Here’s a Better Way to Manage Quarterly Business Reviews for Product-Led Orgs
It happens in every transformation: an organization is shifting to funding product teams instead of projects, and someone in the C-Suite says, “Wait a darn minute! How will we know what people are working on? How will we know if our investments are paying off?”
That, friends, is like sending up a giant, G-shaped bat signal. This executive is asking for GOVERNANCE, which is critical in a product-led enterprise, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. It might even fit within existing review cadences, like the QBR. But the standard QBR is typically an excuse to review stoplight reports and Gantt charts – things that should not exist in a product-led, outcome- and value-oriented organization.
Instead, it’s essential that we rethink and reimagine the QBR to better suit the needs of a transformed organization and ensure teams and their leaders have the opportunity to review roadmaps, KPIs, and learnings from past releases. Here’s a short case study.
The problem:
Leaders are anxious that their empowered teams are operating too independently. “What if they go off and build stuff we don’t know about?” “How will we know what they’re up to?” The natural instinct for most leaders is to request a project plan, timeline and budget, but those don’t exist in a product-led org. These types of reporting don’t offer a sense of accountability against value and outcomes, which is the focus of capacity funded, dedicated product teams.
The solution:
In a transformed organization, leaders need to find alignment with their teams before things go amiss, and without falling into an approve/deny dictatorship that stifles the independence of the team. This is the entire idea of a capacity-funded team: determine the value of the outcomes the team is responsible for, align on success metrics, fund the team to operate at the desired velocity, and then get out of the way so that the team can run. But this isn’t a toaster – you don’t “set it and forget it.”
Enter the reimagined QBR.
To support more meaningful reflection and course setting, I usually recommend that the quarterly cadence be broken up into smaller, more digestible bites. This might look like a once-a-quarter, all-day meeting, or several meetings paced over the course of a few weeks. Either way, it brings teams and leaders together to align, then allows them to break off to get things done.
Part One: What did we learn?
An initial meeting to focus solely on backward-looking review. Each team should report on what they set out to do, what they actually did, the impact of the work, where there were failures, and what lessons were learned. This provides a critical moment to deep dive and show that teams were accountable for what they said they would do, as well as the results and learnings from those actions.
Part Two: What’s the leadership guidance?
The second meeting in this series is focused on leadership input. It’s the executive team’s chance to outline important items on the horizon, reinforce priorities and strategies, cover any pivots or changes in priorities, and then give teams time to disband and reflect on new criteria as an opportunity for refinement.
Part Three: Where are we headed next?
The final and third meeting is geared at what lies ahead. Given what the team did, the leadership message, and inputs from other teams, this meeting should outline what will happen moving forward, how it fits into or impacts the roadmap, and any hypotheses and tests to be considered.
The benefits of this format touch every constituent and part of the process:
Pausing for learning: So often I see teams churn and churn and churn on delivery and never pause long enough to say “did we do the right thing in the right way at the right time?” Elevating this conversation to the QBR is elemental for reflection and to inform what comes next.
Clarity for teams: This approach creates more collaborative opportunities between teams and leaders before charting the course ahead. That means less guesswork and more alignment on priorities (before time gets invested in the wrong things).
Transparency for leaders: Executives get to see what their teams are working on and influence where things are headed without having to override the independence afforded by the design-thinking process.
Time to get it right: focusing as much on what we learned as what comes next, it ensures the work gets the attention it deserves and assures everyone that teams and leaders are aligned every step of the way.
This structure fosters a different kind of conversation, one that gives leaders more insight into the work while still keeping the onus on teams to get it done in their own way. It ensures that teams get to present ideas that have already been steered by leadership and are aligned with priorities. And it provides a much more sound review process that can actually give leaders confidence in their teams and the work being done. I’d like to see a Gantt chart do that.