Product Managers: Four ways to make meetings more effective

Shobhit Chugh

·

Follow

Published in

Product Coalition

·

5 min read

·

Jun 13, 2018

--

Listen

Share

Are you a Product Manager? Would you say your day is packed with productive meetings that help you progress, learn and further work relationships?

If you are like most PMs, that is not the case. Depending on what kind of company you work for, what role you have, how big your team is, you might be spending anywhere from 30% — 80% of your time in meetings. And less than half of that is useful.

When was the last time you had a meeting and thought: wow, that was a really useful way for all of us to spend time? It does not happen enough.

My goal with this blog post is to tell you everything that I have learned about making meetings more effective. My four methods of making meetings more effective are as follows

1. Eliminate
2. Define the purpose
3. Design meetings with the purpose in mind
4. Follow up

Now let’s talk through each of them in detail.

Eliminate

My first rule of meetings is; if you don’t need to have it, don’t have it! Or if you don’t need to be there, simply decline.

I do two things to eliminate meetings as much as possible:

1. I plan the night before. I look through the next day, and decline meetings where I have no clear role or where I am not going to learn something crucial. When in doubt, decline! Why is that? That is because if you really are needed, the organizer will reach out and ask you if you can attend. Yes, this involves putting more burden on the meeting organizer, but organizing meetings should carry this burden. An alternative (especially applicable for 1:1s) is that you ping the other person you are meeting with and ask if you really need to attend.
2. Take a second pass in the morning. Ask yourself a question; if you lost half your day to some personal emergency, which meetings will you cancel? Then see which ones came up as candidates and use your judgement

This helps me eliminate meetings that do not add much value to me, and where I do not add much value to others.

Recently I have started doing another experiment; I have started to rate my current day and rate each meeting on how it was. I follow a simple coloring scheme: Red for a waste of time, Yellow for OK and Green for “Really good use of time” or “I learned something new” or “I built a relationship further.” Then I look at patterns of bad meetings and use the to eliminate more things

Define the purpose

If you are organizing a meeting, you define what success looks like. Complete this sentence: “I would love it if by the end of this meeting we are able to…..” State that upfront. Put it in the agenda. Yes, there is a good chance that nobody would have read the agenda, but for the people that do, they can make a more informed decision on whether to attend or not.

There are other amazing benefit of doing this

1. It helps you cancel meetings that have no purpose
2. It helps you question whether there are better ways of meeting the purpose than having a meeting.
3. It helps you make sure you have the right attendee list and the right structure

In general, there are four main purposes that meetings can have:

1. Make a decision
2. To get to common understanding
3. To get various perspectives to solve a problem
4. To get buy-in

The purpose you stated should follow one of the purposes mentioned above.

Note: this does not include 1:1s. 1:1s can be about relationships building, perf and feedback, syncing up etc so I have excluded those. Perhaps I will do a post about it in the future.

Design meetings with the purpose in mind

By default, we tend to treat meetings the same way. Someone sits and starts talking. Or we go around the table and everyone says something. Or someone presents.

Let’s not do that.

I use the word design with intention. Design the meeting so that you are able to solve for the purpose of the meeting.

Design encompasses

1. Format of meeting: presentation, round table decision, read a document and provide feedback etc.
2. Choice of attendees
3. Choice of activities to create the right mindset
4. Who attends
5. Frequency

The important thing is that you put yourself in the mindset of a “meeting designer” rather than a meeting organizer. Organize might just mean creating and invite and making sure people will show up. Designer encompasses aligning all the factors above to make sure we get to the right outcome.

Here is an example. In my group at Google, we have a weekly meeting to sync up on each team’s progress. The meeting is structured around a document which each team fills in before, which has sections for

1. Progress
2. Risks
3. Need help
4. Learning

We then read through the doc, comment in it with questions, markitems for discussion and capture out takeaways with the entire engineering group. It is one of the most productive meetings I have been in, and allows us to stay in sync while re-enforcing that we a) Value learning b) Are here to help each other c) Realize that things might go wrong and we don’t blame people but we might blame circumstances or actions d) We celebrate successes and retro failures.

Contrast this to previous companies where the “Staff meeting” was every member giving a status update verbally. Everyone generally ended up doing a few things:

1. They minimized sharingany risks, learnings or anything negative. They tended to use this as an opportunity as a way to get credit for things done rather than for true collaboration
2. People were so occupied with how they were going to present their progress that they did not pay much attention to the people who spoke before them

Designing meetings really does make a huge difference. And you should design the meeting to meet the purpose it was intended for.

Follow up

So many times great meetings happen, but there is no follow up. There are three crucial things to do here

1. At the end of the meeting, define the next steps and owners and the date by which the next steps will be done
2. Create and send notes. Teams love this especially when the PM does this.
3. Schedule another meeting as a follow up checkpoint right away!

This is one more thing that is awesome about our regular sync meetings. We begin by checking in on action items from the week before.

Conclusion

To sum up

1. Value your time and stop spending it in useless meetings
2. Define a purpose/intended outcome for each meeting you have
3. Design meetings, don’t succumb to defaults
4. Follow up.

If you liked the blog post, you would love my free workshop, “5 Steps our Product Manager Clients Take to Land Their Dream Job, Increase Their Salary by 200%+, and Accelerate Their Career.” Go ahead, enroll now!