Meetings Exercise

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>> We're gonna have an exercise now. So same formatting, this August one status update. I want you to make a meeting agenda about it. You're gonna have 30 people in a room, from a 5,000 person company, some of those 3010 will be executives, including the VP of product and the CEO and they wanna understand what the delay is about.

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10 more technical stakeholders on your project a few which are impacted adversely by your delay, so they're not gonna be pumped about it. And they will be looking to kinda take you to task a little bit about like, hey, why are you late and we want this sooner.

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And the last 10 or your team members and your designers ever talk about the design process your UX researchers prepare to talk about the new research needed, and the tech lead is ready to talk about the development process. The tone of the meeting you generally anticipate to be tense, but generally everyone just wants to launch features.

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So no one's gonna be like out to get you, they're just all worrying about their piece of the pie. So I want you to write an agenda for this. I want you to write some time boxes for it, and then just kinda take some notes for yourself like what challenges are you gonna expect and how can you organize yourself to get the maximum effect out of this meeting?

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And again, your point is essentially is like, we're late, but this is necessary and we're gonna end up with a better thing if we delay two weeks. That's generally what your point is. So you can feel free to write about this one. If you have a meeting that you like are about to do at work, by all means, do the exact same exercise for your meeting at work.

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This can be helpful for yourself as well. But in the absence of that you can do it about this formatting exercise. So I'm curious some of your approaches to this. I am pretty wide with my time boxes, and I'm not gonna say anything here is wrong or right.

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I'm just gonna tell you how I approach these. So I'm not down to like, okay, we're gonna address this point, then this point, then this point. I'm generally here, probably like 15 minutes of me just talking about this is the overall summary of what's happening. Do you have any questions about this?

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Probably give me like another five to 15 minutes of discussion about that. So, probably the first half would just be me owning the meeting, talking about this is the process, this is what we're gonna talk about. Do you have questions about the delay? And then leaving those kinda like informational towards the end.

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Obviously, this is gonna be those parts right there. They're kinda like the carrot to move the meeting along, is like, hey, do you wanna see the new designs? Do you wanna talk about the development process? So I probably give each one of these people 10 minutes, give or take depending on what they wanted to do, right?

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Maybe the US researcher doesn't need that much. Maybe the designer needs more. But I leave probably the last half of the meeting. It's hey, here's the actual technical details here. So, if I was gonna write this down, 30 minutes for me to talk about, break that down into two sections, what happened and what's gonna happen.

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And then 10 minutes for each one of those specialists to come in and talk about whatever they wanna talk about. So my general approach to that, I'm curious if anyone had any sort of differing thoughts there. Yeah,
>> I'd be curious your opinion on this. I broke it down similarly, but I put it was essentially, here's the problem.

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Here's what we're doing about it. We have eight minutes for questions right in the middle of the meeting and the tactic being that if the room is gonna be times blow up, there's gonna be a problem. You can say, yeah, with Pastor Tom, and then I get to run I get to be the runner I get to filibuster it basically, [LAUGH] for the next half hour of, here's what's next.

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But essentially, to keep the meeting from running out, I figured if there's gonna be a little tension if other folks are gonna have opinions. We could put that in the middle and we'd literally have times the damage control it, [LAUGH] in the tail.
>> It's gonna depend on, do you think you can corral those data into eight minutes?

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It's gonna depend who it is culture, your personality. If I had done that in those Microsoft media I would not have regained control of that meeting. I could see it kinda breaking down. It's like all right, we have blocks of time for questions, so if you're like, all right, presentation, 10 minutes, five minutes for questions and just say if you're missing this block, there's another one coming after this.

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So if someone's running over it's all right, we gotta keep this going. But especially eight minutes seems pretty tight to me. I don't know, your mileage may vary there.
>> Yeah, no, I agree with you at six and one-half dozen another, it depends a lot on who and what the dynamics are.

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But I appreciate your comments. I wouldn't propose that as an ideal strategy by any means.
>> Yeah. I mean, it's a tough balance to walk there. Yeah, Dustin.
>> Christine, the chat says, very similar, left the questions to the last 15 minutes. Otherwise, I thought they may ask questions that were covered by the specialists.

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>> Yeah. Totally I think that is a super valid strategy and just saying, hey, keep your questions we got them at the end. That is generally a fairly effective strategy depending on again, who is in the room and how apt they are to interrupt. I am kinda used to working with CEOs and vice presidents that are willing to just come down the say, I don't care we're gonna ask it now, [LAUGH].

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And you can, [INAUDIBLE] some of those people. The Jedi mind trick I like to pull there at the end. So like, well, this is gonna happen the design and this is gonna be like, hold on, I'm gonna cut your question off there cuz we still have someone that's about to answer a lot of those questions.

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And so a little trick there to say like, we haven't talked about that yet, keep at it, and then we're gonna talk about it at the end. But I think both of those are valid strategies. I'd be happy with either one of those.