Ownership, growth reviews and QBRs
What should change in our priorities, resources or approach?
How I use it
Make the priority executable
Give a named owner a clear outcome, decision rights, capacity and access to the people needed. Clarify dependencies across product, engineering, design, analytics, marketing, sales and customer success.
Shared responsibility needs an explicit way to resolve trade-offs.
Separate delivery checks from investment reviews
A short working review can remove blockers and inspect leading signals. A periodic business review can assess outcomes, assumptions and resource allocation.
Choose a cadence that fits the business and the speed at which useful evidence appears; adding meetings alone will not improve decisions.
Build the review around questions
What changed? Why do we think it changed? What did customers teach us? Are we addressing the constraint? Which assumption failed? What should we stop, continue or fund next? Bring the relevant metric tree, growth bridge, research and experiment evidence, with uncertainty visible.
Leave with a decision and return to it
Record the choice, rationale, owner, dependencies and follow-up date. Revisit earlier commitments and check whether shipped changes were adopted and useful.
When a successful approach can help another team, share the method and develop the people who will use it.
From my work at Contentsquare
- InspectWhat changed? What did we learn?
- DecideWhat should stop, change or get funded?
- ActAn owner follows through.
The useful loop is between evidence and action. Another meeting only helps if it improves that connection.
By refocusing Product Analytics on strategic questions, the team covered three times as many product teams without increasing resources. I improved the QBR process and brought metrics into the reviews so prioritisation could improve.
Other parts of the business adopted the way of working. The useful lesson is to connect analytics and reviews to decisions about the business, then give people the ownership and support to act. This is a description of that work, not a promise of the same result elsewhere.
What to watch for
- Making the QBR a presentation of activity instead of a place for decisions.
- Holding a team accountable for an outcome without the capacity or authority to influence it.
- Calling a launch complete before checking discovery, adoption and ongoing value.
A brief for the next discussion.
A decision record, accountable owners and a date to check progress.
Turn learning into action
Where is your growth work getting stuck?
Use the growth diagnostic to find where to focus, or talk it through with me.