How to Run Better Meetings

I will buy you a coffee if you aren’t getting glowing reviews about your meeting after following this guide. Seriously.

Before you continue reading, let’s make sure this article will be worth your time:

• Do you hold a leadership position in a recurring meeting?
• Do you find meetings frustrating? Do they feel full of updates instead of anything substantial to move the work forward?
• Bonus: Do you work anywhere but Shopify? (really though has Shopify solved the meeting issue? If you know please fill me in!)

If you answered yes to the above, continue on! You’ll leave with:

• 2 key ingredients to create great meetings
• 4 tools to help you improve your meetings (including a copy-pasta-worthy meeting agenda template!)
• The confidence to run great meetings that get glowing reviews

Why Some Meetings Suck

Oh, the meeting. Sometimes dreaded; sometimes cathartic. What sets the great apart from the dull?

Some meetings feel like a waste of precious time. You know, the most scarce resource, the one we don’t have enough of? This is what the “should have been an email” crowd is feeling — this was an update and it didn’t require my synchronous engagement.

Worse yet is the meeting where nothing gets done. You could have sworn that marketing agreed to report back on the expected reach of our upcoming email campaign but no one else seems to remember. And now you have to either hope they own up to it or awkwardly call them out. But wait, aren’t you supposed to critique in private? Ugh, okay let’s just remind them and hope they bring it next week (marketers you know I love you, it’s just an example).

Another reason meetings suck? The right people don’t show up. You’ve worked hard to prepare something for the group, and whelp, your key stakeholder is missing in action. You’d better find out a way to update them, or worse, better wait until next week. Yikes.

My personal favourite is the meeting that gets canceled. It’s either an hour prior or 3 seconds prior and “Oops, I booked this but now it’s not happening”. It feels like a win in the moment, free time to get stuff done! But what does the canceled meeting say? It gives the impression that this group of individuals has nothing to work through. Which I find hard to believe for important folks like you.

Let’s recap. Some of the biggest issues around meetings are:

Lack of engaging, thoughtful discussion
Lack of accountability
Lack of clarity
Lack of the right decision-makers
Lack of structure

Key Ingredients for Success

To set up a meeting for success we need to consider 2 key ingredients:

1. The right people
2. The right agenda

The Right People

To have a successful meeting you need to get the right people to attend. Agree to a cadence that works for everyones schedule. Try to meet as often as is reasonable. Stick to it! Go ahead and send that calendar invite to block that precious time forevermore.

In Product, usually, your meeting will include your key stakeholders. At a minimum, you’ll want your Product Manager, Engineering Lead, and Designer present. For Leadership teams, this means you’re meeting with your peers and leader, and you have a separate meeting with your direct reports.

The Right Agenda

If you have the right people in the room, it’s our job as facilitators to ensure we’re talking about the most pressing issues.

A shared agenda with the same structure at each meeting is a game changer. It’s the secret to creating shared expectations that can transform a meeting into a capital-m-Meeting — the kind where things get done and it feels like a worthwhile investment of your time.

When we set up a consistent agenda for our meetings we are creating predictability. When you know what to expect in a meeting, you feel confident, prepared, and therefore comfortable. With that comfort comes a relaxed mind, which is key when you need to have difficult discussions or make tough decisions.

We can use frameworks and processes baked into our agenda that address the worst part of meetings and set the team up for success. These agenda ‘tools’ can unlock accountability, focus, and trust. Let’s review a few tools that can help us do just that.

Build Focus

The issues you choose to spend time on in your meeting matter. You want to use your precious time together to focus on conversations that require synchronous decision-making. Sure, yes, spend time getting your teammates up to speed on the latest developments if they are mission-critical, however, make sure you’re making time to get into the juicy issues that are holding your team back. The majority of the meeting should be about solving pressing issues.

One way to ensure you’re focusing on the most important issues is to spend a few minutes debating what the most important issues are before you dive in. Knowing that the team has chosen the most important issue to tackle minimizes tangents, and invites teammates to redirect to the issue at hand. Over time this exercise also builds a shared sense of prioritization amongst the team.

Once an issue is chosen as the priority, it can be very tempting to jump to solutioning. Resist the temptation! Spend time getting to the root of the issue. Introduce a framework like “5 whys” and ensure all parties are in agreement before you begin collaborating on solutions. If you find the same issue popping up week after week, it’s a sign you need to spend more time understanding the issue.

If you are having trouble finding the right thing to discuss, look to leading indicators that you can measure at the same cadence of your meeting. Once the group agrees that these are the right metrics, set targets, and monitor these KPIs. If the metrics aren’t hitting your targets spend time digging into the core issues as you see them.

Build Accountability

When we’re using our meeting to solve the most important issues, your tasks (or to-dos) that come from those solutions should be the most important things to complete.

What do you think will happen if, at your next meeting, you review the to-do’s you agreed to at the previous meeting? I’d expect that most items won’t be complete. This is normal, we all have competing priorities and a never-ending list of things that need to be done. However, let’s say that you continue to review to-dos three, four, or five weeks in a row. What will happen then? You’ll find that your attendees will complete their to-dos. In this situation, we’re faced with the impact of not completing our to-dos and the predictability of the meeting agenda prompts us to make an extra effort to move our work forward. We identify that we want to be the type of coworker who follows through on what we say we’ll do, but it takes a consistent process to show us how often we’re not delivering. Your agenda created accountability.

It’s not easy to be ‘that guy’. That guy who is reading to-do’s they know weren’t complete — especially the first few meetings after you’ve implemented this new agenda of yours. If a to-do isn’t complete, ask your teammate when they’ll have it done. So long as you come into this section with the right attitude the team will accept it and they’ll even begin to appreciate it. Remember, you’re doing this for the betterment of the team. To move your issues forward, and because as a leader, you want your team to hold you accountable to your own to-dos, too.

It is often unclear who is accountable for doing the work. If Carrie and I are both supposed to do something, then is it my fault it wasn’t done? Not really, no! Shared accountability is no accountability. To provide clarity for the folks in our meetings, we should spend time during the meeting to capture and review new to-dos. Everyone should have a shared understanding of what will get done and by what deadline and only one person should own that task. If a to-do is that two teammates should meet, assign responsibility to one of those people. If an issue is worth the time to discuss the next steps, it’s worth the time to clarify the details.

Build Trust

Here’s the secret to how I’m able to publish this article without a substantial coffee budget. To avoid bad meetings, we should regularly ask the team for feedback on the meeting itself. The way I do this is with the following question:

I’m going to ask everyone to rate this meeting out of ten. Start with ten and deduct a point for each thing you wish had been done differently. I’ll ask you to share those reasons.

You now have actionable items to make the meeting better for your specific team members and goals. Implement those suggestions! Iterate on the format, the reminders, and the agenda — whatever is suggested. By inviting attendees to give actionable feedback, and then acting on that feedback, the responsibility to create the ideal meeting is in turn owned by each attendee. This reinforces appreciation for their contributions and shows you value their attention.

The Agenda

• Review previous meeting to-dos (3 minutes or less — builds accountability)
• Updates (3 minutes or less)
• Issues
  - Prioritize issues (5 minutes or less — builds focus)
  - Identify the problem, then solution (the majority of the meeting!)
• Review new to-dos (3 minutes or less — builds clarity)
• Meeting rating out of ten (3 minutes or less — builds trust)

Let’s Recap

Why do some meetings suck? What can we do?

Lack of engaging, thoughtful discussion?
Limit time for updates.
Spend time prioritizing issues as a group.
Choose issues that need synchronous discussion.
Focus on identifying the core issue before you jump to solving.

Lack of accountability?
Review the previous meetings to-dos at the beginning of each meeting.

Lack of clarity?
Review new to-dos at the end of each meeting. Clarify expectations, and assign one person to be accountable for each to-do.

Lack of the right decision-makers?
Do what you can to get the right people to commit to attending on a regular cadence (quality is better than quantity).

Lack of structure?
Follow a consistent meeting agenda to set expectations and build trust.
Ask teammates to give feedback on the meeting itself, and implement ideas.

Thanks for making it this far! Do you see a different problem with meetings? Do you have any tips and tricks? Please let me know in the comments.

My offer stands. If you implement these changes and you’re not getting glowing reviews, reach out, and I’ll do good on my offer of coffee.

These tips and processes are inspired by the Entrepreneurial Operating System outlined in the book, Traction by Gino Wickman.