Ask YC: How to conduct a meeting?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=224615

by Stabback • 18 years ago

23 37 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm the CEO of a fairly new web based startup (who isn't?) and I've been having trouble getting much traction going at my teams weekly meetings. I've read up on how to properly conduct a meeting however for some reason it just feels like I'm missing something.

Can anyone recommend a good read on how to conduct a meeting, or (if I could be so lucky) give me some advice on the subject?

As an aside, we are a small group, only 4 people.

Mystalic• 18 years ago

Take note from the Paypal model when they first started out - have as few meetings as possible, hit only the key points, and again, don't have unnecessary meetings.

Just cover what needs to be covered and allow people to get to their work. Fast paced.

And have people stand if possible, not sit. And no laptops or cell phones in the room. They'll pay attention in both instances.

chrisbroadfoot6• 18 years ago

Where I work, we have a stand-up meeting every day. It only takes 10 minutes and everyone is on the same page.

Fortnightly, we have longer, sit-down meetings, generally for planning.

I think it works well, although the sit-down meetings sometimes draw out too much discussion, I think this should be avoided to keep the meeting on point and not to bore/waste people's time

tialys• 18 years ago

Before you have a meeting, consider what would happen if the meeting ended up cancelled -- then decide if you even need to have it. I've sat through countless meetings that could have easily been solved with a few quick emails or a phone call.

Also, make it clear what the meeting covers and stick to it, this lets people who aren't stakeholders in the current topic leave and get back to work.

DenisM4• 18 years ago

Short answer: don't have meetings.

Long answer: work in the same room together for a few hours a week (10-20). This way as questions come up they will get resolved in context. Announcements, presentations and other broadcast-type things can be made at coffee break. Start having meetings after this model stops scaling.

Stabback• 18 years ago

Unfortunately this is not an option. One of our team is working on the west coast, the other three are east coast. We currently do not have an office - we are a home based organization (we are coding and running around contacting potential clients/investors).

We are having weekly meetings to get everyone back on the same page as the work is largely independent at this point.

DenisM4• 18 years ago

We use skype when apart - both video and audio. Good camera, mike and speaker help. We'd just sit and code with a little window showing the other guy, when something comes up we would talk it over and then code again. Don't knock it till you try it!

spencerfry3• 18 years ago

I disagree with your short answer. Our 3 person company has a weekly meeting every Friday from 1 minute to anywhere to 30 minutes depending on if anything needs to be discussed in more detail. It's a very good idea to get together once a week outside of just working together to go over the week's happenings even if it's only for a few minutes. It serves to seal the deal of the week and get everyone completely caught up.

I also disagree with your long answer. It's not necessarily productive to work in the same room. That's why God invented cubicles! In all seriousness, though, a lot of people -- myself included -- work best in isolation. The bottom line is that you should get the people together in your group and figure out what will work best. Some people prefer working in the same room, some people get distracted because of that, etc. Find our what works best for you and stick to that.

DenisM4• 18 years ago

I'm not saying this lightly, I was dead set agains it before I became 100% for it. It boils down to one thing:

It's a lot easier to stay focused when the other guy is focused.

mynameishere• 18 years ago

4 people should be in a state of continuous meeting.

Kaizyn2• 18 years ago

The problem with this is that too much cross-communication will result in a productivity drain.

jlouis• 18 years ago

Meetings should have an agenda. By mail. 5 days in advance. That will kill "impulse meetings". First point on the agenda: "Is this meeting necessary?". Every time. With luck, it can be adjourned in less than 5 minutes. If not, you have something to discuss.

Meetings have a secretary who writes down decisions. The referendum is available as quickly as possible. The same day or the next. Meetings have a speaker who conducts the order in which people are speaking. For each agenda-point, you have 2 rounds of discussion. After that, you must cast a vote on the point or make a decision.

Ok, that was the extreme version. But it is either that or "till the coffee cup is empty" meetings. The advantage of having some rules is that you will actually get something done in the meetings. If you can't get something decided, voted in or otherwise actionated, don't hold the meeting.

Remember: If there is 8 people in a meeting, each minute in the meeting takes 8 minutes of work. Also, there are 8*7/2 relations between these people. This leads to the conclusion that you must keep the number of people down in a meeting.

Finally: Get consistency in when meetings are held. In my former code-job I hated getting in to work in order to do some great coding, just to be shown off into a meeting. All productivity that day was totally gone afterwards. Do that 3 days a week and you have cut your productivity of your developer to 2/5. Do it for all of the 6 person staff and you lost about 2.5 persons in productivity a week.

Do I sound bitter? I probably am :)

chrisbroadfoot6• 18 years ago

Mail is horrible. As I just commented, I much prefer the pattern of using a wiki to organise a meeting agenda.

That way, everyone can contribute to the meeting's purpose (beforehand, obviously)

skmurphy3• 18 years ago

Not only beforehand: you can use the same page for the minutes as well and the "secretary" doesn't become the neck of the bottle. The page should be updated during the meeting and links added to other relevant material as needed.

tonystubblebine• 18 years ago

Since people are already advising you to ditch the meetings, I'll just answer with a direct tip.

Try sending out an email detailing the meeting's goals, agenda, and any preparation you expect from the participants. This is sometimes called GAP and I had a coworker who was a bit of a task master who'd come from a company with the policy that you didn't have to go to any meeting that didn't provide this. I like the sentiment, at least, that meetings require preparation.

So for a weekly meeting you might send: Goal: To assign work responsibilities for the week Agenda: * Keeping our promise to deliver X to customer Y * Assigning bug #123 * etc. Preparation: Could everyone come prepared with the state of their work?

In my experience, the preparation part is the part most likely to fail. Either the meeting planner isn't the type of personality to enforce it or the meetings aren't important enough for the participants to actually do the prep. In either case, you can drop it as just having a clear goal and agenda will make any meeting better.

Also, forcing yourself to be clear about the goals and the agenda will help you see ways that you could eliminate parts of your meetings.

chrisbroadfoot6• 18 years ago

I think using e-mail for preparation already puts your meeting on a route for destination FAIL.

strlen• 18 years ago

One interesting tactic that we had at Yahoo and have adopted at a start-up (which includes several ex-Yahoos) is the "stand-up meeting", where the idea is that we all stand (as not to be comfortable and not have the meeting drag on for hours) and merely say what we are doing that may be a blocker to others (or where we are being blocked by somebody else).

Another idea (for engineers) is setup an IRC server and have everybody run a screened (as in the screen utility) client on a stable UNIX machine in a common channel. Screen on a stable UNIX machine provides persistence, IRC provides real time ability. 37signals campfire provides the same functionality (real time, but also persistent chat) for less technical people.

chrisbroadfoot6• 18 years ago

Keep it short and to the point.

Have an agenda. Allow people to edit the agenda before-hand (a wiki is a good place for this).

Make sure actions come out of the meeting, so the time isn't wasted.

skmurphy3• 18 years ago

These are great suggestions! We use a private wiki that anyone on the team can edit: it saves a lot of time versus E-mail. We use the same page for both the agenda, the minutes, and a decision record (you can always re-factor or start pages to address ongoing issues/concerns, but there should be a single page for the meeting that links to related content). Since you are geographically separated I would use an IM session (e.g skype chat, google chat, AOL, Yahoo) that lets everyone take contemporaneous notes and pass links/URLs and raise their hand to speak. Take a few minutes after the meeting is over to clean up the transcript and paste it into the meeting wiki page, it doesn't have to be pretty, but comprehensible a few months from now (and everyone else can continue to refine/edit etc..). Key thing is to get decisions documented, the context that led to them, and for major decisions a brief prediction on expected outcomes and when and how to re-evaluate.

chrisbroadfoot6• 18 years ago

The other good thing about wiki vs email is that you have a permanent record of everything that has ever happened. E-mails get lost, and new employees cannot browse the old content

wheels• 18 years ago

Ditto on the agenda-in-wiki, with the addition that if it's not on the agenda it has to wait until next week. This keeps meetings from wandering from topic to topic, usually on topics that someone just thought of that don't really need to be discussed in a group.

visitor4rmindia• 18 years ago

When you have a team size of only 4 people, I really feel you should target continuous communication. A weekly meeting just encourages each individual to "go dark". I'd suggest a daily 'stand-up' meeting.

I've used this format when forming new teams and the 10 minutes the meeting typically takes is more than paid for by the increased communication. Plus it helps motivation - everyone can share daily progress and trouble spots.

The key to this working correctly is you've gotta drive it. There is a general agenda (share progress and discuss issues) but no minutes or note taking. This means you've got to keep track of everything in your head (the big picture). Then you get to decide - "Hey this is taking too long" or "We need in-depth discussion of this" or "X isn't communicating/contributing enough" etc etc...

randy• 18 years ago

There's no one 'proper' way to conduct meetings, it depends on your team and situation. You'd probably be good to ask your (conveniently small) team about the issue, they'll be able to give you a better answer than any HN user.

That being said, 37signals "Getting Real" has a chapter on meetings (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch07_Meetings_Are_Toxic.php) that is probably worth reading (though most of the points have already been made in comments here), as is the rest of the book.

dkokelley• 18 years ago

Minimize meetings.

Limit most meetings to "actionable" items. (Person A does task X. Person B does task Y after task X is completed.)

Keep meetings short. (If the information can be given 1 on 1, great, if you can cover it over email or a phone call, even better.)

Maybe once weekly have recap/planning meetings, and make sure they are scheduled and sacred. Use them to look at what got done that week and what needs to get done next week.

Limit "vision & direction" meetings to conversations over lunch. You're the CEO, and your job is to get version 1 out the door. If you think that there is a fatal flaw in the fundamentals, don't pull everyone out of what they're doing.

Most of these tips only work because of the small number of people (who I assume you are very familiar with) involved.

Subscribe to the "Manager Tools" podcast (http://www.manager-tools.com/). There's lots of good information there, though it is designed for larger corporations. Just keep the ideas in mind as you grow.

Kaizyn2• 18 years ago

Question: Is your team meeting necessary every week? If there isn't a set of issues that need to be brought up, then you should seriously consider skipping meetings.

At a minimum, the following things should be kept in mind for running meetings: 1) Send out an agenda for the meeting beforehand a minimum 4 hours (half a day) ahead of time to allow everyone enough time to read it. Have printed copies for everyone attending can be helpful as well. 2) Use the meetings as a forum only to disseminate information to your team or to make decisions. This one is crucial. If you aren't making decisions, the meeting is a waste of everyone's time. 3) Have a fixed time each week that team meetings are held so that everyone can plan ahead to be available to attend. 4) Keep the meetings as short as possible. Hopefully with a rather focused agenda and restraining your meetings from turning into a discussion forum, you can keep the team meeting to an hour or less.

No one likes meetings that feel like they're a waste of time. Also, by making the focus of the meeting on decision making, you stop it from degenerating into endless discussions. By keeping them short and focused, everyone will be more likely to think that the meeting was useful for them to attend.

gruseom• 18 years ago

If you're having the meetings for the sake of having a weekly meeting (or, what amounts to the same thing, for a managerial reason like "status updates") then I'm not surprised it's dull. People's spirits are weighed down by the artificiality of that. It's a drag to drop what you're doing, which presumably is interesting, and go sit around doing something boring. Surely that's the last thing you ought to be doing in a startup.

To get out of the trap, apply the converse. The same people who groan at the thought of enduring an arbitrary meeting will come to life when working together on something real. Therefore, figure out how to make your meetings real work on something that matters. Failing that, ask the team to figure out a way to provide the value of the meeting without needing to have a meeting.

Here's my criterion. I ask myself whether what's going on is making me (and others) feel more or less alive. If it's the latter, I try to understand why. If necessary, I'll speak up and say frankly that what we're doing feels like a drag and change the subject to what we can do about it.

Basically, if it doesn't feel fun, something's wrong. Fun is the canary in the coal mine: if it goes, everything else is going too, just more slowly. So it really pays to give attention to this. I'm surprised more people don't figure that out. (Incidentally, by "fun" I don't mean anything set up to be fun, like those asinine team-building outings... those things aren't fun, they're a crate of suckage with a label that says "fun" stuck on it. What I'm talking about is spontaneous enjoyment of creative work and meaningful interaction with others.)

icey• 18 years ago

Hmm. You're getting some... strange advice in this thread.

First: A scheduled weekly meeting with you and three other people is most likely overkill. The only reason to have scheduled meetings with that frequency is if you are dealing with a large team with conflicting schedules. What do you do in these meetings? I hope it's not a status report meeting. I would certainly hope in that small a team you already know the status before even starting the meeting.

Always ask yourself "can this be solved with an email or a phone call" before calling a meeting. People resent having their time spent by their boss catching up.

Don't be afraid to grab two people and say "hey guys, we need to hash this out". If you feel that it's going to take more than 20 minutes or so, THEN schedule a meeting.

Try not to schedule meetings too far out in advance. Having a meeting scheduled 5 days out kills productivity. Nobody will want to make a decision because it will be talked about "in the meeting".

Something that I see a ton of in startups is the perceived need for formality. In a team of 4, I would assume you have other responsibilities than managing the rest of your team. If not, then I assume you're the money guy. Either way, be very careful of destroying your team's productivity because you're looking for a way to validate your position. You don't have to do that, I assume they already understand you're the CEO.

I can tell people have done a lot of reading about how other companies do their meetings; unfortunately none of it is good advice. You know your team and we don't. You know your product and we don't. If meetings seem boring, then you probably shouldn't have had one. If people can't keep in the loop with what's going on in the company, then you need more meetings.

Anyways, let's get to a TLDR version:

- Don't have a meeting without a clear reason for having one.

- That reason has to pass the "can this be solved by an email or phone call" litmus test.

- Don't waste people's time.

Herring• 18 years ago

for future reference, the tldr usually goes first.

bootload• 18 years ago

"... I've been having trouble getting much traction going at my teams weekly meetings ..."

Probably because they realise that you get paid just as much in meetings as coding except meetings are a whole lot easier. How many people do you have? (4) Are they all in the same room. If they are all in the same room and your team is small you don't need "formal" meetings. It's just another distraction in flow.

reitzensteinm• 18 years ago

Manager Tools has some pretty good podcasts on conducting meetings. They're not startup or tech specific, but they'll definitely give you some food for thought:

http://www.manager-tools.com

edu• 18 years ago

What kind of meeting?

In some cases I'll recommend Lego Serious Play, http://www.seriousplay.com/. Basically uses Lego to project the issues discusses in the meeting so it's easier to (1) de-personalize them and (2) to visualize.

DanielBMarkham• 18 years ago

Daily stand-ups for 5 minutes each.

Weekly 15-minute "what's killing us right now" meetings

Work in the same room all the time.

Make it a point to spend a lunch with the team at least once a week somewhere besides lunch.

Repeat and rinse.

My guess is that you're not co-locating and collaborating effectively. If you were, meetings would not be a problem.

danw• 18 years ago

First step is to figure out why you want weekly team meetings. Once you've figured out the goal make sure everyone attending knows it, keep the time spent to a minimum (max 30 mins) and don't let anyone take you on an irrelevant tangent.

Ask YC: How to conduct a meeting?

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