The time of senior leadership on a team is precious and expensive but so is the cost of poor decision making and inefficient execution due to misalignment between teams. The Engineering organization I support runs a 50 minute sync every two weeks to provide status updates, escalate issues, and review business updates that may impact our team specifically. In the spirit of continuous improvement, we took time to reflect on the format of the current meeting to make it more effective and efficient. This post is a summary of the lessons learned and where we landed in case it’s helpful to other teams facing similar challenges of respecting people’s time but also ensuring the team leads have the best context in order to enable their individual decision making.

Background Context

Some context around how our team operates might be helpful since our solution is tailored to our team size, culture, and company maturity.

We have strategic reviews every 6 months to refresh our 6-12 month roadmap and do detailed planning at a quarterly level. This biweekly meeting was a forum to monitor our progress on that quarterly plan as a group.

Individual teams manage their own projects. The team leaders maintain their backlog and can choose between using sprints or a kanban process. This meeting is the only time where all team leaders and senior ICs come together. Previously, during this meeting, each team presented their progress, risks, dependencies, and recent updates in just 3 minutes. The slides and a summary of these presentations were shared with the rest of the organization via email and team chat.

Feedback on the Existing Meeting

I met with most of the meeting presenters and attendees to gather feedback. Here were some key themes:

• Wall of text: Slides were text heavy which makes it hard to follow and also hard to determine what needs to be discussed vs ignored.
• Product/Business updates: Reduce the content but add more context so that team leads would be able to communicate the info confidently to their teams in their own team meetings.
• More granularity on near-term milestones: People want to know more about the next 1-3 weeks of work. Milestones beyond that are good to be aware of but have less immediate impact.
• Redundant content: Similar conversations happening in other internal sync meetings and internal organization newsletters.
• Signal to noise: For each individual team, maybe only 10% of the content impacts them but that content is distributed across the entire agenda.
• Limited discussion: We want a format that can surface items that warrant visibility/limited discussion with a larger group.
• Flexible attendance: Meeting invitees who aren’t requested to present can review the content and discussion items and determine if they should attend or skip.

What Other Meetings Do We Have?

In an effort to make the team sync more efficient, I reviewed all our existing meetings to identify if any of the content/conversation at the meeting is redundant with other meetings that currently exist. Some insights:

• External cross functional meetings allow my team to ensure alignment with adjacent teams (SW teams, Operations, etc) and higher level programs. However since only one or two of my team members usually attend, the content isn’t easily accessible or consumable by the rest of my organization.
• Individual team level planning meetings are at a more tactical level and this level isn’t generally relevant to other team in my organization. Other teams are usually more concerned at the milestone level, not the individual task level
• Internal cross functional meetings often cover status updates and dependencies across teams. However, meeting notes and decisions made in these meetings aren’t easily reviewable by teams without a presence in the meeting. This was the largest area of potential redundancy with our team wide, bi-weekly sync meeting.

What Is The Meeting’s Objective?

We wanted to be clear about the objectives of the meeting. We noted that some of these objectives could be accomplished asynchronously by review of the slides.

• Consolidate and pass along external business or product updates that have impacts on our team’s plans and priorities
• Regularly review team progress and ensure alignment with overall team priorities/goals
• Provide visibility on scheduled upcoming work
• Identify changes to internal milestones, risks, or dependencies that impact other individual teams
• Maintain an updated list of milestones, their status, and ETAs, as a reference internally and to be used as source of truth for creating external updates.

Given the feedback and the defined focus of the meeting, we came up with a few high level recommendations:

• Maintain biweekly cadence and <1 hour duration
• Maintain Product/Business update but tailor more explicitly to our team
• Use team email newsletters (and/or internal/external all hands) to call out major wins. Spend our synchronous time on discussing risks and challenges.
• Instead of focusing on individual functional team specific updates, provide updates on each Objective and it’s associated KRs.

Final Product

We continued to start the meeting with business updates, notes from software organization strategic discussions, and general top of mind notes from myself and my Engineering Director partner.

We then had a single slide for each of our three Objectives. Each slide was broken into four quadrants. We gave the slide owner 10 minutes to review the slide with discussion. This encouraged a lot more conversation since folks felt less time pressure to quickly get through all the content on their slide before moving on to the next slide.

Here’s the template for the slide we used.

In the first section, we focused on our OKRs. Specifically, we asked the objective owner to assess our confidence in meeting the individual KRs as well as the objective overall. The slide owner was expected to put the most recent value of the key metric associated with each KR. If something was off track, we wanted to understand why and what the plan was to get our efforts back on track.

This generally flowed into the next section on top risks and problems. This section drove most of the conversation as the slide owner described the current challenges to achieving our goals. Ideally, a mitigation plan was associated with each problem. The objectives we cross functional so generally multiple sub-teams were supporting each objective. This allowed the functional leader of each sub-team to have better context on the challenges members of their team were facing.

We wanted to specifically surface and discuss the challenges, blockers, and risks to ensure broad awareness across the team. Maybe we needed to shift personnel or clarify priorities. Maybe we needed to get more engagement or support from an external team. Or maybe someone had an idea that hadn’t been considered by the core team.

We then transitioned to our schedule to look at upcoming milestones. We only looked a few weeks out since that’s where we had the most fidelity in our schedule and where the work items had immediate impact to the team. People wanted to know what was landing and when in case there were dependencies or prerequisites that needed to be completed. We also wanted to ensure that we continually adjusted our feature development to ensure that we were building capabilities that moved us close to our goals. Often the discussion of KRs or top problems would result in an adjustment of the work plan for the next few weeks.

Lastly, we left a section for the slide owner to outline anything else they thought might require visibility or discussion for the rest of the team. It’s sometimes difficult to understand what decisions are being made in a large organization so this was a space to outline these. Similarly, design docs were often of interest to a broad audience. Sometimes people realized they needed to be more involved in the design doc review process. Other times, people were just interested in what other teams were drafting. Lastly, we used this as a space to talk about any interesting lessons learned from work that was completed in the last few weeks. This could be from experiments that were completed or features that were landed. We wanted to ensure we were continually focused on assessing the impact of our work, not just the execution.

We’ve kept this format for a year with little modifications. The 10 minute allocation really enabled a lot of discussion that was missing in the previous format. The KR review helps keep our goals top of mind and our focus on outcomes over output. Sharing risks and challenges allows the team to build camaraderie and shared ownership of our outcomes. We’ve agreed on shared goals to strive for and this meeting reminds us of our purpose. We’re in this together to achieve something meaningful.

I’ve used this template with slight deviations for additional teams to positive feedback as well. I hope you find it a useful starting off point for iteration on your team’s way of working.