Meeting Principles

Meetings are not equivalent to work. Meetings are what happens when people aren’t working…

• They break your day into small, incoherent pieces

• Talking doesn’t require thinking so they convey an abysmally small amount of information per minute

• They are not inclusive to an international remote-first team

• They drift off-subject 100% of the time

• They frequently have agendas so vague nobody is really sure what they are about

• They require thorough preparation that people rarely do (although we are trying to change this!)

credit: https://basecamp.com/gettingreal/07.3-meetings-are-toxic

Goal: Establish the release cadence of the product

1. What are the problems with our current quarterly release cycle?

2. Principles for choosing a release cadence

3. Potential solutions brainstorm

The best feedback and opinions come when everyone had the opportunity to think about the topic. If you surprise people with the context during the meeting, you will get their reaction and not their thoughtfulness.

Since we expect that the work was done before the meeting, share the content at least one day before the meeting and attach it to the meeting invite (confluence page, diagram, etc…)

Meet with direct contributors on your project, then send notes and the recording to all interested parties afterward.

Everyone’s time is valuable. Beyond 4 people, it’s hard for a group to interact and move work forward effectively. If one or more people in your meeting seem to be an “audience” to the few people interacting, chances are they could simply be sent the meeting notes without having to attend.

Pro tip: use this tool to calculate the cost of a meeting: https://hbr.org/resources/html/infographics/2015/11/meeting-cost-calculator/index.html

Max 4 GlobalVisionaries in external meetings

Bringing everyone (drivers, contributors, informed) into calls leads to some big drawbacks:

• Nobody knows when to speak up

• It is less personal for the customer and partner - we are not building meaningful relationships

• The opportunity cost of internal resources (time is money)

If there are ever more than 4 people involved in a project, choose who is the most likely to drive or contribute to the conversation and then send the chorus call recording to everyone else to catch up (at 1.5x speed)

Meetings tend to run shorter than we think now that you have an agenda and everyone prepared before!

The only good (great) reason to not start the meeting is if you are socializing. The few minutes in a meeting is sometimes the best part of the day ✨

Otherwise, starting meetings late perpetuates a culture of always starting meetings late. If there is 1 person waiting to join but 3 people already in the call, you are prioritizing 1 person’s time higher than the three people who are twiddling their thumbs.

Time = 💰 , and a 1-hour meeting with 5 people is a 5-hour meeting $$$. Treat every minute respectfully.

Here is a passage in a book by Matt Mochary:

It is critical to be on time for every appointment that you have made or to let others involved in the meeting know that you will be late as soon as you realize it. This is common decency, yes, but it has a greater importance. There is someone else on the other side of your agreement to start the meeting at a certain time. They have stopped what they are working on to attend the meeting on time. If you do not show up on time, they cannot start the meeting, but they also cannot leave because they dont know if you'll show up the next minute or not…
Each minute that they are away from their work is a minute of productivity that you have stolen from them. This is not only disrespectful but also counterproductive. If they are a customer, an investor, or a recruit, they will not engage with your company. If they report to you, they will keep quiet but resent you. There is no winning scenario when you waste someone's time.
Life happens. A previous call or meeting may run late. Traffic always cooperates. Even with careful planning, it's not possible to be on time for every meeting. The good news is that you don't need to be.
It is only critical to let the other members of the meeting know that you will be late as soon as you realize that you will be. And you must come to this realization (and let the other attendees know through whatever channel will get to them the fastest: text, Slack) before the meeting starts. Ideally you'd let them know about the delay before they have to break away from whatever they were doing before the meeting.

In addition to being on time, you must also be present. Being present means that you are composed, prepared, and focused on the subject matter.
It can take a few minutes to "get present" - prepare for the meeting, research the topic and the attendees, go to the bathroom between back-to-back meetings, get a drink or snack, and so on.
To make this easy, I recommend scheduling twenty-five and fifty-minute meetings only (Google Calendar even has an automated setting for this). This will give you five minutes each half hour and ten minutes each hour to maintain yourself.
When in meetings, I often see people making the mistake of constantly checking their messages. They cannot get away from being "on," if even for a second. This is not only disrespectful but also defeats the purpose of the meeting, which is collaboration with the attendees present. It sends a message that the meeting's content is relatively unimportant. Furthermore, it also breeds a bad habit for the entire company one that will be hard, if not impossible, to break down the line.
During every meeting, leave your phone in your pocket or facedown.

– Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short.

– Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved.

– Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.

– Don’t use acronyms or nonsense words for objects, software or processes at Tesla. In general, anything that requires an explanation inhibits communication. We don’t want people to have to memorize a glossary just to function at Tesla.

– Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the “chain of command”. Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere.

– A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.

– In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a “company rule” is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change.