Six months ago, I walked into a conference room at Google Cloud with my standardized QBR deck of metrics, charts, and carefully color-coded status indicators.

I had the stats. The year-over-year comparisons. The utilization metrics. The support ticket trends. I’d spent hours perfecting it.

And as I presented, watching executives scroll through emails on their phones, I felt it: that nagging sense that I was wasting everyone’s time.

The Retrospective Trap

Coming from the video game industry, I thought I had the answer. We’d done post-release retrospectives for years—honest, structured conversations about what worked and what didn’t. So I adapted those frameworks for QBRs:

What went well, What needs improvement, Next steps.
Simple. Clear. Action-oriented.

Or the more structured DAKI (Drop, Add, Keep, Improve) framework that prompt real discussion about what to eliminate, introduce, continue, and enhance.

These are good frameworks. They create dialogue. They surface issues.

But here’s what they don’t do: They don’t drive adoption. They don’t inspire renewals. They don’t create expansion opportunities. They don’t answer the only question that actually matters.

The Realization

Somewhere around month four, sitting through yet another two-hour “retrospective conversation,” it hit me:

No one wants to pay six or seven figures to talk about what went wrong last quarter.

They can read the metrics themselves. They already know what didn’t work. And frankly? They don’t care what went well—that’s the baseline expectation they’re paying for.

What they actually need, what keeps executives up at night, isn’t reflected in any QBR deck.

They need to know: What’s next? How do we win?

The Experiment

So I’m trying something different for the next six months.

No decks. (Which I’ve always hated anyway.)

Just whiteboards, markers, and one strategic question: What could we help you achieve?

Not “what went well.” Not “what needs improvement.”

What do you need to accomplish? Where do you want to be in 12 months? What’s standing in your way? A theoretical spin on design thinking for executive strategy.

The Unexpected Outcome

When I pitched this approach to my primary contact, they asked: “Who should participate in the conversation?”

I said, “The CEO.”

I didn’t actually expect them to get the CEO.

But after several weeks of planning, we walked into a room with every senior-level executive in the company. Not to review dashboards. Not to audit the past quarter.

To brainstorm one simple question: What’s next?

And in that session, something shifted. We stopped being a vendor delivering a service review. We became a strategic partner embedded in their long-term roadmap.

The Real Problem with QBRs

Traditional QBRs have become compliance theater. They’re CYA meetings dressed up as partnership. They’re designed to prove we delivered what we promised, when what our clients actually need is help achieving what they didn’t even know was possible.

The problem is that QBRs ask the wrong questions.

We need to transform them from quarterly business reviews into quarterly business breakthroughs.

Workshop-style strategic sessions that deeply embed our companies into our clients’ futures, not just report on their pasts.

Because at the end of the day, clients don’t renew because you met your SLAs last quarter. They renew because they can’t imagine achieving their next breakthrough without you.