Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask YC: How to conduct a meeting?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 38 posts

Re: Ask YC: How to conduct a meeting?

#21

Post by dkokelley »

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.

Re: Ask YC: How to conduct a meeting?

#22

Post by Kaizyn »

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.

Re: Ask YC: How to conduct a meeting?

#24

Post by gruseom »

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.)

Re: Ask YC: How to conduct a meeting?

#25

Post by icey »

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.

Re: Ask YC: How to conduct a meeting?

#26

Post by chrisbroadfoot »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #9

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 sen…

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

Re: Ask YC: How to conduct a meeting?

#27

Post by Herring »

icey wrote: post #25

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…

for future reference, the tldr usually goes first.

Re: Ask YC: How to conduct a meeting?

#28

Post by bootload »

"... 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.

Re: Ask YC: How to conduct a meeting?

#30

Post by skmurphy »

chrisbroadfoot wrote: post #15

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.

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.
Post reply on HN