Get those meetings under control

10 simple things to help run more efficient meetings and save (a lot of) time

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Finding factor e

7 min readFeb 12, 2018

If you work in product your life is 80% meetings 20% something else you don’t actually remember because it seems everything you do is being in a meeting.

Let me try to guess (and these are only the planned meetings, I am not even counting the ad/hoc project-related ones): you have squad standups, product manager syncs, product reviews (probably 2 or 3 per week depending on how many projects you manage), squad checkpoints/grooming, squad retrospective, sprint planning, stakeholders weekly meetings, design syncs, roadmap meetings (maybe one per department?), roadmap retrospectives, UX/research sync… on top of this add your 1–1 with your manager, the all hands weekly meeting, your department weekly all hands. It’s insane. Let’s say each take 45 min (which they don’t, and I am already summing the daily standups into one), I am easily counting 16 weekly occurrences (assuming 3 stakeholder PoC). That is 12 hours of meetings per week!

And that’s fine as long you are making decisions after each one. In the end, a PM’s (nearly) sole purpose is to get people to sit, understand each other, and make decisions. And the majority of this happens in… meetings. But if you don’t create a process to make them efficient, you will waste an enormous amount of time. And time is money when you need to ship.

Here’s my cheat sheet after practical iteration, research across the web and honestly, common sense.

1. When setting a meeting on your calendar make sure to have agenda, owner and goals

Particularly helpful for sprint planning and retrospectives, most syncs, all hands and stakeholder meetings, use your calendar description and add 3 key points:

Agenda — Add bullet points with each topic, and how long you believe each will take.
Meeting owner — Define who’s the meeting owner, in order words who will take notes, keep order on the meeting, remind how much time is left, and follow up afterwords.
Goal — write the main goals after this meeting is done. In case you don’t have goals, you should question why you need the meeting in the first place.

2. Start/finish meetings on time, be disciplined with the agenda and remind participants

Although this should be applied in all meetings, the biggest impact is in sprint planning and retros who tend to take hours of you don’t control time. In order to reduce time waste and reschedules, make sure you start the meeting in time and end the meeting in time. Be disciplined around this, even if not everyone is in the room OR the topics have not finished. In case you have to end a meeting before you ran all agenda topics, select the most important and create a new meeting in a different timeframe to tackle them.´

3. Have action points in the end of the meeting and follow up

This is a “must” for stakeholder meetings as it helps keep agendas alive each week. Every meeting should end with clear action points, either for the owner or for other participants. If there are no action points, possibly this is an information brief, and could’ve been done via slack, email or other media. Always think how you can evade a meeting, especially if you see that no decisions will be made.

4. Setup your calendar to protect against back-to-back meetings

Back to back meetings are the main cause for meetings being delayed, you not being prepared for a meeting, and not processing the content and information shared during the previous meeting. To prevent this, tweek your calendar to make blocks of time in 25 minutes instead of 30 minutes or 50 minutes instead of 60 minutes. This creates an interval to “breathe”.

To setup follow the steps:

Go to settings in the top right side, in the clickwheel
Go to Event Settings and change default duration to “25 minutes” and enable “Speedy Minutes”

5. Contextualise participants BEFORE the meeting and don’t wait if it’s urgent

This is more important for ad-hoc/project related meetings as participants aren’t “expecting” it. When setting up a meeting, make sure ALL participants receive a slack, email or message to WHY this meeting is being setup and if they need to bring any information, resources or prepare anything before. Also, don’t make urgent decisions depend on calendars. If you need it now, get people together, and hustle through.

6. The meeting owner leads and controls the meeting

Extremely helpful for larger meetings like sprint planning, roadmap planning, retros, checkpoints. If you are the meeting owner you should lead the meeting. This means:

Start the meeting providing context (which should already be known, but repeated)
Take notes (or defines who should take notes)
Keep order on the meeting, making sure the agenda is followed
Remind how much time is left
End the meeting summarising the key action points
Follow up afterwords with notes and action points

7. Make meetings small, and only invite people that should / need to be in there

Really makes the difference in roadmap planning as it’s easy to get the number of participants out of control (everyone’s a PM when it comes to road mapping right?). In order to be efficient, make meetings small (Amazon follows a 2-pizza rule, aka have “Never have a meeting where two pizzas couldn’t feed the entire group.”) and question whether the people you are inviting really add value to the meeting and its purpose.

8. No laptops except to take notes and dial people in

Ask people to keep laptops out. This is key when you need everyone’s participation like retrospectives or when you are syncing cross-functions (design and UX syncs). Often you will end up with unfocused participants working on their own stuff. If someone says they need the laptop to take notes, ask to share the notes in the end.

9. Keep smartphones in your pocket and ask participants to keep them there unless it’s urgent

As with laptops, checking your smartphone distracts you and could possibly distract others. Ask to keep smartphones away, including from the table, as you will be tempted to check that naughty notification.

10. Make meetings shorter, aim for 25 minutes instead of 50 minutes

Applying this to stakeholder meetings, 1–1 and ad-hoc syncs will yield huge gains. The time you define for the meeting will always be the minimum time you will need to have this discussed, so aim to have less time so you are more efficient in dealing with problems. Most meetings are set as 1 hour (or 50 minutes if you changed your setting to Speedy Meetings), but ask yourself if this couldn’t be solved in 25 minutes instead.

Bonus. Consider opportunity cost of a meeting

I know the first 10 points are about making meetings better, but what about thinking “Do we really need this meeting?”. How much time is being invested here? Will it be worth it considering the expected output? Think twice before opening up your calendar.

Some other ideas:

Try standing up

“Experts say that for every hour that we sit, we reduce our life expectancy by 22 minutes. Considering we spend approximately 40–80 hours per week sitting at our desks, it’s no wonder the top innovative tech companies are refusing to meet sitting down. A recent study also found “that when people stand during meetings they appeared more excited by their work, acted less territorial about their ideas, and interacted better as a team”

Get out of the office

Try running the meeting outside the office or in a different space. It can lead to higher attention spans, more creativity, being less defensible of your ideas and more open to new lines of thinking. It’s also a way to foster personal bonding, generating less work-related conversation, key to improve trust among teams.

Get a totem

When you have really energetic people in a meeting, they tend to run over each other to speak, rush answering questions, and monopolise a large part of the time. This gets even worse when you have more introvert people, leading to feel outcasted. A clever way to fight this is to bring a “speaking totem”, some physical object that grants the power of “speaking” to the holder. It’s easier to respect an object than a spoken rule.

Want to know even more? Here are some links on how to make your meetings better:

For all of those who have contributed with ideas, triple thanks.

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