Startup Guide to Internal Meetings.

I know it’s Friday evening but today I’ve been thinking a lot about meetings.

Specifically, how to run efficient, effective internal meetings. And how to have fewer of them. They are such an integral part of any organization, the simple mechanism of bringing your team together.

The whole point of internal meetings is generally to make decisions about how to get things done and make sure everyone’s on the same page about it. But the Catch-22 is that you can’t actually get anything done while you’re actively sitting in a meeting.

So there must be a delicate balance meeting-time and getting-shit-done-time.

As the founder of a tech startup, I think I’m more inclined than most to limit meetings in service of having more time to work on stuff. Generally I’ve found that most things can be communicated and accomplished asynchronously, and when they can’t it’s usually easiest to just make a quick ad-hoc phone call vs. scheduling time on the calendar.

If you are as meeting-minimal as me, then there are really two types of mandatory, scheduled, internal team meetings you should consider having on the calendar:

1. A daily standup (15min)

2. A weekly all-hands (60min)

Daily Standup (15min)

A daily standup is exactly what it sounds like. A simple meeting, typically held mid-morning (10a or 11a is ideal) that lasts up to 15-minutes, with the explicit intent of keeping everyone in the loop. They are meant to be short as to avoid getting too into the weeds or becoming a distraction in the flow of the day (they’re called ‘standups’ bc the thinking it they should be short enough for everyone to take the meeting standing up and not getting too comfortable)

In a standup, each team member goes around and shares 3 simple things: 1) what did they get done yesterday, 2) what they plan on getting done today, and 3) are there any impediments in their way. By doing this everyone know’s the rough-strokes of what’s going on and blockers preventing progress are surfaced, so they can then be solved outside the meeting. Importantly, standups are NOT meant for problem-solving or in-depth discussions.

Weekly All-Hands / L10 (60min)

On the other hand, another approach is to just have a single, dense meeting once a week to discuss what’s going on executively as a full team. The most common and well-regarded version of these is the Level-10 (L10) meeting, which is a particularly structured meeting described in Gino Wickman’s Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) guide. The L10 is designed strictly to maximize productivity and accountability amongst a team by covering distinct elements.

My personal favorite L10 design starts with 5min of segue/banter, 5min reviewing metrics/KPIs, 5min covering major ‘headlines’ (things worth calling out about customers/upcoming events), 5min going over basic to-do’s for everyone on the team that week, and then 45min of good old issue-solving. This is basically where you go through and identify any issues (blockers) preventing work from getting done, prioritize the top 3 worth discussing, and then work through solutions as a team. At the end of each L10 (importantly), each team member grades how they thought the meeting went to enable continuous improvement

Other Meetings

Anything outside those two things probably doesn’t require a pre-scheduled meeting. Not saying you cant grab ad hoc time on the calendar to discuss things or solve them more in-depth, but remember the more meetings you schedule the less time you have to get the shit done. And of course a meeting doesn’t just eliminate work time in a 1:1 ratio — it also eliminates work time leading up to and after by breaking the flow state. Just ask Paul Graham.

Anyways, if you’re going to schedule meetings as as startup, those are the only two I’d consider, and generally you only need to pick one or the other.

Peace,
Ramsey