On Meetings (drafting)

Sean Horgan

General principles

Many meetings are a waste of time. Don’t waste people’s time.

Meetings that are worth your time need an objective with a clear agenda to hit that objective. Skip meetings that don’t.

Understand what type of meeting you need and plan accordingly.

Types of Meetings

The type of meeting you are in will dictate how you manage it.

Decision making

Questions to pose

The What & Why: Is everyone aligned on the problem?

The How: Is everyone aligned on the solution?

The When: Is everyone aligned on the timeline?

The Who: Is everyone aligned the people who owns driving the solution and who is going to tell us we’re done?

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https://hbr.org/1967/01/the-effective-decision⁠

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Retrospective

Problem-solving

1:1

Reduce 1:1 frequency to reflect the product decision frequency. Don’t default to weekly 1:1s unless live decisions are really needed every week.

Anti Meetings

Status updates: 90% of the time these types of meetings should be done asynchronously. The 10% is for customer-facing updates which are really a forum for feedback.

References

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6 types of meetings you need (and 3 you can skip)⁠

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A Summary of High Output Management by Andy Grove⁠

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