Technical Leadership and meetings

I don’t like meetings. And the main reason is that in many projects that I worked on the meetings were not setup properly and it’s not that easy to prepare an efficient meeting.

You need to have a clear agenda, clear goals and relevant attendees. Or you set it up as a brainstorming meeting with a clear goal of defining certain topics in a specific way.

Most meeting are something like let’s discuss about this business case, story or requirement.

My approach is to push back and ask for:

• clear agenda
• clear goal (what we want to achieve from that meeting)
• relevant information that needs to be read/known in advance (so that attendees are prepared)
• what is expected from each participant (if not obvious)
• review relevant participants (be sure that we have the right people in the meeting)

And in a number of cases you end-up with a couple of emails exchanged and problem solved without having the actual meeting. And a clear proper written trace of the discussion, topic and decision.

And there are also environments where people don’t respond or are afraid to respond in written, afraid to make decisions that would contradict someone higher placed. Or they lack experience and want input from the technical side in order to decide on any action. And you need meetings and a great facilitator. Try to stay away from those, you never grow in this kind of environments.