Hold more effective meetings

Meetings are the ultimate corporate time waster

Image generated by Midjourney with the prompt “a corporate meeting but everyone including the presenter is asleep.”

When I joined Amazon, I was very skeptical of the idea that everyone started the meeting off silently reading the materials, and only after everyone had done their reading would the discussion start. It sounded like the type of thing that happened once in a while but leaked out into the media who then blew it up into this mystical ritual. I had never experienced a corporate meeting that felt like an efficient use of time before and so my mind could not conceive of this approach happening at scale.

Well, for those of you who haven’t worked at Amazon before, reading before talking is exactly what happens and it is glorious. Does that mean every meeting is a good use of time? No. Does that mean the documents are all worth reading? No. Does that mean the ratio of good to bad meetings is in favor of “good?” Yes, without a doubt.

This was part of Jeff Bezos' way of working. He described his “perfect” meeting as everyone reading a crisp (his word) 6-page memo outlining a problem and then having a discussion about the proposal. He did not believe that people - his senior executive team - would come to meetings prepared if he didn’t have this study hall approach to meetings.

The approach transcended his meetings. It was very cool to see that part of the culture in action. Consider me a convert.

First, Anti-Patterns

We can all think of some awful meetings that we’ve had to endure. If you take a huge step back from all of those experiences, you will likely see some patterns emerge. These are “anti-patterns” meaning: something that is common and on the surface may even look like the right way to do it, but that has more bad qualities than good.

Anti-Pattern 1: Everyone gets the invite!

This is a meeting that feels more like the house party held by that kid from high school whose parents left him alone for weeks at a time. If you have 60 people in a meeting and only a handful are engaged, you’ve wasted a lot of time. Consider your meeting audience and the outcomes you are trying to drive to. Cut everyone else off the invite that isn’t essential to that goal - they won’t mind.

Anti-Pattern 2: So what do you want to talk about?

The cost to send a meeting invitation out is next to zero. If you are going to book someone else’s time, you need to make it worthwhile. You should be preparing the agenda and the materials in advance. You should not get upset with anyone who opts out of your meeting when you aren’t prepared for them to be there.

Anti-Pattern 3: Hey, one more thing

You called the meeting. You prepared the agenda and the materials. You drove to a decision. And you did all of that before the allotted time was up. Nice job! Don’t mess that up by attempting to shoe-horn another topic no one is prepared to talk through into the last seven minutes of the hour. Just let people leave to answer the emails they already started to think about.

Meeting Formats

There are only a few types of meetings that exist. The implementation of these meetings is usually very bad which gives meetings a bad reputation (refer back to my list of anti-patterns). Done correctly, however, meetings can be the most efficient way to move your project or organization forward.

Status/Alignment Meetings

Recurring status meetings, when done correctly, are a great way to share knowledge across the organization. The challenge that these meetings tend to face is that the participants are often unprepared to speak to the status of their deliverables. They just show up and provide a bunch of filler words or other nonsense that wastes everyone else’s time. This also directly leads to Watermelon Reporting. 

Status/Alignment meetings should be narrative-based updates captured before the meeting starts. Why narrative-based? Because the author needs to think through what is being delivered and the challenges that the delivery is having. Bullet points tend to gloss over key details and, by nature, represent partial thoughts. With a narrative describing the work, prepared before the meeting starts, the participants have the opportunity to read and react to the update rather than play catch-up with a scattered verbal presentation.

When I write “narrative-based” updates, this is what I mean:

Project Falcon user action feature - GREEN - 3/22/2024

On 2/14/2024, the River team completed the detailed design for the user action feature and will be holding a Design Review with the core engineering team on 2/15/2024 to identify any additional technical requirements that may have been missed. On 2/16/2024, the team will review the design and threat model with the Application Security team to assess any overlooked security requirements. On 2/19/2024, the team will begin implementation of the user action feature with a target delivery to the QA/Gamma environment on 3/8/2024. 

A note on stand-ups

These aren’t status meetings. The Scrum “what I did yesterday, what I did today, any blockers” bit is a waste of time. The board should be reflective of those things and if someone cares, they can go look at it. A far better use of time is this: “I’ve got a larger Pull Request coming, and would love to huddle up with a few people and go through it live, anyone interested?”

OR

“I’m working through the integration pattern and I am stuck on “this thing," does anyone have time after the stand-up to go through some questions for 10 minutes?”

Don’t trick yourself into thinking you need the project team to provide daily updates on their work. If the Scrum or Kanban board isn’t reflective of where the work is, address that as a topic for feedback with individuals on the team.

Decision Meetings

Meetings to make a decision are my favorite type of meeting. These meetings represent literal progress within the organization. They are also easy to get right, the agenda is one item: Decide on a topic. Preparing for a Decision Meeting is significantly harder because someone/a few people need to do a bunch of homework.

The “Decision Doc” is what needs to be prepared to make these meetings effective. I will evangelize the Amazon way for the rest of time when it comes to this prerequisite. The Decision document is simple (each of these is a section):

• Purpose of the document (What decision is being made)

• Background on the issue

• Why we are making this decision today

• Recommended option

• Alternative options

When preparing this type of document I recommend the author consider the Doctrine of Completed Staff Work as a proxy to know if enough detail has been provided to make the decision. That means research in the form of identifying risks, regulations, controls, costs, etc. that would need to be weighed to accurately make the decision. 

The format of this document should not be Slides. The slides are for presentations.

Design Review

Design reviews are prevalent in technology circles but apply all over the enterprise. Whether it is a process, product specification, business case, governance control, or some other “designed” thing, there needs to be some type of artifact that needs to be prepared to give the reviewers the right context and data to make recommendations. 

Ideally, the “Design document” will feature a detailed view of the problem at hand along with the proposed solution and any decisions that are being made as a part of the solution. The goal is to allow reviewers to review the materials, document comments/questions (while the review is going on), and then enable a discussion on those comments/questions.

Too many design reviews are carried out informally. A question or problem is put in the subject of the meeting invitation and then everyone who shows up tries to figure out a solution in real time. When the meeting is over, everyone hopes that someone was taking good enough notes that the discussion doesn’t have to start from scratch the next time the meeting is called.

These meetings are only effective if the materials are prepared beforehand and the reviewers capture comments on the materials directly.

Not Meetings

There are a few categories of events that take up space on the calendar that I don’t consider meetings.

One-on-ones

One-on-ones are conversations. I do think there needs to be some structure and advanced prep work to make them effective, but the audience should not be more than two people and neither one of those people should be in lecture mode. Check out my article on improving one-on-ones for more detail.

Brainstorming/Working Session

These are not meetings, these are activities. A handful of people getting together to break new ground or to work in a co-located way toward a deliverable. This type of event gets abused and presented as a “meeting” a lot of the time. Twenty people are called together to have an open discussion about something - that rarely produces an outcome. 

This type of activity might be three people in front of a whiteboard scribbling out a system design. Or this type of activity might be two financial accountants going over a set of transactions. 

Meetings have structure. These sessions are intended to be unstructured.

All-hands, Town Halls, Organization Announcements

I’ll use the word “gathering” here to illustrate why this isn’t a meeting. Yes, these are structured events that have a basic flow. The difference is that these are not aimed to be discussions that are working toward an outcome. These are presentations where a small group of people is communicating outwardly. These gatherings take up time on your calendar, but you likely are just listening. 

That is not a meeting. This is a great place to use slides.

Moving forward

If you take anything away from this article, please make it the structure and approach of the “Decision meeting.” While this is a topic for another day, too many organizations are terrible at making quick decisions. I believe that this article represents a solution to the poor decision-making problem.

If you aren’t ready to go that far yet, immediately improve your meeting cultures by doing two very simple things:

1. Make your 30-minute meetings 25 minutes and your 60-minute meetings 50 minutes

2. Review the participant list and remove everyone who isn’t essential to the agenda

As I mentioned, meeting invitations are close to being free to send out, but they come at a high opportunity cost. That time we pull people away from their work was likely better spent producing something or thinking about a problem. If you do need a meeting, put the effort into being prepared for it and make sure only the people who need to be there are invited.