I had a conversation with a more junior member of our product team and had to talk him down from scheduling a recurring meeting that takes up a lot of time for many people on the product leadership team.
To mitigate this, I put together a quick set of requirements for when a meeting needs to happen, let alone creating a recurring meeting.
I might have been a bit brusque, but I think it gets the message across well enough:
Recurring meetings once a week around product development with all stakeholders tend to not meet the criteria to have a good meeting:
- Focused on a particular topic – talking about a massive product is too broad, the topic can veer in a million directions and nothing in depth can be discussed
- Actionable – if we discuss a topic that requires everyone in the room to be there (i.e., the meeting is focused), there should be very specific and tangible steps the people attending the meeting can take after the meeting; recurring weeklies with stakeholders tend not to have this
- Goal oriented – if there’s a recurring basis for a meeting with a ton of stakeholders without a very specific and actionable topic, the only consistent goal is to announce progress/status updates which can be done in a slack channel or a word doc or the PRD.
I try to be very conservative with my time in meetings. Meetings feel like “work”, but usually they’re not.
Amaan Lakhani 