How a Tiny Team Ships Like a Big One · The Partner Track

The partner scorecard we generate before every QBR

QBR prep used to be a week of spreadsheet archaeology performed by the most expensive person in the room. We generate the scorecard instead - co-sell pipeline, funding, Marketplace, propensity - and let the humans spend the meeting negotiating.

4 min readawspartnerqbrco-sell-indexproduct

The quarterly business review with AWS is the strangest meeting in a partnership: two organizations that genuinely want the same thing, each arriving with numbers the other can't verify, assembled by people who spent the prior week doing archaeology. At one customer, QBR prep was a standing calendar block: the alliance lead exporting ACE, cross-checking it against the CRM, chasing reps for deal status, reconciling a funding tracker that lived in a different spreadsheet, and building slides from the wreckage. Call it a week of the most partnership-literate person's quarter, four times a year, producing a document that was already stale at the meeting.

The archaeology is the tell. Every number in a partner QBR is a fact about deals, submissions, funding, and Marketplace activity that some system already knows. If assembling them takes a week, the facts aren't connected; the alliance lead is the join.

What we built

Our product already carries the connected version: deals resolved against reality, ACE submissions and their statuses, funding checks, offer and subscription state, and AWS propensity signals on the account base. The scorecard is those facts, generated on demand for a date range: co-sell pipeline as AWS sees it (because it's synced, not exported), submissions and their conversion, funding surfaced versus claimed, Marketplace transactions and upcoming renewals, and where the next quarter's co-sell energy should go by propensity. One number rolls the co-sell posture up, the Co-Sell Index; what feeds it stays out of this post, but its job in the QBR is to make quarter-over-quarter movement arguable in one line.

The part that changed the meetings wasn't the time saved, though. It was that both sides now argue from the same substrate. When your co-sell pipeline is ACE-synced by construction, there's no twenty-minute detour about whose export is right; the AWS team's numbers and yours reconcile because they were never separate. The disagreements that remain are the productive kind: priorities, coverage, which motion gets the next quarter.

From connected facts to a QBR brief · click to enlarge
The generated scorecard. Synthetic demo data, blurred. · click to enlarge

Real numbers

  1. ~1 week → under an hour: alliance-lead QBR prep at one customer, from archaeology to reviewing a generated brief.
  2. 4x a year, per AWS relationship - the recurrence that makes prep time a real cost.
  3. 0 export-reconciliation arguments since the pipeline sections became ACE-synced by construction.
  4. 1 number (the Co-Sell Index) for quarter-over-quarter movement; the rest of the scorecard is its receipts.

Where the humans sit

The QBR itself. Nothing about the meeting is automated: the scorecard is the brief, not the attendee. The alliance lead reviews the generated draft before it goes anywhere (numbers only leave the building after a human has read them), decides what the quarter's ask of AWS actually is, and spends the meeting on judgment: trades, introductions, commitments. The week they used to spend joining spreadsheets was never the job. It was in the way of the job.

Steal this

Write down the five sections your AWS QBR deck always has, then trace each number to its system of record. Every number that requires a human join between two exports is a place your prep time goes and your credibility leaks. Fix the joins in order of embarrassment: co-sell pipeline first (sync ACE, don't export it), funding second, Marketplace third. And put one owned number at the top of your deck that you're willing to be measured on quarter over quarter, whatever your version of an index is. A QBR where both sides trust the substrate is a negotiation; anything else is two teams comparing homework.

Next on this track: the discipline the scorecard enables - when to say no to an AWS program, because eligibility isn't fit.

This post is part of the partner track of How a Tiny Team Ships Like a Big One, a series on how six builders run a production AI company. Building at Aithon - if this is how you want to work, talk to us.