Every meeting matters

Meetings are where collaboration happens, where real work gets done, and where decisions are made. Then, why are they so often terrible?

Meetings can be magic. Unfortunately, they rarely feel like magic. At ETW, we had just made some big team changes and I assumed leadership of the product team in January 2020. As a company, we were still learning what was really working with clients and what could scale, but we did know one thing: meetings were the tip of the spear for us.

While our consulting improvements were still taking shape, the development team and I started to dig into the meeting problem more aggressively and see how we could improve upon the experience from a product perspective. Plus, we wanted to offer that meeting magic opportunity to even more teams.

Internally, we referred to this project as “3TW,” since it was marking the third iteration of a product effort at ETW. After some early discovery and resource planning, we started designing and developing what eventually became Mindup in April of 2020, launching an alpha version of the product in August, just four months later. Since that time, we’ve been iterating quickly, responding to the user data we have and deploying valuable new features every three-week iteration.

In February of 2021, we even hit the #1 product of the day on Product Hunt.

I learned a lot

As with any product effort, I learned quite a bit. Some of my most important new (and reinforced) learnings while building Mindup included…

• There’s always a better way to validate user needs prior to development

• I need to trust my gut on the team member capabilities and competencies needed to create a valuable product; I should have made some earlier changes

• The right design or development contractor can solve a lot of problems

• Even teams with very authoritarian leadership backgrounds can become highly autonomous, collaborative teams if given the appropriate time and environment

• You have to change out the development methodology to fit the team you have; both Scrum and ShapeUp didn’t work that well for us, but Kanban did

• Retrospectives remain the most powerful meeting possible—there is no stopping a team committed to small, continued improvements each and every iteration

• Remote work isn’t ideal for everybody, but you can make it work better for everybody

• Marketing is much more difficult than product management

• Creating a simple framework for experimentation helps everybody stay on the same page with what’s being done, what we’ve learned, and how we’ll change next

• Intercom is pure awesomeness and I learned how to use this onboarding software much more effectively over the course of this effort

• Context shifting can take its toll on deep work—do everything you can to focus

For the love of all things, stop the cycle of boring, purposeless, and actionless meetings.