Some of the challenges that a lot of young product managers (including me when I started) face while navigating their way through hundred meetings a week are:

1. Ensuring there is a clear agenda for each meeting.
2. Taking notes during a meeting.
3. Keeping track and then communicating the action items from each meeting.
4. Effectively organising all of the above and not missing/forgetting the critical things from all of the above.

With this in mind, here are insights and lessons learned in regards to how I manage, run, and own meetings.

Ensuring there is a clear agenda for each meeting

Most PMs broadly have three types of meetings:

1. Recurring meetings — which include 1:1s, progress updates, project syncs, standups, etc.
2. Adhoc meetings — engineers need clarity on a project, urgent issues that need resolving,
3. Presentation to large audiences or senior leaders (which include a lot of discussion/questions/feedback.)

This section (of creating agendas) applies to meetings of the first kind.

Before I share how I manage my agendas well, I want to focus on the goal.

The goal here is two-fold: create meaningful agendas and communicate the agenda to the right person at the right time in the proper form.

This step is usually pretty straightforward, but you should put considerable thought into it.

This is how I do it:

Step 1: Maintain an agenda doc for each meeting, and attach it to the calendar invite