market works its own prioritised backlog and sees only its own properties. Head office sees the roll-up, read-only. Neither side has to ask permission for routine work.

One cadence. Weekly movement digests routed to the person who owns each page group, rather than a shared inbox nobody reads.

What changed in practice

Reporting time fell by roughly 80%, which mattered less than where the recovered time went — an analyst who previously spent three days assembling a deck now spends them on analysis.

The second-order effect was slower to appear and larger: because the numbers stopped being contested, the team started being asked what they thought rather than what happened.