Validation Tracker

The operating rhythm that keeps a GTM system honest week over week. Two claims drive the design: a metric without a benchmark is a mood, and a pivot without a written decision is a drift. The tracker holds both: bands that say what good looks like before the week happens, and an append-only log where every change of course is recorded with its reasoning, so the system's history can be audited instead of reconstructed.

What this consumes

The workflow

Four phases, run weekly. The whole ritual is thirty minutes; the value is in never skipping it.

Phase 1: Record the week

Append the week's actuals to metrics.json. Zeros are data: a zero week recorded honestly is the input the coverage rule exists for. No retroactive edits to prior weeks; corrections are new entries with notes.

Phase 2: Run the check

scripts/weekly_check.py compares every metric against its bands and validates the decision log: chronological order, unique ids, supersession links that resolve, and coverage: any week with a metric below floor must have a decision logged within the window (default 21 days), or the check fails with an undocumented miss. The rule's point is not punishment; it is that a miss someone wrote a decision about is a managed miss, and a miss nobody wrote about is a drift.

Phase 3: Decide, in writing

When the check demands a decision, or strategy changes for any reason, append to the log: what was decided, the rationale at the time, what it supersedes, and when to revisit. Entries are never edited or deleted; a reversed decision gets a new entry that supersedes the old one, so the log reads as the true history of the system's thinking.

Phase 4: Revisit on schedule

Entries with revisit dates come due; the weekly run lists them. A revisit produces either a reaffirmation (log it, one line) or a supersession (log the new decision). Either way the log stays the single place where "why are we doing it this way" has an answer with a date on it.

Scripts

Failure modes to avoid (the quality bar)

• Bands set after results. Floors and targets are commitments, not descriptions.
• Smoothed zeros. The zero week is the most informative row in the file.
• Edited history. The log is append-only; supersession is the only way a decision changes.
• The undocumented miss. Below floor with nothing written down is the failure mode this whole skill exists to catch, and the script fails on it mechanically.
• Decision theater. An entry without a rationale and a revisit condition is a announcement, not a decision.
• Metrics sprawl. More than six metrics and the ritual dies; track what would change behavior.

Bundled references

• references/operating-rhythm.md: the weekly ritual, the band-setting guidance, the metrics.json and decisions.json schemas, and the coverage rule's exact mechanics.
• examples/gtm-skills-repo/: this repo tracking itself. Every metric and decision in the example is real and checkable against the public git history, including two zero weeks and the decisions that cover them, plus a deliberately broken log the check refuses.