Product growth · Ted Truscott · 15 October 2026
The right amount of product process is the amount that changes decisions
How product growth and product operations meet: using numbers, QBRs and planning to prioritise across teams and within them, without turning reviews into reporting theatre.
A review is not useful just because the numbers are accurate
A good report can still leave the important choices untouched. If a quarterly review ends with better-informed executives but the same priorities, resources and goals, ask whether it did its job. Sometimes the evidence supports staying the course. But that should be a decision, not the default outcome of a meeting that never had the authority or information to change anything.
What changed in my QBR work
At Contentsquare, I was Senior Director of Product Analytics and part of the product leadership team. I led a function of analysts and engineers through managers; I did not run the entire product organisation. The change I helped introduce connected quarterly reviews to strategy, roadmaps, resources and goals. Analytics moved beyond piecemeal data requests towards helping people make those choices. We made faster, clearer decisions, and the model was adopted elsewhere in the business. That is the useful test of the process: it affected the work beyond the meeting.
Across teams: make the investment choices comparable
Different teams can make persuasive cases using incompatible measures. One talks about adoption, another revenue and another reliability. Do not force them into a single invented score. Instead, ask each to state the outcome, current baseline, population affected, plausible impact, effort, dependencies and uncertainty. Connect those to a shared business objective where possible. A range with explicit assumptions is often more useful than a precise-looking forecast whose logic nobody can inspect.
Within a team: compare solutions, not just the size of the problem
Knowing retention is weak does not tell you what to build. The team still needs to compare potential causes and interventions. Which users are affected? Where do they stop reaching value? Would a product change, a clearer proposition or a different customer focus address it? Estimate the opportunity, then choose the smallest credible way to learn. Cross-team planning decides where to place effort. Within-team prioritisation decides how to use it. The evidence needs to support both, at different levels of detail.
Use different cadences for different decisions
Weekly reviews can catch a broken funnel or check whether a change is behaving as expected. They should not repeatedly reopen a strategy because a small sample moved. Quarterly reviews can revisit opportunity allocation, resources and goals, but should not require teams to wait three months to act on decisive evidence. The cadence should match the speed at which useful evidence arrives and the reversibility of the decision. A QBR is a checkpoint, not permission to think.
The minimum process has an owner and a consequence
For each material piece of work, keep a short statement of the opportunity, outcome, baseline, proposed approach, uncertainties and owner. At review, record the decision and what changes as a result: continue, adjust, stop or invest more. Include who owns follow-through. Product operations can make that information consistent and accessible; growth work can supply the behavioural and commercial reasoning. Neither should become a service centre producing artefacts that other people are free to ignore.
Remove process that no longer earns its place
A small team may need one shared document and a regular conversation. A larger organisation needs more explicit coordination because there are more dependencies and competing uses of resources. Neither needs duplicate decks, metrics without definitions or meetings whose purpose is only visibility. Ask of every recurring artefact: who uses it, for which decision, and what would be worse without it? Keep enough structure for people to act with confidence. Remove the rest.
I work with product and leadership teams in London and the Midlands on growth diagnosis, experimentation and how teams operate.
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