10 Tips for Running Engineering Meetings on Zoom
Running an engineering meeting is always challenging. Running an engineering meeting over Zoom when everyone is working from home poses new challenges and exacerbates old ones. Here are 10 tips on keeping the everyday engineering meetings effective and productive.
1. Stay on point
What are you trying to solve? What do you want to discuss? Having a specific agenda is even more important for a technical meeting than a non-technical one, because a meandering technical discussion can be infinite and leave the important problems unsolved. When someone starts pontificating, interrupt and refocus the conversation.
2. Reset context frequently
One surprising effect of the WFH era seems to be that individuals can focus a lot better, but groups have a harder time focusing together. Everyone is off on their own, living in their own context. Whenever you start a meeting, or a new topic in a meeting, set the context again. Restate the problem. Abstract it to force everyone to rise up from the line-of-code level of thinking. Take a step back for the person that just joined the meeting, or was Zooming While Multitasking. The conversation will be more coherent, and the outcomes will be of higher quality.
3. Share visuals to focus the discussion
Nothing focuses a group like looking at the same thing. Screenshare is the best thing about Zoom conferences. Share a diagram, a screenshot, a piece of code. Make everyone see the same thing, so they can start at the same place. Talk through the shared visual, so everyone understands what they are looking at in the same way. That is a great place from which to start a technical discussion.
4. Screen-share a Text Editor
Tech discussions often revolve around a long chain of logic or a multi-step sequence. This is hard to do verbally for one person, and impossible for a group of people. Bring up a text editor and write down each step, for everyone to see. The conversation will be much more coherent. A shared whiteboard or Google Doc can work too, but personally I find a clean and bare text editor will focus a discussion immediately.
5. Take Screenshots
I often take screenshots of important moments of the conversation. I include the main screen (especially if it’s a screen share) and the Participant List. It helps to jog my memory later, and to look up the people I don’t know who are in the meeting. Even when I don’t look at the screenshot later, I find it helps me remember better, in a similar way to taking notes.
6. Turn Off the Video, Sometimes
Watching talking heads is super-useful for many types of discussions, but it’s not always great for meetings of engineers who are talking about engineering. Your camera forces you to be “on” all the time, which gets exhausting. Having to stare at the screen constantly makes your eyes tired. All this tends to distract from the actual ideas being discussed, or the details that need to be tracked. For one on one sessions, I usually use video to establish a personal connection. For a group that needs to talk tech, I usually turn off the video.
7. Watch the Participant List
Zoom’s participant list is the best map of the moment-to-moment dynamic in the conversation. You see who is unmuted and poised to jump in, and who will have to take that extra few seconds to turn off mute before they can respond. In larger meetings, there are people who you won’t know speaking up, and they probably won’t introduce themselves. The Participant List will at least show you who’s talking, with its animated microphone icon. The highlight on the participant’s video feature on Zoom really doesn’t work that well, especially when a screenshare is in progress.
8. In a single-team meeting, skip Zoom chat and use Slack (or Teams)
In many meetings, there is a need to share links and documents that are surfaced through the conversation. People usually share them in Zoom chat, but if the group is small enough, it’s better to share them via Slack or MS Teams or email. This way they persist and become part of the larger asynchronous conversation that your team actually runs on.
9. Poke at the Quiet Ones
There are many reasons for an engineer to be quiet during a meeting. Perhaps he is stuck or has a problem and wants to hide it for emotional reasons. Perhaps he doesn’t want to cause waves with a dissenting opinion. In remote meetings, it’s easier than ever for an engineer to hide these things by being quiet, robbing your team of the chance to help, or the chance to find a better solution. If an engineer is being quiet, poke at that engineer. Uncover the problem. Ask for a real opinion. Use uncomfortable silence to provoke a response. This doesn’t always work, but the more you do it, the better off the team is on the whole.
10. Be the Dumbest One in the Zoom
As the person leading the meeting, your job is to provoke and channel the talents and expertise of everyone in the discussion. This rarely makes you look smart. The best leaders ask the naive, ignorant, and out of the blue questions, because that’s what creates the most revealing conversations. Don’t let a conversation topic go until it’s clear to everyone at an appropriate level of detail. This is often a much more conceptual level than lines of code. This is good — code is just logical concepts, embodied. If the group doesn’t get the concepts right, they won’t get the code right either.
Vineel Shah is a Senior Engineering Manager at Walmart Global Technology. The opinions in this post are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Walmart.
