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Show HN: Meetter – Reduce time wasted by meetings

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Re: Show HN: Meetter – Reduce time wasted by meetings

#21

Post by genevpd »

StavrosK wrote: post #19
lsiebert wrote: post #11

I'll be honest, many of the issues I've seen with meetings are issues with not training people how to have productive meetings, not having it clear who can make decisions, and perverse incentives. Not to mention almost every woman I know in tech has told me a story where they are ignored, only to have someone else who's a guy propose basically the same idea (including having had male coworkers who are friends knowing…

I have tried to do some of that with a Slack bot project I'm working on, called Huxley: https://www.meethuxley.com/ Basically, it used guided questions to get you to give structure to your meetings. I will add some of your suggestions, they sound very good. I should also get around to releasing it one of these days...

Happy to hear that there are other companies solving the same problem!

We are working on Slack integration too, it will be possible to create & schedule Meetter topics right from Slack or from Teams.

Re: Show HN: Meetter – Reduce time wasted by meetings

#22

Post by genevpd »

system2 wrote: post #20
genevpd wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your suggestion on landing page! The problem we see is that companies in their transition from physical office to a virtual and distributed workplace carried over all the meeting habits that are outdated. We believe there is no longer need in standing meetings with fixed audiences. With Meetter, you are basically setting your weekly meetings budget for the whole company and let topics compete for that time…

Have you experienced these yourself or seen it from outside (like a tech consultant)?

Yes, I have personally struggled a lot. About 5+ years of experience working in a highly distributed company where meetings for me and many colleagues take more than 50% of the time. There a lot of advice out there on how to improve things, but it takes time to master. The other problem is that it is not something that only you need to learn, all your peers have to and that takes time. There are also limits to what you can do with existing technology.

Compare the difficulty of doing project task tracking in MS Word versus JIRA/Trello/Basecamp.

With meetings, we are still at MS Word stage and Meetter is a JIRA/Trello for meetings.

Re: Show HN: Meetter – Reduce time wasted by meetings

#23

Post by system2 »

genevpd wrote: post #22
system2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you experienced these yourself or seen it from outside (like a tech consultant)?

Yes, I have personally struggled a lot. About 5+ years of experience working in a highly distributed company where meetings for me and many colleagues take more than 50% of the time. There a lot of advice out there on how to improve things, but it takes time to master. The other problem is that it is not something that only you need to learn, all your peers have to and that takes time. There are also limits to what y…

Well then, you should include a case study like yours because it would be far more effective than a short video.

Re: Show HN: Meetter – Reduce time wasted by meetings

#24

Post by genevpd »

system2 wrote: post #23
genevpd wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I have personally struggled a lot. About 5+ years of experience working in a highly distributed company where meetings for me and many colleagues take more than 50% of the time. There a lot of advice out there on how to improve things, but it takes time to master. The other problem is that it is not something that only you need to learn, all your peers have to and that takes time. There are also limits to what y…

Well then, you should include a case study like yours because it would be far more effective than a short video.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Re: Show HN: Meetter – Reduce time wasted by meetings

#25

Post by lsiebert »

dionian wrote: post #14
lsiebert wrote: post #11

I'll be honest, many of the issues I've seen with meetings are issues with not training people how to have productive meetings, not having it clear who can make decisions, and perverse incentives. Not to mention almost every woman I know in tech has told me a story where they are ignored, only to have someone else who's a guy propose basically the same idea (including having had male coworkers who are friends knowing…

> I'll be honest, many of the issues I've seen with meetings are issues with not training people how to have productive meetings, not having it clear who can make decisions, and perverse incentives. I agree with this, a lot of this is human error and inefficiency and tendency to fill spaces > Not to mention almost every woman I know in tech has told me a story where they are ignored, only to have someone else who's a…

I'm not sure why you raised your point, but unfortunately generalizing when a specific issue is raised is one of the problem things I see in meetings too.

Like if someone says, "The front end is extremely slow loading the SPA in the browser because of legacy cruft," I see a lot of people relate that to their area or generalize, either "Analytics also takes forever, the email queue needs more workers/the db has slow queries, building the app takes too long, the mobile app take forever to sign in" etc etc, or "the whole tech stack is slow and needs improvement."

No doubt all true, and sure perhaps speeding up DB queries by indexing on user email or whatever would speed up loading for signed in people, but the front end is still slow to load, and bringing up other issues doesn't solve the specific problem raised, if you get my point.

Re: Show HN: Meetter – Reduce time wasted by meetings

#26

Post by peterwwillis »

genevpd wrote: post #13
peterwwillis wrote: post #10

Feature request for way, way down the line: auto-integrating product work into daily/weekly standup meeting invites. If I have committed something, updated a ticket, run a deployment, resolved a pagerduty issue, moved a work task from Planning to Doing, etc, then automate retrieving this work log and pre-populate it in the meeting invite. All members of the meeting can see the work and can ask about it if they need t…

Thanks for bringing this up! One thing that we are not yet sure how much value the concept of daily/weekly standing meetings will add to the teams using Meetter for most of their meetings. I feel like many meeting habits and practices are evolved from the physical office environment that has limitations that are not present in the virtual world. Btw, check out this talk from Al Pittampali at Google https://www.youtub…

Oh I agree, but we do need to discuss blockers relatively quickly after they come up, and stand-ups can be an efficient way to do this. You can try to just automate workflows or try to get people to resolve blockers asynchronously, but if it takes more than a couple replies to resolve them, now a meeting may have been faster/more efficient.

If I'm using Meetter to automatically schedule a stand-up, I (presumably) can say, only schedule the meeting if we have blockers to discuss, and only invite the people who are mentioned in the issue/blocker. But how to determine if there's blockers, and who to invite? Query the issue tracker.

You could look up blocked GitHub or ZenHub Issues and generate a stand-up to discuss them once they happen, and maybe re-generate a stand-up after X time if they have not been updated, to prevent stale blockers.

What I get out of this is when I work for a company which requires stand-ups, I don't have to go to them if I have no blockers. I know I would pay for that privilege :-)

Re: Show HN: Meetter – Reduce time wasted by meetings

#27

Post by jarl-ragnar »

I have a much simpler way of dealing with meetings. If I'm sent a meeting request and there's no agenda or clear reason for my attendance I decline it.

A couple of months doing that in a new job, explaining the rational where necessary, usually sorts the problem out.

Re: Show HN: Meetter – Reduce time wasted by meetings

#28

Post by snarf21 »

jarl-ragnar wrote: post #27

I have a much simpler way of dealing with meetings. If I'm sent a meeting request and there's no agenda or clear reason for my attendance I decline it. A couple of months doing that in a new job, explaining the rational where necessary, usually sorts the problem out.

This is the crux of the problem. Is there an agenda that leads to a concrete result and is it the right set of participants? Too often, people turn a 10 minute meeting into an hour by just socializing or talking about things that only 2 people in the 10 care about or need to know. This is what annoys me about Slack's "we remove all meetings and email" approach. You can have no full meetings using Slack, instead you invite everyone to a channel and have 100 micro-meetings of a minute all day long that constantly interrupt your flow and could be solved easily with one short 15 minute meeting.

The problem is lack of good communication skills. Whether it is inability to write concise emails that have clear actionable tasks or resolution or having agenda for meetings and someone who will force the meeting forward. The other thing that drives this is managers (project, product, technical) who feel they must know everything about everything related to the project. Lack of clear roles and job descriptions exacerbates this issue and you end up with a lot of people only interested in job preservation.

Re: Show HN: Meetter – Reduce time wasted by meetings

#29

Post by genevpd »

peterwwillis wrote: post #26
genevpd wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for bringing this up! One thing that we are not yet sure how much value the concept of daily/weekly standing meetings will add to the teams using Meetter for most of their meetings. I feel like many meeting habits and practices are evolved from the physical office environment that has limitations that are not present in the virtual world. Btw, check out this talk from Al Pittampali at Google https://www.youtub…

Oh I agree, but we do need to discuss blockers relatively quickly after they come up, and stand-ups can be an efficient way to do this. You can try to just automate workflows or try to get people to resolve blockers asynchronously, but if it takes more than a couple replies to resolve them, now a meeting may have been faster/more efficient. If I'm using Meetter to automatically schedule a stand-up, I (presumably) can…

Ah, I see what you are suggesting. This indeed makes sense and may be possible not so far down the road when we expose APIs.

For now, it is possible to implement the same workflow with the current version of Meetter just by asking someone to check task tracker for blockers about 30 minutes before the Meetter hour and manually create topics.

Re: Show HN: Meetter – Reduce time wasted by meetings

#30

Post by genevpd »

jarl-ragnar wrote: post #27

I have a much simpler way of dealing with meetings. If I'm sent a meeting request and there's no agenda or clear reason for my attendance I decline it. A couple of months doing that in a new job, explaining the rational where necessary, usually sorts the problem out.

This is simple if you are in a position of power within the organization. For most makers, this is not the case, so people end-up with meetings where most organizers belive are good and most participants believe are bad, BUT ALMOST NOBODY SPEAKS UP!

With Meetter if someone is a CEO of a company and wants to cut the costs on time wasted because of meetings, this will be a lot faster to achieve than just educating whole company on how to run meetings.

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