Mental Shift: How to Change from Meetings to Delivery

For most of us in technology, meetings are a normal part of our worklife and some are more necessary than others, but let’s face it, most are not, especially with amazing asynchronous communication mediums like Slack or even — gulp — email.

If you’re wondering where I’m going with this, this is very much an anti-meeting read, well, most meetings anyway.

It’s up to you to figure out what “most” means!

Why? Because most meetings are counterproductive and their purpose can easily and more quickly be accomplished with the aforementioned tools. But what fun is that?

Let’s take a look at how most meetings start:

Person 1: Hey, how ya doin?

Person 2: Meh, I had a bad weekend.

Person 1: Oh really? Mine was amazing, I went rock climbing and then we test drove a Subaru — that had leather in it — can you believe that — ?? — then we finished the day at REI. Later in the evening, we watched Running Wild with Bear Grylls. He’s my hero.

Person 2: That sounds fun, I need a new car too, but I bought this water-bottle and it’s amazing.

Person 3: Joins, listens. The best water-bottle is a S’well Bottle, they’re insultated and keep your liquids cold for 24 hours and hot for 12 hours. They’re amazeballs!

Person 2: No way!

Person 3: Way!

Person 1: No way!

Person 3: Triple way, no givesees backsees, and it’s made with organic steel.

…and 20 minutes of nonsense blows by! What are we here to accomplish?

Let’s be honest, we are all guilty of this, myself supremely included. In fact, I’m guilty of everything in this story, but please, continue on.

Look, there are plenty of amazing articles about the importance of meetings and more importantly, running them efficiently and using everyones time effectively: like this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, and there are scores more.

The problem is: Meetings != Productivity

Some people consider it a badge of honor to have zero free time available in their calendar but I argue, those people should be embarrased. Why? Because others are ruling your life which prevents you from focusing on the work and team dynamics that truly matter and most importantly, producing anything.

You should never need to call a meeting to make a decision or meet on the status of X, there are a variety of other channels better suited to broadcast the message.

As a team, we should scrutinize every single meeting that comes across our inbox. We should ask “why” more often and push back. We sure as hell should have the power to decline a meeting invitation — from anyone — that contains no agenda and no objectives.

Be anti-meeting.

Let’s list out the type of meetings that we have in a typical product and technology organization:

• 1:1 meetings
• sprint planning
• design meetings
• decision meetings
• estimation meetings
• refinement meetings
• retrospective meetings
• scrums/daily standups
• status update meetings
• meetings to align teams
• iteration review meetings
• meetings to plan our meetings
• steering committees for those meetings
• meetings to plan how to build _____________

Not all meetings are created equal, but if you let them, meetings will overrun your life and easily cut into any modicum of productivity that you still have left in the day. They’re mostly anti-action too.

The problem with most meetings? They’re a Wasteful Time-Kill.

As an example, let’s look at one type of meeting, the exploratory meeting. You know the one, where you’re unsure how to implement this next major feature and you invite a couple people from your team and some others from another team to discuss — then the invitation snowballs — and suddenly your meeting was forwarded and now you have 13 invitees because they’re all “interested.”

Guess what you just did?

Let’s imagine that 13 professional technologist earn, on average and conservatively: $100,000/year

That’s $1,300,000 annually.

Divided by 2,080 work hours in the year, 52 weeks at 40/week.

Cumulatively $625/hour.

A 1 hour meeting costs: $625 (cost of a basic iPhone 6s)

Imagine if you had 30 of those meetings throughout the year: $18,750

That’s real money! What else could you do with that money? What if you had something tangible to show after each meeting? We sometimes use meetings to get aligned or learn how to do X but what is really the best way to learn? It’s to build.

Instead, with nothing to show we’ve wasted time, money and resources — burned. Poof!

Have you ever participated in a productive meeting with over 6 people? It’s rare, possible, but rare.

I’m not talking about meetings that set the tone of an initiative, like sprint planning or daily scrums. There are necessary meetings, but they’re typically short, they set the tone, align the team, educate and bridge gaps — and then we disperse. Rather, I’m talking about the kind of meetings that start with good intentions but then quickly snowball out of control — and suddenly — we’ve just burned $625 and have nothing to show for it. That, happens far too often.

See this overly-confident dude, the one below, standing tall, with the gray slacks and brown belt? As if any group of people are ever this happy in a meeting.

This is how you think your meetings are perceived. He thinks he’s the shit. That he’s got the team aligned, when in reality, he just wasted all of their time. Fact.

After your status meeting, you might assume everyone is on cloud-nine, energized and ready to roar — because everyone applauds after a meeting!

Wrong. This doesn’t happen. What is a better sense of accomplishment, talking about how you’re going to solve a problem or actually solving the problem?

Ask yourself, what do I have to show for this meeting?

If nothing tangible, then there’s a good chance you just wasted everyones time and cost your company $XXXX. Not good my friend. Ruthlessly manage your availability, focus the team, and insist they do the same.

Here’s a new approach

From time to time, I like to bounce ideas off my good friend Alan Wizemann because I’m genuinely curious how he solves problems. He’s a true product guy and technologist, and very insightful, in a direct, succinct kind of way.

My first question to him was something along the lines of, “how would you get your team to stop scheduling meetings and instead start building solutions?” “Easy,” he said, “just tell them to knock it off.”

I found that response mildy amusing and I even LOL’d but as proud product guy that leads through influence, you know, all the responsibility but none of the authority, that’s just not in the cards. But he did offer another method of making a point that I quite liked, one that is very useful, and it’s using guilt in a manner to make a point. In practice, it’s very, very simple.

Firstly, all meetings are not equal, some are quite important, like this:

Whoops, I meant this. Sometimes you need people together, focused and aligned on a singular mission. (You rock Bob Ross!)

The next time your team has an hour long meeting, ask: What did you build and can you demo it for me?

If the team can’t show a tangible solution, the meeting was a bust, and peoples’ time was wasted. In technology, there are many approaches to solving a problem, but the best is hacking together solutions and showing results. It’s how we learn and it’s how we solve problems effectively.

We can sit around and talk about how we should solve that 5000 piece jigsaw puzzle scattered across the table, or we can dive in as a team and start building the puzzle. What would you rather show, a write-up articulating how you’re going to solve the problem or actual progress towards a solution? I much prefer the act of solving problems vs talking about how we intend solve them.

How about you?