Tinker With Those Meeting Notes!

A Small Case Study in Evolving Tools for Teams

Something I’ve found over the past few years is that the best meeting structures emerge when we give teams clear working principles and empower them to choose their own ways of achieving those. Instead of top-down mandated systems that disregard the huge variety of ways that people work, this approach allows teams to operate in ways that are sensitive to their individuals’ needs and styles. Importantly though, it does so while ensuring that product and insights remain transferable across the organization.

Recently I supported a team that evolved a pretty unremarkable artifact — its note-taking and meeting style — to great effect.

I n an effort to expand our capacity to deliver innovative product consulting, we recently brought in a new creative director, Katy Garrison. When new people come on, and especially if they are expected to lead teams, we find an internal project for them to direct with minimal up-front guidance. By starting off with trust in their ability to lead, we can begin to understand how they work, tap into their background (believe it or not people who have worked other places can sometimes teach us things 👻), and provide the opportunity to expose and resolve weaknesses in our current approach. Our sister company PCR needed a website refresh, and this seemed an appropriate initial project for Katy to lead. We determined that the core team would be her as the product manager, a PCR employee as a representative from the client brand, a current OpenNester as a junior strategist, and me as a facilitator.

Any project that OpenNest delivers must be guided by good Purpose (Derrick Bradley provides a nice working definition here). For this website, the team generated the following: To make explicit and accessible the PCR brand to clients, prospects, and seekers online.

Working principles for teams deserve their own post, but some of the common ones at OpenNest across all teams are:

• Default to Open, Connected Systems- Documents are stored in shared, searchable places set to org-accessible. Conversations should be open and searchable vs. single-tenant. Anyone should be able to status check without having to ask for access.
• Move Small and Revise Frequently- Complex proposals should be pared down to work that can be safely tried quickly. Reflect at regular intervals on effectiveness of work, and tune outputs accordingly.
• Consumability is the Metric that Matters- The user is a key stakeholder. [Usually] we are working for our clients’ customers, not just our clients. Measurable improvements in usability and experience always trump vanity quotas.
• Always Collect Data- Record the essentials. Use systems that track in the background (no work around the work!). Remember that seemingly nonessential data often becomes powerful later. Track changes.
• Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast- “Continuous attention to technical excellence, good design, [and proper tooling] enhances agility.”
• Roles, Not Jobs- Define clear roles (both static and emergent) required by your project’s success conditions. Be ready to fill multiple roles, and roles that might seem out of your area of expertise. If a role needs to be filled and the present team doesn’t have capacity, tap someone from the organization.

These were the tools with which Katy was equipped when she launched her first OpenNest project.

K aty began with a planning meeting to clarify product management approach, jobs to be done, roles to be filled, and the conditions for success that would allow the team to resolve the period of the project.

In these meetings, especially when supporting someone leading their first OpenNest project, I try to stay silent and play the role of facilitator, only helping move the team forward through blocks or slowness, and avoiding exerting influence on either the specific ways of working or the design of the project itself (note: this is a growth area for me).

To the left are the notes from that first meeting. I felt that the general frame of the project was accurately captured, and the notes were sufficiently thorough, and I was interested to see how the daily work of the project would connect to the planning document. The team decided that it wanted to use Trello and Slack for task management. The first stand would be two days after the planning meeting, and someone from the team committed all the outcomes from the meeting to Trello.

A few insights emerged at our first stand. One, while our planning notes may have been thorough in some ways, they provided minimal guidance for how Trello/Slack was going to be used. So if a person needed to get up to speed on the project, they would look at our planning notes and have zero documentation on how to status check the progress of the project in real time. Additionally, we held the meeting in person, so had not recorded it or linked to the notes in the #pcrwebsite Slack channel. We had successfully selected open systems, but insufficiently connected them — a failure to achieve our first working principle.

Finally, the notes are ugly, kind of hard to read, and have an inconsistent formatting scheme. The taxonomy doesn’t make a ton of sense. Instead of sitting with Katy before the meeting and talking about what we were going to accomplish, I’d built the notes from a standard template I’ve used with other teams. This is a failure against “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” (good design and proper tooling). Citing ugly, uninspiring meeting notes as an early failure might seem overly pedantic, but the devil is in the details. Pleasant, clear visuals should underpin our internal systems as much as they need to guide our work for clients.

K aty realized that we had the opportunity to record insights and make changes to the ways of working immediately, before starting the project off on the wrong foot. This meant delaying an extra day, but that was alright (slow is smooth, smooth is fast). Prior the second stand, Katy and the team made immediate corrections to the tooling. She pointed all the various productivity tools in play (Trello, Pivotal, Google Drive, etc.) to the central brain of the project, Slack, so that changes would update automatically. This provides two advantages: 1) it allows progress to be recorded without requiring manual entry into a system (we’re smarter than that) and 2) it stores all activity and output in a central, searchable location (the quality of search and notifications in Slack are a huge reason we’ve largely moved away from HipChat).

Katy also noted the problems with the visual taxonomy of the notes themselves, and tasked me (the original note taker) with arriving at a better format. It is worth pointing out here that her willingness to trust me (a non-designer) to generate this document demonstrated maturity that we think is essential to success in any organization, and was a huge substantiation of our beliefs about the importance of having her join our team.

In the left image, you can see the notes from the second stand. Despite the fact that the meeting happened in person, we posted in Slack and tagged @channel with a link to the notes. This makes them infinitely easier to find later, and lets anyone not physically easily jump into the document to follow along.

Note the evolved visual design for recording information. It’s a simplified scheme with smaller, sans-serif headers, a monospace body font, and information architecture that relies more heavily on indentation and color than rich formatting. This is a pretty obvious reference to information taxa in true plain-text systems like the terminal or SublimeText. Also, note the types of information included in the notes. Content like when the next meeting is, who is helping unblock, and each person’s role in the current meeting is available without any addtional searching.

T hese small adjustments produced an immediate result. Katy’s team has been working with clarity and speed, and easily manages to address changing requirements. We’ve seen work being shipped in smaller units and within a week we feel like the team is effectively touching each of the working principles it often takes months to grasp. She’s able to fork people in and out of her delivery group and get them up to speed in minutes, rather than

The lesson? Never overlook the tooling and the small, foundational details if you want projects to move with clarity and agility.

I kind of snuck it in the piece, but we’re really stoked to welcome our new creative director Katy Garrison to OpenNest. Check her out on instagram, dribbble, or online.

OpenNest is an team design consultancy founded this earlier this year. We are helping organizations large and small navigate a business climate that is changing faster than it has before.