Tom Spencer

Founder, co-host of The Build, shipping AI-first GTM playbooks.

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Operating Cadence for AI Builders

If AI makes it possible to ship faster, cadence is what keeps the work coherent. This playbook distills Tom Spencer’s conversations on The Build into a weekly rhythm any AI-native team can adopt—whether you’re three people in a shared Notion or a cross-functional crew spanning product, design, and GTM.

Foundations Before You Accelerate

  1. Set a narrative north star. Document the change you’re trying to create for customers. Every experiment should tie back to that story.
  2. Instrument your loops. Capture the minimum viable metrics for product (activation, retention), GTM (pipeline velocity, win rate), and customer success (time-to-value).
  3. Assign experiment owners. Give each initiative a single accountable lead—even if AI agents handle part of the workflow.

Tom’s Weekly Flow

Monday — Align on Intent

  • 20-minute async Loom recapping last week’s experiments and decisions.
  • Publish an updated “bets board” that pairs qualitative customer insights with the metrics you expect to move.
  • Share a short list of live experiments, each tagged with owner, metric, and next check-in date.

Tuesday/Wednesday — Ship and Instrument

  • Engineers and design partners ship in small slices, with AI agents handling QA scripts or content scaffolding.
  • GTM squads run targeted outbound informed by agent-surfaced signals (ICP coverage gaps, buying-window triggers).
  • Capture customer language in a shared repository (actual quotes, not paraphrases).

Thursday — Narrative Sync

  • 30-minute “show & tell” with product + GTM in the same room.
  • Each team answers: What did we learn? What changed because of it? What’s next?
  • AI summarises the call, but a human editor highlights the implications for next week’s plan.

Friday — Retro & Renewal

  • 45-minute retro split into three blocks: Metrics Check, Customer Story, Decision Log.
  • Identify which rituals felt heavy and decide whether to kill, keep, or evolve them.
  • Celebrate small, undeniable wins. Tom always calls this out as the fuel that keeps velocity sustainable.

Tooling Stack That Keeps Pace

  • Async video (Loom, Claap): Keeps meetings tight; everyone preps with context.
  • Shared dashboards (Equals, Metabase): Translate data into first-order language the whole company understands.
  • Agent transcripts (Custom GPTs, Cohere): Provide searchable context and flag anomalies (“Why did churn spike for plan X?”).
  • Decision doc (Notion, Coda): A single rolling document with the date, decision, and owner for every material change.

Cadence Checklist

  • [ ] Every experiment has an owner, metric, and end date.
  • [ ] Weekly recap shipped before 9am Monday.
  • [ ] Narrative sync scheduled at the same time each week.
  • [ ] Retro documents one new insight and one ritual to adjust.
  • [ ] Customer quotes captured and tagged for future storytelling.

“Velocity without narrative discipline is noise. The cadence forces us to connect the dots for customers and for the team.” — Tom Spencer

From The Build Podcast