How I engineered effective meetings to stop wasting time (3-phase framework + 🎁 Free Strategy)
How I engineered effective meetings to stop wasting time (3-phase framework + 🎁 Free Strategy)
Learn how to set agendas, steer discussions, and capitalize on meeting notes to ensure every session yields tangible results. Say goodbye to meeting chaos and hello to streamlined success with these e
“We have too many meetings”
How many of you had this sticky note on one of your retro boards? I bet most of you.
Engineers are paid to build software, not to be in meetings.
However, building software is a collaborative effort. The bigger the company, the more moving pieces, and the more meetings you need to do even the simplest change.
When people complain about meetings, it’s not about the time. It’s about not making progress
On the other hand, writing code is clear progress. You merge commits, and you move tasks from left to right in a sprint board.
To make a meeting feel the same way, you need to drive it proactively.
⭐ In this post you’ll learn:
The setup of a meeting, because just gathering people won’t create a magical outcome
The driving of the meeting, because a conversation with people always goes through another topic.
The after-meeting work, because we forget what we talked about.
#1 Before the meeting
📩 Send an email with the invite to the audience.
It’s tricky to identify who to invite. If people think they should be invited and they are not, they’ll be mad you ignored them. If people attend a meeting and it doesn’t add value to their work, they’ll be mad you lost their time
Combine adding more people than needed to the invite, make clear their attendance is optional and send meeting notes to avoid the FOMO. Now whoever decides to attend is their choice, you offer a feasible alternative.
📝 Prepare a document
Even if it’s just an outline of talking points. Never hold a meeting without a structure.
Include this in the invite for anyone to take a look and use it to decide whether to attend.
📄 Include agenda and objective in the email
The agenda is the expected structure of the meeting, with time allocation for each section. At Amazon, meetings are document-driven. Most 1-hour meetings are 20 minutes of reading and 40 minutes of discussion
The objective is the outcome you need by the end of the meeting. E.g. A decision on the technology choice for project X.
😮💨 Don’t sweat about the preparations
When I started my career, I would spend from 30 minutes to an hour crafting the best possible email explaining a problem, deciding which people to invite, or thinking about the talking points.
Now I am more experienced and I automated most of the process.
Attendees: If I’m doubting, then I invite my entire team, making it clear everyone is optional.
Email body: I have a template to consider the agenda, the objective, and always share a document. Takes me 30 seconds to craft that email
The document: I have my templates for typical project documents, like technical designs and operational readiness. Also for ad-hoc topics, like a 1-pager to discuss an obstacle or a 1-pager for a proposal.
#2 During the meeting
🗣️You start talking
Call out the objective of the meeting and the agenda.
If you have a document, send the document link and put a time check. This helps people prioritize their reading to be done by the time you provide.
🎤 Drive the discussion
Respect people’s speaking turns, but interject when the conversation goes into another topic.
I do this when I notice it’s going sideways. This happens when two or more people start a discussion between them.
To avoid interrupting them, I jump when they switch turns like another participant in the discussion. But instead of feeding the fire of the discussion, I redirect it back to the objective.
✍️ You take notes
If you can’t process the information and take notes simultaneously, take raw notes. Over time, you’ll process them into concise notes on the fly
- Fran: Is zero downtime a hard or soft requirement?
- C: The data is already in prod, so we would prefer no downtime.
- Fran: In case of failure will the client service just retry or would the end-customer perceive a real issue?
- C: Will check
⏰ Don’t let the clock close the meeting. Close it yourself
5-10 minutes before ending, bring back the objective to ensure you have covered it.
It’s fine if the meeting doesn’t solve it. But it’s different needing more information and a follow-up meeting than forgetting about the topic because the conversation went in another direction
End the meeting either with a decision or with clear next steps. Capture those next steps in your meeting notes. Never end the meeting in a limbo that nobody knows what’s next.
The meeting runner has to set the agenda and direct the meeting. When a conversation thread is no longer valuable, use the agenda to switch to another.
#3 After the meeting
🤑 Capitalize on your meeting notes
You already did the hard job of taking meeting notes. Now use them to bring visibility of the meeting to everyone.
Put them into an appendix of your document. Also, send them in an email to everyone to whom you sent the invite.
Like when sending the invite email, don’t sweat about it. Have your email template and copy-paste the meeting notes. This shouldn’t take you more than 5-10 minutes. If you feel like you need more information to answer some questions, send the first email with the notes and a second one with the answers after investigating.
In the absence of information, your team will make up the worst possible version of the truth, usually reflecting their worst fears
🗂️ Be very vocal on how you act on the next steps
We see progress when we move our tasks in the sprint board. Treat meetings as tasks-creation in some way.
You capture the next steps, communicate clearly by the email thread, with the responsible person, or in your standup updates how you took action into the meeting action items assigned to you.
🎯 Conclusion
The key to any improvement is making it easier to do it than not doing it.
This is what I did with all my templates for meetings. It’s easier to hit a shortcut, get the template, and fill the sections than writing something quick on a blank page/email.
Making these tactics a default will create a consistent feeling of the meeting having served its purpose.
It’s the job of the meeting driver to create that feeling.
🎁 Free Strategy: Action-oriented documents
Create a table with decisions to make and a ✅ /⚠️/🛑 legend.
Use this table to record decisions in the table as the discussion flows.
I have used this for meetings where I proposed a few different improvements. We discussed them one by one and based on the comments, decided to implement, modify the proposal, or forget about it.
I proactively write notes and classify based on the legend, even while people are discussing. It’s better to be proactive and have someone stop you if they disagree than waiting for the discussino to end
👏 Weekly applause
Some articles I enjoyed from during the last week:
- is one of my go-to sources to maintain myself up to date. For example, I learned about the 1-bit LLMs in this post and now it seems that’s a very feasible way of scaling LLMs (also considering the latest NVidia GPUs announced)
How Lyft Support Rides to 21 Million Users by
. Tons of concepts I’m not familiar with. Many companies are providing transportation services around the city, it’s likely you end up working in one.Done is better than Perfection by
. You can apply this minset to your code, your career growth or your side-project. Once you download this mental model into your brain, it’s useful in any area.Exactly what to say in code reviews by
. A good overview of tips to make sure people interpret your comments as questioning the code, not questioning their ability as engineers.
Will have regular meetings from May. This will be a lifesaver, thanks Fran 🙌
Great post, Fran. Loved the organization and appreciate your templates.
SWEs are hired to work, not go to meetings, loved that part. Taking notes has been my game changer strategy over the years, liked how to added tips to capitalize on that.