Meetings in a startup
This article is part of a series about how to manage a small software start-up, the first article & overview is found here.
A team is only a team if people communicate with each other. Even though I prefer written communication most of the time, in some cases, an in-person (or video) meeting can be more effective.
However, most people seem to have the tendency to plan too many meetings rather than too little — so whenever thinking about planning another meeting, I cite the phrase “Meetings are toxic”.
There are many good reasons to avoid meetings, from interrupting the creative flow to simply wasting time. Still, one that stands out to me the most is the feeling of “imaginary productivity” — I see many people feeling productive just because they are busy, which is an especially harmful illusion to have.
In my experience, meetings with just two people tend to be less wasteful if there is a good communication culture. The more people there are, the more it is paramount to think about the raison d’être for an upcoming meeting.
Some good rules to follow are:
- As short as possible and as few people as possible. Have a standard 30 minutes instead of 60 minutes — and set a timer.
- Have a clear agenda and goals prepared; make sure all participants understand these before joining. And if they don’t think they provide value, they shouldn’t join. (Recordings can also be done to watch them later)
- If there is no agenda, the meeting is just chit-chat — this can be fine for team building but should be clear up-front (like a coffee break).
- Prefer online meetings to in-person meetings if it’s not about getting to know each other.
- Be as little intrusive and interruptive as possible with meeting requests. Understand the maker vs. manager’s schedule (link)
- Don’t assume people have time because their calendar says so; always request their time.
During a meeting, you should always reflect on the value add of the time being spent, especially the more people are invited. Analyze if people are bringing up inconvenient truths, asking tough questions, and giving the meeting their full attention.
There’s no point in collaboration without tension, disagreement, or conflict. — Liane Davey
One of the worst things is people joining for political reasons or “feeling important”. I love the statement from Elon Musk: “It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time”. However, it’s tough with friendly people to build a culture where they actually raise their concerns about a meeting’s effectiveness. So it’s even more critical to build this culture actively.
One note about having attentive people in video calls: it helps to establish the rule of microphone and camera being on at all times to force being more present (or leaving otherwise).
There were four types of events that we handled differently than other types of meetings:
- Regular check-ins
- Company updates
- Team building events
- Sprint meetings
These events exist to ensure consistent knowledge exchange and give a forum to raise questions and concerns. I will describe the first three types in this article and discuss sprint meetings in the next article about work management. For all regular meetings that are vital, schedule them for the year out in the calendar; that’s the only way to ensure they actually happen!
Regular Check-ins
Regular 1-on-1 meetings between different members of the team can yield wonders to productivity and motivation. When we finally started to do a weekly founder’s alignment every Wednesday evening, we were surprised by how much more there was to discuss than we thought — pretty much every single time.
During the alignment, we discussed various topics ranging from company strategy to specific projects, generally beginning with the most urgent matters that need some “fire-fighting”.
Later on, we also scheduled at least monthly alignment meetings between team leads and the team members in a similar format, additionally focusing on each employee’s career development and aspirations.
The best to organize these meetings is to have a running agenda for each pair with items for the upcoming meeting, points for later sessions, and follow-ups from previous ones.
Monthly Company Updates
We had monthly company updates every 2nd Thursday of the month, either called all-hands or quarterly reviews after a quarter ends. I consider the goals shared and decisions taken in these meetings to be the core implementation of a company’s strategy. In addition to the north star framing a more long-term plan for the company, we defined several quarterly goals and one team goal every 3 months (of course, SMART):
- Quarterly goals with normal or high priority. A clear assignee and contributors assigned to each goal.
- A team goal for everyone to contribute and as the highest priority for all daily actions.
In every monthly update, we reflected on these goals and discussed everything related to the status and health of the company:
- Quarterly goals status: Completed, on track, at risk, failed, or no progress (or irrelevant? can also happen)
- Team responsibilities & recruiting: Changing jobs, new hires, hiring pipeline
- Product development: Feature roadmap, customer feedback
- Sales pipeline: Deal overview, specific insights, upcoming projects
- Ongoing projects: Next milestones, deliverables so far, current (time-) budget
- Financials: Current balance sheets and income statements, forecast for the coming months (quite tricky in tough times, more on that in a later article)
In addition, we would discuss proposals on changes of company processes and hold Q&As for new projects or product features. In quarterly meetings, we would also reflect on our overall performance concerning the past goals and set the following quarterly goals.
We also synchronized our monthly investor and board meetings with these company updates as they provided the summary on all updates already. Being “radically transparent”, we usually didn’t have to change much between what we communicated to the team vs. the investors.
Team Building Events
I find social events within the team essential for people to really feel like a team. We can beat around the bush, but this is just more difficult for remote teams. A good mixture is a mix of pure free-time activities, strategy brainstormings, and open feedback meetings. This is a topic for which you find with a lot of inspiration on the web; what we did was:
- Weekly paid company lunch where everyone is encouraged to join
- Monthly game evening either something with sports, video games or escape rooms
- Twice a year, a 2 days excursion to a place with beautiful nature
For specific activities, check for example this article.
In the next article, I go into detail on how to manage the actual work that needs to be done.
