Mission Control Rituals

Every great team has a rhythm. Not the kind you notice when things are going well, but the kind you desperately miss when it's gone when weeks blur together, alignment drifts, and the feeling of momentum fades into endless context-switching.

At Enobase, we've built what we call "Mission Control": a set of rituals that keep us focused on our goals while forcing us to maintain rhythm through discipline. These aren't arbitrary meetings but intentional practices that should compound over time.

We didn't invent these rituals. We learned from companies we admire: hexa, Notion, Linear, PostHog, Figma and adapted what works for our context. While it is still subject to change as we grow and evolve, here's our current operating system.

The catalyst for formalizing these rituals was joining hexa's Sprint program. Our advisor Thibaud pushed us to establish clear rhythms from day one. "Rituals are how you scale culture," he told us during our first session. He was right. The Sprint program gave us the structure and accountability to actually implement what we'd been reading about for years.

Sunday: Weekly Kickoff message

Every Sunday evening, I send a message to the entire company.

The message typically covers three things:

Reflections on the previous week: what went well, what we learned, what surprised us
Context for the week ahead: priorities, focus areas, what matters most
A reminder of where we're going: our 3-month and 6-month vision

This practice was inspired by Shishir Mehrotra, who wrote Sunday night emails to his entire company at both YouTube and Coda. As he describes it, summarizing your feelings about the previous week and setting expectations for the next creates clarity.

Here's an example of what one of these Kickoff messages looks like:

Subject: 2025-01-05 - Week 1 - New year resolutions

Hey team,

New year, fresh start. This feels like the right moment to put our vision in writing and make it real. (For context, I wrote a blog post about this exact ritual: Mission Control Rituals.)

The problem we're solving: Non-tech businesses remain under-digitized. Custom solutions are unaffordable, off-the-shelf tools don't fit, and many still rely on Excel or pen & paper to run their operations. We're building Enobase to change that.

Our vision: "Lovable × Notion for Ops" — A modern, versatile, AI-powered platform for heavy ops SMBs to centralise and digitize their operations with fully customizable, industry-specific templates.

Where we're going (6 months):

Volume: 10 implementations/month → 100/year

Speed per industry: 0→1 (2-3 months) → 1→10 (2-3 weeks) → 10→100 (2-3 days)

Focus: 2-5 industries (starting with Catering)

Team: 5 FDEs across industries

This month's focus:

Put Catering industry on track. Basile will coordinate with the team to get it done.

Improve our speed of execution: New hires onboarding & AI customization improvements

This week's focus (Please make it yours and more specific, the goal is to commit to something for Friday showtime):

Basile: Catering & Freddy's implementation & Admin incorporation

Thibaut: Peppol / AI sdk / Catering industry

Karlien: Core improvement and performance optimization

Arthur: Pipeline building + Sales calls with new prospects / industries

Me: Platform architecture / UI design / Documentation / Improve onboarding

While this is a suggestion. The unlock we are aiming for is 100x cost reduction in solution cost: 10x from AI × 10x from platform + industry templates. If we nail this, we're not competing with Odoo. We're making Odoo irrelevant.

Let's make this year count by getting our first week of the year off to a great start.

— Gauthier

The discipline of writing this message every week forces reflection. It's harder to lose track of what matters when you have to articulate it every seven days.

Monday: Week Kickoff

Monday morning starts with alignment. For us, this is a quick async check-in on Slack where everyone shares their priorities for the week.

No long meetings. No status theatrics. Just a simple answer to: What are you focused on this week, and is anything blocking you?

This is inspired by Basecamp's automated check-ins, which replaced standing meetings with written updates that the whole company can see. The result: dozens of hours saved weekly, and everyone starts the week on the same page.

Drift takes a slightly different approach with their "Monday Metrics" meeting—a quick 20-30 minute sync where each part of the organization shares what's on their radar. We've found async works better for us, but the principle is the same: start the week with clarity, not chaos.

Friday: Showtime (Demos & Changelog)

Friday is our favorite day. It's when we celebrate what we've shipped.

Our Friday ritual has two parts:

The Demos

Each person gets 5 minutes to show what they've built during the week. Here are the rules:

No demo shaming (it's okay to skip weeks)
Avoid using slide decks (live demos only except for sales / gtm / marketing / ... demos)
Avoid dev box demos (use production when possible)
No selling (this is internal)

The magic of demos is that they create accountability without pressure. You're not being evaluated but you're sharing what you've built. But knowing you'll share creates subtle motivation to ship.

The Changelog

After demos, we write our changelog. This isn't optional documentation, it's a core ritual.

Railway has shipped 222 consecutive weekly changelogs with a 50% open rate. Linear published 50+ changelogs in 12 months and found that "most candidates followed our changelog before applying."

As Linear puts it: "Weekly changelogs help communicate that the company values execution and shipping."

Our changelog process is simple:

Throughout the week, we post completed work to a dedicated Slack channel
On Friday, one person curates these into a coherent changelog
We publish it publicly

The deadline of "something to write about on Friday" creates healthy pressure. As Railway notes: "Software never ships when expected, so Friday often begins with our team searching for one or two more things to talk about. This subtle pressure acts as great motivation."

Kudos System

Inspired by PostHog, we're implementing a simple recognition system. Anyone can type /kudos @person for [reason] in Slack, and these get highlighted in our Friday demo.

It sounds small, but public recognition compounds. It reinforces the behaviors you want to see more of and gives visibility to work that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Rituals We are Considering Adopting

Watching what works at other companies, we are considering adopting a few additional rituals:

Quality Wednesdays

Linear dedicates every Wednesday to identifying and fixing quality issues. In two years, they've made over 1,000 small fixes through this ritual.

The insight is that quality rarely comes from big initiatives. It comes from consistent attention to small details. A dedicated day creates the space for this.

Life Story Fridays

This one is ambitious. PostHog has a Friday ritual where one team member spends about an hour telling their life story to the entire company—childhood photos, career journey, what makes them who they are.

As PostHog describes it: "We're big fans of our Friday event, and it's brought us closer as a result."

For remote teams especially, this kind of deep personal sharing creates bonds that Zoom calls and Slack channels can't replicate.

Feature Roasts

Linear has engineers ask the team to try new features during weekly meetings, getting instant feedback in a safe environment. It's like user testing, but with your harshest critics (your colleagues).

We're experimenting with this as part of our Friday demos—after showing what you built, invite the team to break it.

What We've Learned From the Best

Looking across the companies we admire, a few patterns emerge:

Write, don't just talk. PostHog puts it directly: "Remote work doesn't work without strong writing culture." Written updates scale. Meetings don't.

Celebrate shipping, not effort. The focus should be on deployed, production work. Not "almost done." Not "in progress." Shipped.

Bookend the week. Monday kickoffs and Friday celebrations create rhythm. The week has a shape. There's intention at both ends.

Leadership participation matters. When the Basile and I attends demos, it signals that this stuff matters. When leadership skips rituals, they decay.

Consistency over perfection. Railway hasn't missed a changelog in 222 weeks. The content varies. The cadence doesn't.

Name your rituals. "Quality Wednesday" is stickier than "we try to fix bugs midweek." Named, repeatable practices become cultural anchors.

Building Your Own Mission Control

Our rituals reflect our values: shipping, transparency, craft, and connection. Yours might look different.

The key isn't to copy what Linear or PostHog does. It's to be intentional about what you repeat. Culture isn't what you say—it's what you do consistently.

Start small. Pick one ritual and commit to it for 12 weeks. Add more as the first becomes automatic. Invite feedback and iterate.

As Randy Hunt, Notion's former Head of Design, put it: "A lot of this is about rituals—simple, powerful ideas that you commit to and repeat."

That's the secret. Not complexity. Not sophistication. Just commitment and repetition.

We're building Enobase in public. Follow our changelog to see what we ship each week.