Seventeen bits of advice from Ariel Salminen on Leading Successful Product Teams. I really like all of them. Allow me to pluck off a few about meetings:
- Avoid meetings as much as possible. Instead of having them, communicate asynchronous to each other via tools such as Linear, GitHub, Figma, Slack, and similar.
- Provide at least three days of focus time per week for designers and developers in the team. There should be no interruptions whatsoever during this time. Let them do their work.
People gotta work yo. Including yourself. You gotta give lots of time to let that happen. Context switching has a cost for some people, and I’ve found a heavy cost for some. Too much of it, which meetings force, can scuttle an entire week of productivity.
But one is probably good:
Don’t do team wide standups or sync meetings, except one meeting at the start of every week. Here you can walk through the tasks and discuss how the team feels, what motivates them right now, and if there are any blockers.
That’s generally what we do at CodePen right now. One standing meeting on Monday to look at everything going on and make sure everybody has got stuff. Under an hour is the goal.
We do have occasional sync up meetings but only when it’s obviously appropriate, like when a new project is just taking shape. I find these to be highly beneficial, as I find that if you think everyone understands what is going on exactly as you do: you’re wrong.
I also feel the one-on-one stuff (not official One-on-One’s, just like grabbing someone to chat) are the most beneficial, as in our case, they tend to be pair programming sessions and they can really chew through tasks efficiently.