running a meeting.

As a Product Manager, or any manager, having a series of meetings is inevitable. Whether you are having a product review, debating a topic, making a decision, attending a stand-up session, or meeting with yourself in your head. Haha!

This write-up is going to highlight three important things that should be done to run an effective and efficient meeting:

Confirm if the meeting is necessary: Firstly, identify the purpose of the meeting. Ask yourself, "Why am I calling this meeting?" "Is this something I can send as an email to the parties involved, or would a conference call on Zoom be ideal?" "What am I trying to achieve?" If the purpose of the meeting is to make a decision, ensure that all the parties involved have background knowledge of the subject matter before the meeting.

An efficient meeting starts promptly, stays on track due to good time management, includes as few people as possible, and achieves the stated objective.

An effective meeting brings a thoughtfully selected group of people together for a specific purpose, provides a forum for open discussion, and delivers a tangible result: a decision, a plan, a list of great ideas to pursue, or a shared understanding of the work ahead.

Choose specific attendees: Invite the key stakeholders to the meeting. These should be people who play a significant role in the matter, the decision-makers, or people with distinct opinions. When meetings grow too large, attendees can lose respect for the meeting, which leads to less preparation, participation, and action. It then becomes difficult to come up with a specific action.

For example, you probably do not need the whole engineering team to be at the meeting. You may only need the team lead and maybe one more person from the engineering team.

Stick to the created agenda: Now that the meeting has been decided and the attendees have been invited, let's start the meeting. The agenda of the meeting must be available to everybody, and as the facilitator of the meeting, you should stick to it.

Since everybody was aware of the goal of the meeting beforehand, it is easier for people to ask questions, make contributions, and stick to the allotted time. It is very possible to have more than one point to discuss, so highlight the order in which these things are going to be discussed.

For example, the product team of Company X needs to release either Feature Y or Feature Z in the coming months. The meeting goal should be centered around that. In that case, let the meeting goal drive the agenda of the meeting. It can look like this:

Determine the feature to be pushed out to production.

Discuss the marketing strategy for the new feature.

Plan the press release/product review for the new feature.

More things can be done to have an effective meeting; however, these three actions should be prioritized. Running meetings is part of our everyday lives, whether face-to-face with the team, through an online conference call, or one-on-one in the corridor of the office.