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What, When, Who Table: The Three-Column Overview That Makes Marketing Systematic

The Framework

The What, When, Who Table from Allan Dib's Lean Marketing converts an amorphous marketing strategy into a concrete operational schedule. Three columns: What (every marketing task), When (the cadence — daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly), and Who (the person responsible). The table is the operational backbone of Dib's Loose Goals, Tight Systems philosophy — it's the tight system that makes loose goals achievable.

The Three Columns

What. Every marketing task your business performs, listed exhaustively. This includes content creation (blog posts, social media, videos, emails), lead generation activities (outreach, ad management, lead magnet updates), nurturing activities (email sequences, follow-up calls, community management), retention activities (customer check-ins, loyalty programs, satisfaction surveys), and analytical tasks (metrics review, campaign reporting, funnel analysis).

Dib emphasizes exhaustive listing: if a marketing task exists but isn't on the table, it's either happening inconsistently (dependent on someone remembering) or not happening at all (forgotten until it causes a problem). The table makes invisible work visible.

When. The cadence for each task: daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. Cadence must match the task's impact cycle — social media posts are daily because platform algorithms reward daily consistency. Email newsletters are weekly because subscriber engagement peaks at weekly cadence. Strategy reviews are quarterly because strategic changes need 90 days to produce measurable results.

Dib warns against two cadence mistakes: tasks scheduled too frequently (monitoring metrics hourly produces anxiety, not insight) and tasks scheduled too infrequently (quarterly content audits miss problems that monthly audits would catch). The right cadence produces maximum information with minimum distraction.

Who. The specific person (not "the marketing team" but "Sarah") responsible for each task. Single ownership prevents the diffusion of responsibility that kills execution. When everyone is responsible, nobody is responsible. When Sarah is responsible for the weekly email newsletter, Sarah sends the newsletter — or has a conversation about why she didn't.

Dib connects this to Wickman's Accountability Chart from The EOS Life: every function has one person who owns it. The Who column is the marketing-specific implementation of EOS's single-point accountability principle.

Building the Table

Dib recommends building the table in three phases:

Phase 1: Brain dump. List every marketing task you can think of, without worrying about cadence or ownership. Get everything out of your head and onto the table. You'll have 30-60 items for a typical small business.

Phase 2: Assign cadence. For each task, determine the appropriate frequency. Group by cadence for easy visual scanning — all daily tasks together, all weekly tasks together, etc. This grouping reveals the daily, weekly, and monthly marketing routines.

Phase 3: Assign ownership. For each task, assign one person. If you're a solo operator, everything starts as "Me" — but the table makes the delegation roadmap obvious: which tasks should be the first to move from "Me" to "Employee #1"? Wickman's Delegate and Elevate matrix helps prioritize which tasks to delegate first.

Cross-Library Connections

Wickman's Meeting Pulse from The EOS Life provides the review mechanism: the weekly L10 meeting reviews whether the What-When-Who Table's weekly tasks were completed. The table is the work plan; the meeting is the accountability check.

Hormozi's 3Ds Training Model from $100M Leads bridges the gap between the Who column changing from "Me" to someone else: Document the task (the What column is the starting point), Demonstrate it, then let them Duplicate it. The table identifies what to delegate; the 3Ds enable the delegation.

Dib's Dead Man's Switch prevents the table from being blocked by any single person's absence: if the reviewer doesn't act within a set period, the task auto-advances. The Dead Man's Switch is the safety mechanism that keeps the table operational even when the Who person is unavailable.

The table's constraint — one owner per deliverable, one deadline per deliverable — prevents the diffusion of responsibility that group accountability produces. Cialdini's commitment and consistency from Influence explains why single-owner assignments produce better follow-through: the named individual has made a public commitment (their name is on the table) that the consistency drive maintains. Shared ownership produces shared accountability, which in practice means no accountability.

Implementation

  • Build your table this week. Start with a simple spreadsheet: three columns, one row per task. Brain dump everything.
  • Assign cadence based on impact cycle. How frequently does each task need to happen to produce consistent results?
  • Assign single ownership. One name per row. If you're solo, put your name on everything — then highlight the 5 tasks you most want to delegate first.
  • Print it and put it on the wall. Digital tables get forgotten. Physical tables create visual accountability.
  • Review weekly. At the end of each week, check every weekly task: done or not done? The review is how the table creates consistent execution.

    • 📚 From Lean Marketing by Allan Dib — Get the book