meetings meetings are whether you like it or not an important part of your job at least unless you are running a single person startup and even then you'll probably have some kind of meeting at some point of meetings with the people who use your products you'll have meetings with external services you'll have meetings with financial advisors whoever it is you're going to have meetings meetings are often demonized as the anti-productive way of spending your time in fact many leading business minds regard meetings as something to minimize and we're not going to rail against that on this podcast necessarily but instead i do want to talk about how to make your meetings more effective put them in their right place and leverage them as well as you possibly can and we're not going to do this in one episode we're going to split this up across a couple of episodes we're going to cover one topic in each of those episodes one specific thing that you should focus on in today's episode we're going to cover the topic of establishing a goal for your meeting you might think about this as the purpose of the meeting why are we meeting in the first place i'm going to steal from an early intel ceo's opinion on this andy grove andy says that there are basically two different kinds of meetings one is process oriented meetings these are things that you come to expect your one-on-ones manager your staff meetings all hands skip level meetings maybe your planning sessions your refinement of your backlog your retros these are all process oriented meetings and you could even include things that are kind of on demand like for example a post-mortem because they have an established process they are you kind of following the established process for the specific outcomes that you care about we'll talk about that in just a moment the second kind of meeting is a mission oriented meeting these are ad hoc meetings centered centered around a specific output usually this is a decision we're going to talk about both of these and talk about what you're optimizing for in today's episode the first is the process oriented meeting these are the output of each of your process meetings is variable it's not going to be the same amongst all of them for example the output of a one-on-one might actually change from week to week and that is part of the design of the one-on-one there are some meetings that do have specified outputs like refinement but importantly the process that is used to accomplish those outputs is often quite important as well the kind of side effects of the process matter in the case of refinement some of the side effects are breaking down the work and talking about the specifics doing some kind of estimation even the estimation sub process if you will has value that extends beyond the output of the estimation for example if you have two engineers one estimates that the work is a small amount and the other estimates that it's a larger amount there's some kind of information that is unearthed in this process and so these process oriented meetings follow a process that has multiple outputs typically with one primary output that you care the most about in other words if you have a refinement session that does not provide output of actionable tasks you didn't really actually accomplish the goal of the meeting even if there were other positive side effects we'll talk about mission oriented meetings right after we talk about today's sponsor this episode of developer t is brought to you by launch darkly launch darkly is feature management for the modern enterprise fundamentally changing how you deliver software here's how it works launch darkly enables development and operations teams to deploy code at any time even if a feature isn't ready to be released to users we've been talking about meetings on this episode how many times have you had a meeting to discuss whether a feature was ready or not to discuss whether all of the teams were absolutely ready to release this thing well maybe your team is and you want to check it out in production but not everyone else is ready you can do that with launch darkly test those features test your infrastructure in the production environment rather than in some lowly staging or development environment that doesn't have everything all wired up without impacting the wrong end users and when you're ready to release more widely just update the flag and the changes are made instantaneously by the real-time streaming architecture go and check it out get started today for free at launch darkly.com that's launch darkly.com thanks again to launch darkly for sponsoring today's episode of developer t we're going to talk about mission oriented meetings in just a moment but i want to give you a yellow flag here on the goal orientation of your meeting if you start to see your mission there's one of one of two things happening either the number of meetings that you have starts to lean heavily into mission oriented meetings right and usually this means that you have a lot of meetings that pop up on your calendar last minute you have a lot of different meetings every week one person is asking you for a meeting tomorrow a totally different person is asking you for a meeting next week on the same day and you're going to be asking for a meeting next week on the same day this is a sign that your process oriented meetings are not solving enough think about this for a second your process oriented meetings are intended to be how you get work done they should be your highest leverage tool as far as synchronous collaboration goes and synchronous collaboration is very expensive and so when you have these out of band mission oriented meetings that occur they should pick up the phone and they should be able to do it in a way that's not going to be where your process oriented meetings leave off in other words maybe the mission oriented meeting is required as a limited time kind of collaboration between two disparate teams or maybe there is a mission oriented meeting about an unexpected change in the market the important thing to recognize is that if you continue to have this overflow of mission oriented meetings then it's likely that you need to inspect not the mission oriented meetings but instead the process oriented meetings what are your process oriented meetings not providing that you're having to resort to last minute ad hoc meetings in order to get things done now with that said let's talk about mission oriented meetings mission oriented meetings are intended to provide a specific outcome like a decision we can't always make critical decisions in an in a process oriented meeting because we don't always have all of the parties necessary to make the decision additionally we have to think about the ongoing cost of process meetings as well if we have process meetings for decisions that we rarely make but they're recurring then we're paying extra overhead for something that we don't need to do very often in other words it might make sense to just deal with those on a one-off basis but here's how it all comes together we've talked a lot about process oriented meetings but we've also talked about process oriented meetings a lot about a mission orientation for your meetings why does this matter to what your goal is well ultimately if your goal is to produce a one-time output something that you don't expect to have to do again or if you're going to do it it's going to be sporadic and difficult to predict if your goal is to produce a specific decision at a point in time then a mission oriented meeting is likely what you're what you're actually scheduling if your goal is instead to address a specific goal then you're going to have to do something that's going to be a little bit more complicated than just a one-off but it's going to be a little bit more complicated than just a one-off but it's going to be a little bit more complicated than just a one-off well we just don't have enough information in our backlog we need to address the lack of information in our backlog our gut reaction might be let's address this in a single kind of marathon session let's get our backlog into order and then we'll be good going forward but instead we should be thinking about how the backlog got to the state that it's in today how can we change our process and by extension our process oriented meetings do we for example need to change the criteria for putting a card in the backlog or maybe we need to extend the length of time that we're spending in our refinement session or maybe we need to set aside specific time as individuals asynchronously to comb through the backlog in advance there's a lot of things that we could do but the important thing is that we need to set aside specific time as individuals asynchronously to flag is when we start going to meetings as a solution to a problem we shouldn't think about meetings as a solution to a problem instead we should think about meetings as an opportunity to create some kind of output to affect some kind of change a mission-oriented meeting is intended to change the status of a decision from undecided to decided this is not solving a specific problem it's changing something a process-oriented meeting is not solving an issue because if there's an issue it's likely created by a bad process instead we adjust our process-oriented meetings so that the output prevents those problems from happening in the future once you understand your goal in a meeting you can then progress on to improve the meeting from the perspective of optimizing for that goal in future episodes we're going to talk about how you fit into that picture how do you optimize for that goal and what should you watch out for in yourself and in others thanks so much for listening to today's episode of developer t if you want to hear more about how to make your meetings more successful please subscribe on whatever podcasting app you're currently using thank you again to today's sponsor launch darkly head over to launch darkly.com to get started for free today and lastly a quick plug for the developer t community if you want to join a community of other engineers and engineering leaders who are like you they want to improve in their careers and in their lives go and check out the developer t discord community head over to developer t.com slash discord to join totally free today thanks so much for listening and until next time enjoy your tea