How I Ran Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) Differently

While I was at Red Hat, I regularly got feedback that my team’s quarterly business reviews (QBRs) were different than every other QBR they attended and generally more useful (most QBRs I’ve attended were like extended status reports: lists of accomplishments with nothing actionable). So I thought I would share how I ran our QBRs. First, some background.

Who We Were, & Meeting Logistics

At Red Hat I managed the technical arm for the company’s 50 top strategic partners globally across five partner business pillars:

1. Independent software vendors (ISVs)

2. Hardware companies (e.g., Dell, Quanta, HP Enterprise, Cisco, etc.)

3. Cloud hyperscalers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba, …)

4. Global systems integrators (Accenture, Infosys, Deloitte, TCS, …)

5. Global distributors (Ingram Micro, Arrow, TD Synnex)

If you’ve worked with partner ecosystems, you know how differently each of these kinds of companies operates; our QBRs were like 5 mini-QBRs and that could get complicated real quick. Also, my team connected with almost every part of the company: all product groups, my regional counterparts, direct sales teams, and peers running the business relationships and sales for our top Alliances. Because partners were a significant driver of business for Red Hat, I felt the obligation to make ourselves accountable and transparent to our stakeholders within the company.

I wanted to take advantage of the huge brain trust sitting on the call, but how to keep everybody interested and participating? That question drove our QBR format.

Minimal Ground Rules

I only had two ground rules for the audience of 50-75 people on these QBRs:

1. Everybody’s camera is OFF unless you are the presenter or in the presenter’s management chain (me and my manager). If you want to speak up, simply turn on your camera; you’ll instantly be recognized and you’ll be called on right away. (we came up with this format during COVID when everybody was getting videoconference fatigue from staring at others in a conference call all day long. Giving the participants permission to leave cameras off meant they could focus when they wanted to, and not get so fatigued during my QBRs. Worked great.)

2. Speak up anytime; don’t wait until the end. We wanted conversation, not presentation. The more conversation, the more feedback for us. Feedback was gold for us; it helped us steer the team.

General Principles

To keep my team focused as they created and delivered their presentations, I guided them with these basic principles:

• Steer the team, don’t pat ourselves on the back. The main purpose of the meeting is to make directional changes. We had other ways of showing off what we did (namely, a quarterly blog entry like this one on my Substack). Also, I published all the source material for our work each quarter and put it in a publicly-accessible folder.

• Be opinionated. Our format forced presentations to focus on analysis and recommendations, making us accountable to defend our position. That’s a lot more fun for everybody in a QBR, and it hardly ever got out of hand.

• Less us, more audience. Given how many parts of the company attended our QBRs, the idea was to present as succinctly as possible then get out of the way so we can benefit from discussion amongst the stakeholders.

• Standardized presentation format: If each sub-team had its own format, the QBR would be more difficult for the stakeholders to absorb, which in turn means they’d be less likely to participate.

• Presenters own their section. Each sub-team selected one presenter, solely responsible for their sub-team’s content: data gathering, feedback from their team-mates, and the analysis and opinionated recommendations. If they weren’t opinionated enough during my pre-QBR reviews, I sent them back to make a more blunt assessment.

Presentation Format

I started the meeting with ground rules and a “By The Numbers” section that reviewed our work output in quantitative terms in the previous quarter. Those slides exposed our priorities to the product groups. I considered it a “win” if somebody complained that we didn’t do enough projects for their area; it allowed me to discuss how well their peer groups supported us, or what we needed from them to do more for them.

Once I was finished the team overview, each sub-team’s presentation followed this format:

• Traffic Light Status — A slide listed 3 or 4 main initiatives, each represented by a Red / Yellow / Green status with a couple of bullet points with the presenter’s opinions why we chose that status. This format was easy to absorb, and helped generate participation from the audience. In my experience, opinions generate a lot more discussion than just facts.

• Slide 1: Staffing & Coverage — how many team members covering this partner pillar and which partners we covered. It’s a quick slide (one minute or less) that gives the audience a snapshot of how much resource is devoted to one set of partners vs. another.

• Slide 2: Group-wide Key Initiatives: I set out key initiatives for the entire team; each sub-team contributed to my org in different ways. This slide discussed how the sub-team did it.

• Slide 3: Sub-team Key Initiatives: Not all partner pillars are alike; often we had vastly different goals with each partner pillar. So, each sub-team defined its own key initiatives and reported against those.

• Slide 4: Key Wins, Misses, & Engagement: I thought it more provocative to report out positive things that were unexpected or true stand-outs. With misses, I only wanted to report those that we needed help from the audience. Engagement was about how we worked with our stakeholders; since our team worked mostly by influence, I felt it important to be explicit about how well we engaged with others, and to make ourselves accountable for it.

After the last presenter finished, I concluded the public meeting and went into a closed-session section just for my team members. We’d spend that time discussing the feedback we heard, capturing action items from the open session, and trying to make some quick decisions based on that feedback to the extent possible.

Observations

This format definitely paid dividends. Soon after we started using this format, I started noticing changes in behavior amongst the stakeholders in the audience:

• Participation from the attendees increased. A lot. The format encouraged them to speak up and as a result, we got more opinionated guidance than we normally would from a formal meeting with them.

• Stakeholders talked to each other who usually didn’t talk. My favorite part of my own QBRs was when one attendee would get into discussion with another attendee (especially from two groups that didn’t usually talk to each other), and just watch them go back and forth. I think this was one reason the attendees came back again and again: they had conversations with people they hardly ever talked to, and so they got unexpected value from my team’s QBRs.

• I noticed a lot more after-meeting follow-ups.

• My team learned their business more deeply. When they became responsible for analyzing how we did, they became more like owners, less like individual workers. The opportunity for career growth with them was tremendous (in my opinion).

Wrapping Up

Of course I’m going to ask you what you’ve seen in QBRs that you found useful and interesting. I bet you haven’t seen many, but prove me wrong!