# Worked Example — QBR Deck

A gold-standard run of this skill: a QBR that grades its own missed goal honestly, hands the disputed metric to the customer instead of defending it, and still walks out with commitments on both sides.

## The brief

Sundial — a fictional HR-tech platform for frontline shift-worker engagement — runs its Q2 2026 QBR with Alder Hotels Group, a UK hospitality operator with 19 sites and 4,200 frontline employees. £96K ARR, customer since September 2024, renewal March 2027, 3,800 licensed seats. The quarter is mixed: frontline activation beat its goal, but manager check-in adoption missed badly (38% vs a 60% goal), a May payslip-integration outage burned trust, and Alder's People Analytics lead disputes Sundial's headline claim that the platform cut absence 14% — a new rota policy launched the same quarter. CSM Rachel Adeyemi prepares the deck.

## The output

---

# QBR: Alder Hotels Group × Sundial
**Q2 2026 Business Review**

**Date:** 22 July 2026 | **Location / Call link:** Alder head office, Leeds
**Customer attendees:** Femi Balogun (People Director), Sarah Kwan (People Analytics Lead), Tom Herrick (Regional Ops Manager, North)
**Sundial attendees:** Rachel Adeyemi (CSM), Dev Malhotra (VP Product)

---

## Slide 1: Agenda (5 min)

| Time | Topic | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| 0:00 | Welcome and introductions | CSM |
| 0:05 | Q2 — how did we do? | CSM + Customer |
| 0:20 | Value delivered — business impact | CSM |
| 0:35 | What's coming — roadmap preview | VP Product |
| 0:45 | Q3 — goals and priorities | Customer |
| 0:55 | Actions and mutual commitments | CSM |
| 1:00 | Close | |

*Talking point: "We've kept today to 60 minutes. Two things I want your honest reaction to: the manager adoption numbers, which we missed, and the absence figures, where Sarah and I don't yet agree on attribution — that's the most useful argument we could have today."*

---

## Slide 2: Where We Are Together (2 min)

**Partnership snapshot:**
- **Customer since:** September 2024
- **Contract value:** £96,000/year
- **Renewal date:** March 2027
- **Active users:** 2,940 of 3,800 licensed seats (77% adoption)
- **Products / modules active:** Shift feedback, pulse surveys, manager check-ins, payslip view

*Talking point: "Twenty-two months in, our seventh QBR, and for the first time more than three-quarters of your licensed frontline team is active in a month."*

---

## Slide 3: Last Quarter — Goals We Set Together (5 min)

| Goal | Set in Q1 QBR | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Frontline activation ≥70% of licensed seats | 62% at the time; push via site-champion programme | ✅ Achieved — 77% |
| Manager check-in adoption ≥60% of line managers | Roll out to all 19 sites with GM sponsorship | ❌ Missed — 38% |
| Pulse surveys live in all 19 UK sites | 9 sites live at Q1 | ⚠️ Partial — 14 of 19 |

**On the miss:** check-in adoption stalled because the workflow assumes managers work at a desk; Alder's line managers run floors with a phone in a pocket. Average check-in takes 11 minutes in the current UI. What changes: mobile quick-check-in ships in Q3 (Slide 7) and we re-baseline the goal at 55% by end of Q3 rather than pretending 60% is still on the table for the old workflow.

*Talking point: "Let's start with accountability. Two of three went well. The manager number is on us — the workflow doesn't fit how your managers actually work, and I'd rather redesign it than re-launch training on a broken flow."*

---

## Slide 4: Usage and Adoption (5 min)

**Quarter-over-quarter trend:**

| Metric | Q1 2026 | Q2 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly active users | 2,610 | 2,940 | +13% |
| Sessions per user per week | 3.1 | 3.4 | +10% |
| Pulse survey participation | 54% | 66% | +12pts |
| Manager check-in adoption | 41% | 38% | −3pts |

**Highlights:**
- Site-champion programme drove activation past goal — the 5 champion-led sites average 88% activation
- Pulse participation at 66% is the strongest engagement signal in the account

**Opportunity:**
- Check-in adoption is *falling*, not just short — managers who tried it in Q1 are quietly abandoning it. This is the metric to fix before renewal-year conversations, because manager-visible value is what your GMs will judge us on.

*Talking point: "Usage is up everywhere except the one place we most need it. I don't want to talk past that — Tom, you see this from the floor; what are your managers saying?"*

---

## Slide 5: Business Impact — Value Delivered (10 min)

Lead with outcomes, not activity.

**Outcome 1: Unplanned absence rate**
- Before: 6.8% (Q1 2026 average across 19 sites)
- Now: 5.85% (Q2 2026)
- Impact: a 14% relative reduction — roughly 1,150 recovered shift-hours per month at Alder's average shift length
- **Attribution is contested and we're saying so:** Alder introduced a new rota-fairness policy in April, the same quarter. The 5 pulse-active sites improved 1.4pts vs 0.6pts at the rest — which suggests a real platform effect *inside* a policy effect — but this deck does not claim all 14%.

**Outcome 2: Open-shift fill time**
- Before: 31 hours average to fill an open shift (Q1)
- Now: 19 hours (Q2)
- Impact: fewer agency call-outs; Alder's own finance estimate puts agency spend down £22K this quarter

**Outcome 3: New-starter 90-day attrition**
- Before: 34% (2025 baseline)
- Now: 28% among starters onboarded with Sundial check-ins
- Impact: ~9 fewer replacement hires per quarter at Alder's stated £2,400 cost-per-hire ≈ £21.6K/quarter

**Customer evidence:**
> "The Friday pulse is the first time head office hears about a problem before the weekend rota collapses." — Site GM, Manchester (Q2 pulse verbatim)

*Talking point: "Sarah — outcome 1 is the one I want to settle with you, not around you. Proposal: we jointly design a comparison across rota-policy-only sites vs policy-plus-pulse sites and let that number, whatever it is, be the one we both use going forward."*

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## Slide 6: Support Summary (3 min)

| Metric | This quarter | Last quarter | Trend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tickets raised | 47 | 51 | ↓ |
| Average resolution time | 9 hrs | 14 hrs | ↓ |
| P1 / critical issues | 1 | 0 | ↑ |
| CSAT score | 8.1/10 | 8.6/10 | ↓ |

**Notable issues this quarter:**
- **14 May payslip-integration outage** — payslip view down for 6 hours on a Friday payday across all sites; 380 employee queries hit Alder's HR inbox. Root cause: our integration retry logic; fixed and post-incident review shared 20 May.

**What we're doing differently:**
- Payday-eve integration health checks now run automatically, with Alder's HRIS team on the alert list — failures surface to both of us before employees see them.

---

## Slide 7: What's Coming — Roadmap Preview (5 min)

Focus only on what's relevant to this customer's goals. Do not dump the full roadmap.

| Feature / Improvement | Expected | Why it matters to Alder |
|---|---|---|
| Mobile quick check-in (90-second flow) | Q3 2026 | Directly targets the missed manager-adoption goal — built for floor managers, not desks |
| Pulse-to-rota insight feed | Q3/Q4 2026 | Connects pulse flags to the rota-fairness policy Sarah's team owns — makes the attribution question answerable |
| Multi-language pulse surveys (Polish, Romanian) | H2 2026 | 23% of Alder's frontline staff — removes the participation ceiling on the 5 remaining sites |

*Talking point: "I've filtered the roadmap to three items, each mapped to something on your list, not ours. If none of these are your top priorities, that's exactly the feedback Dev is here for."*

---

## Slide 8: Next Quarter — Your Goals (10 min)

**Customer input section — facilitate, don't present.**

Prompt questions:
- "What does success look like for the People team in Q3 — especially with the two new site openings?"
- "What's the biggest challenge in the next 90 days that Sundial currently touches — or should?"
- "Is there anything about how your managers use the platform you want to change?"

**Capture live:**

| Goal for next quarter | Owner (customer) | How we'll support it | How we'll measure it |
|---|---|---|---|
| [Captured in session] | [Name] | [CSM / product action] | [Metric] |
| [Captured in session] | [Name] | [CSM / product action] | [Metric] |

---

## Slide 9: Mutual Commitments (5 min)

**Sundial commits to:**
1. Joint absence-attribution analysis designed with Sarah Kwan — Rachel Adeyemi — first working session by 5 Aug
2. Mobile quick check-in beta enabled for Alder's 5 champion sites — Dev Malhotra — by 15 Sep
3. Payday-eve health-check report shared monthly with Alder HRIS — Rachel Adeyemi — starting 1 Aug

**Alder Hotels Group commits to:**
1. Nominate site champions for the 5 remaining pulse sites — Tom Herrick — by 12 Aug
2. Provide rota-policy rollout dates per site for the attribution analysis — Sarah Kwan — by 5 Aug

**Next touchpoint:** Mid-quarter check-in, 9 September 2026

---

## Slide 10: Thank You + Open Q&A (5 min)

- Recap the one headline from today: activation is won; the next twelve months are about making value visible to *managers* — and agreeing one absence number we both trust
- Confirm actions are captured and shared after the call
- Ask: "Is there anything we didn't cover today that you wanted to raise?"

---

## Why it's shaped this way

- **The missed goal is graded ❌ on slide 3, with a cause and a changed plan** — the Output Format demands "for any partial or missed goal: state what happened and what changes next quarter," and the anti-patterns warn that "suppressing problems erodes trust and misses renewal risks"; re-baselining to 55% is more credible than re-promising 60%.
- **The disputed absence metric is surfaced by the vendor, not defended** — the QBR principle "every metric should connect to a business result the customer cares about" cuts both ways: a number the customer's analyst rejects connects to nothing. The deck claims only the pulse-site differential and proposes a *joint* analysis, which converts a credibility fight into a commitment (slide 9, item 1).
- **The value slide leads with absence, fill time, and attrition — not logins** — per the anti-pattern "do not fill the QBR with product activity metrics"; usage numbers exist, but they live on slide 4 as context, and every slide-5 outcome is priced in Alder's own units (£22K agency spend, £2,400 cost-per-hire).
- **The customer holds well over 20 minutes of airtime** — slide 8 is a pure 10-minute facilitation block with prompt questions and an empty capture table, slide 5's talking point hands the floor to Sarah, and slide 4's hands it to Tom — satisfying the quality check and the anti-pattern against one-sided presentations.
- **Every roadmap row carries a "why it matters to Alder" tied to a stated goal or dispute** — the skill instructs "do not dump the full roadmap"; three items, one of which exists specifically to answer the attribution argument.
- **Mutual commitments have named owners and dates on both sides** — the quality check requires "real owners on both sides"; Alder owns two commitments (champions, rota dates), which is what makes the attribution analysis and the pulse rollout the customer's project too, not vendor homework.
- **The P1 outage gets its own row and a process change** — the support slide doesn't bury the payday incident under a falling-ticket trend; naming it alongside "what we're doing differently" is the trust-preserving move the anti-patterns exist to protect.
- **Every slide ends in a talking point, not a title** — per the quality checklist; the slide-1 talking point even pre-announces the two uncomfortable topics, which sets the "conversation, not presentation" contract from minute one.