Team Meetings
Team Meetings
My agenda and process for a small team meeting: A weekly mandatory meeting for my direct reports.
This is my agenda and process for a small team meeting: A weekly mandatory meeting for my direct reports.
This is meant to work for a group that have similar jobs, rather than a cross-functional team.
My interest in collaborating weekly is driven by two goals. First, I want to socialize and standardize our practices, like our discovery of progress, impact measurement, and identify any cross-function unblocking.
Another goal is transparency. Like any manager, I like to know what my team is working on, and I want the artifacts to enable that information to be shared within the team and beyond.
Most product leaders need to regularly report progress up the chain of command. Many of us can be found frantically chasing down facts and figures to update our own progress reports, according to a totally predictable schedule that nevertheless always seems to come as a surprise.
I want this to all be a simple, effortless process that basically does itself.
We arrived at one meeting based on two artifacts: Team Update, and Project Update. We used Google Slides but you could just as easily use a Wiki or a Word doc, with a narrative instead of bullet points.
Team Update: One section per team member, with a one-sentence summary of each major project. E.g.:
✅ Archive Unused Contacts is now launched to 5% with a take rate of 18%, going to 50% 8 Jul. [link]
✅ Spell Check, planned for 7 May is delayed to July due to integration dependencies. [link]
These updates serve as the agenda for the verbal update each person will give at the meeting. They’ll read a bullet, give a little color, and we all ask questions. Maybe we’ll make an edit, or we’ll open the link and take a quick look at the related Project Slide.
Project Slide: Each person creates a Project slide for anything that they spent more than about 4 hours on in a week. This is a 5 minute artifact. It provides:
- A brief narrative about the project, who how and why.
- One visual artifact that gives us a flavor for what the project was about. Perhaps it contains a diagram or screen shot. One PM slammed an animated GIF of a prototype in there. This blew all of our minds. 🤯
- Key dates: Project start, next milestone, estimated completion.
Project slides get linked to from the agenda, and any that aren’t linked get clicked through during the meeting.
Updates are due as of the team meeting, which is scheduled just before the upward progress report is due. By sharing our work with each other in this meeting, we’ve become a self-documenting team.
I no longer pepper my team with urgent DMs for updates due for my upward status report, because I know I’ll be up-to-date as of the weekly meeting.
From my perspective, it’s the humane habit of a manager to develop their own practices this way, so that their own needs are met by the practices they organize for their team. A failure to plan on my part should not constitute an emergency for everybody else.
This doesn’t all work perfectly all the time, but hopefully it’s progress. I left the team just as we were getting good at it.
I’d like to hear your ideas about small team meetings, and what makes the useful for you.