How to Make Your Meetings (More) Productive and Clear
As a product manager (or professional), you may be spending most of your time in meetings and discussions with different stakeholders. It is important to find ways to make those meetings more productive and clear for everyone. Often, we overlook even very simple steps that can make people unclear about your meetings, next steps, and action items. Below are my suggestions and steps that I apply to my own meetings:
Always start with the context and agenda
You may not know or realize, but it is incredibly important to provide context before starting a meeting. This was something that I was also missing for a while. Then, I started doing this (and I hope it to become a habit as I keep doing it) and saw better results from day one. I do this when I create the meeting invites and before I kick-off a meeting if I am the host.
Giving context helps to ensure that everyone attending the meeting has a clear understanding of why the meeting is taking place, and the goal that participants should be striving to achieve. A great practice is to recap the overall goal of the meeting and how it fits into the bigger picture, so that everyone is aware of the importance of the meeting. By providing the context of the meeting, not only will everyone understand why the meeting is important, but they will also be able to remember its purpose more clearly. This ensures that the meeting is kept on track, and remains productive as participants are focused on the desired outcome. Furthermore, it helps to prevent any misunderstandings, and enables clear communication between all attendees, so that everyone is on the same page throughout the meeting.
Imagine someone (from your team or not) forwarding you an invite and you only see the participants and meeting subject along with a join link. That’s it. How can you contribute to that meeting without knowing anything about it?
To avoid this, I follow this simple structure for my meeting invites:
- A short summary of what this will be about
- Context: Why we’re having this meeting and more information around the subject
- Agenda: All meeting items to discuss and go over
Here’s an example:
Hi everyone,
I’m sending this invite to discuss Feature X with a larger group. John Doe and I discussed this last week on September 15, 2020 and now we want to get your opinion, answer your questions, and discuss the items below.
Context: Feature X is the most important item for the next release. There are some challenges, blockers, and questions that we need to discuss. John Doe and I went over our questions and answers, but we kindly need your input to answer some technical questions regarding the architecture and implementation.
Agenda:
Issues that we are facing right now
Technical and legal challenges
Blockers
Timeline
Next steps
When someone sees this invitation in a similar structure for the first time, they will have a better understanding of what to expect and how to contribute.
Don’t assume everyone is on the same page
Even if you provide the context and agenda items, do not assume that everyone is on the same page. You may present your epic, sprint, deck or release plan, but your teammates may not be as familiar with the material as you are.
It is also important to not assume that everyone knows the context of the meeting just because they received the meeting invite. Even if the invite contains all the necessary information, it is still important to take the time to explain why the meeting is taking place and what it is about. This will ensure that everyone is on the same page and that the meeting remains productive and focused on the desired outcome.
You can start by summarizing what you will talk about, go through, and present, recapping the context, and then getting started.
Take notes with important keywords and action items
This is self-explanatory and looks simple, I agree. But it helps a lot. Taking notes is very crucial when it comes to a productive meeting. You may use auto-generated transcriptions as your reference or take notes as you listen to people.
Instead of writing everything your teammate says, you can just take notes from the highlights and important keywords as you listen to them. After your meeting ends, you can add more details based on those keywords. This will help you remember the key moments for those specific items.
Wrap-up and summarize before closing
Before you end your meeting, make sure to wrap-up and go over everything you discussed as a summary.
Here’s how you can do it:
Okay everyone,
Before we end the meeting, I’d like to go over the key updates and what we discussed so far:
I walked you through Feature X and issues we’re facing right now.
We went over the engineering teams’ questions around the architecture. We’ll choose Path 2 as discussed.
Jane Doe will send us the docs and ticket links so we can all watch and update accordingly.
After wrapping up your session with the key updates, it is important to define the next steps so everyone can know what is being expected of them, if any.
The next steps are as follows:
Jane Doe to send documents and ticket links
I will assign John Doe to the epic and will update the requirements
I will schedule another call with the legal team before we do anything
Then we will take it from there. I will keep you posted.
After ending my meetings, I also send my notes by adding the key updates, next steps and action items to keep everyone on the same page. You can do the same.
Before I end this post…
Before I finish this post, I’d like to share my personal experience as a product manager. From my experience, I’m pleased to see positive results when I provide context, set the agenda ahead of time, take notes, summarize, and review the action items and next steps.
Whenever I send out my notes, I set reminders based on the action items and next steps, in case I need to follow up with someone or send something out. You can do the same, so you don’t forget or skip anything.
What else do you suggest? How do you make your meetings more productive and clear? Share below.
