How To Run a Meeting

You should assume that everyone is back-to-back. Show courtesy to all sides by being punctual to the meeting, and wrapping up at the appointed time. Do not run over. This means that you will have to keep an eye on the clock (see below).

A round of introductions and/or some small talk can help ease people into a meeting (especially if they’re back-to-back, which you should assume they are) and reinforce the personal side of business.

Try to avoid going around the room (e.g. a “whipshare”), especially if there are more than four people, as this can take way too long and can lead people to check out.

If a lead on either side of the meeting makes a point about there not being too much time or wanting to jump into it, jump into it.

If the meeting is long and complex (more than two people from each side who will need to give updates or present, over an hour+), there will need to be a formal agenda that’s circulated in advance. Ideally, this will be present on the screen (see below on screen sharing).

If the meeting is short and straightforward (e.g. a get-to-know-you call with a new client), the agenda can be representative of that. See here for more details.

Assume most people need a primer to understand what the meeting is about, what’s being accomplished, and what everyone will walk away with. Lay this out at the very beginning. It can be one sentence. “Okay glad everyone had a good weekend. Thanks for taking the time. Today we’re going to give you an introduction to our segmentation process, we’ll hear about the kinds of insights you’re looking for and for what purposes, and we’ll see if there’s a good fit; if there is, we’ll explore some ways that might work.”

There should almost always be just one goal for any major meeting. Some examples:

• Business development this is often “get to know what the other person does” or “get enough information about potential client needs to put together a proposal”
• Problem solving meetings its “align on the underlying problem and see if we can figure out a way to solve it”
• Weekly planning: “everyone walks away knowing what they’re responsible for that sprint”
• Internal management: “gain approval on a proposed course of action”
• And so on

The idea is that you want to know what everyone is walking away with before the meeting starts. If you don’t know the answer to this question, don’t be afraid to ask it at the very beginning of the meeting.

Meetings are much more useful when participants are sharing the same context and information, whether its an agenda, a presentation, a document, a set of notes, some code, etc. A good heuristic is that someone should be sharing their screen so that everyone is sharing the same context and working together on a shared output.

Reference additional best practices around screen sharing in the Video Chat Guidelines.

A powerful way to do this for meetings that don’t have an obvious thing to share at the outset is to have a live document being updated in front of everyone in real time. This should be editable by everyone in the meeting so they can follow along and make notes as you go. This document should include the agenda and links to any additional information you want attendees to have.

Integrate your Calendar with Loom Meetings in order to record external meetings and auto-capture notes. Sometimes conversations move quickly and we’re only human – Loom helps us capture everything and allows other team members reference the call video and notes in the future.

It is so easy for meetings to drone on and for people to lose their attention and to lose the thread of what’s going on. Don’t let this happen! If you’re running the meeting, there is an onus on you to bring energy to the meeting. Get excited! It makes a huge difference.

A very low-energy situation is the dreaded “asking the room” for an update, how they feel, etc. It’s better to call on specific people with a prompt relevant to their role in the project. “Amanda, I know you’re going to be running the qual, did this meeting leave you with a good sense of how qual will fit into the rest of the project?” is a much more powerful thing to say than “does anyone have any questions?”. “Asking the room” is a diffusion of responsibility which we generally want to avoid.

If there is a material that is necessary context for the discussion, it’s okay (recommended, even) to allot time at the beginning for folks to flip through or to read it. How you should handle this is situation-dependent. If it’s an external meeting and folks have not read it, you should ask if they would like to review it on the clock; if they say no, you should be prepared to give a voice over hitting the main points.

If it’s an internal meeting, you should have planned for, and should allow folks to read it during the meeting.

Keep a sense of your pacing relative to the agenda. If you’re pacing behind, a good strategy is to update everyone’s expectations about what will be accomplished during the current meeting and make the first action item to schedule additional time to do the rest.

Don’t let the clock slip too far. The biggest culprit here is typically spending too much time on the upfront chit chat before getting down to business. Don’t cut people off, but gently guide folks back to the discussion at hand if needed.

If you’re pacing ahead, keep going.

We come together in a meeting to figure out what to do as individuals and how it all fits together. Almost definitionally, there should be things that individuals have to do as a result of any meeting. Unless it’s clear by the nature of the meeting (e.g. weekly planning, where the next steps are encoded in JIRA), the next steps should be clearly articulated at least verbally (“okay so the ball is in our court and we’ll get that proposal back to you in a few days”), and often in writing too, in an email circulated to meeting participants.

Hold time on your calendar after meetings to write down the next steps and circulate them to meeting participants