Meetings

Meeting can be the most effective way how reach agreement. But too many meetings can kill the company.

General Rules for Meetings

  • Feel free to schedule a meeting according to attendees' calendar. We generally try to keep them up to date.
  • Always be on time for the meeting (especially if you are the organizer). If you are late, let attendees know.
  • Keep number of attendees to the absolute minimum. Always remember, that 8 people on the 1h meeting is equal to the whole working day!
  • Always specify reasons for the meeting, provide an initial agenda. Allot time and owner to the respective topics, if you have a broader audience.
  • Provide a link to a living meeting minutes document, especially for broader calls. Exceptions would be for 1:1’s / other meetings that are individual in nature.
  • Always consider recording the meeting.

Narrative memos instead of Slideware

This applies to internal meetings.

Slides are important for external communication, many people just expect them. But they are also very dangerous, especially for the internal communication. As it is trivial to unintentionally hide complexity and why's. On the other hand, putting additional text on the slides is not the solution. The most impactful presentations are mostly visual.

What we are after is a though-through narrative text which provides answers to many of "why" questions which can be asked about the topic. Writing a (short) memo is harder than "writing" a 20 page powerpoint presentation because the narrative structure forces better thought and better understanding of the topic. Also it gives space to cover relationships among topics. Slide-based presentation with bullet-point lists somehow gives permission to gloss over topics, making all of them sort of same importance and most importantly leaves large space for misinterpretations.

Cross time-zones and All Company Meetings

Please attempt not to reschedule meetings with a very broad invite list, including all company meetings, less than 24 hours ahead of time. This way we can avoid our fellow teammates waking up for example before 5am in order to attend a meeting only to find out that it was rescheduled.

As in all things there will be exceptions.