Running an Effective and Efficient Meeting as a Product Manager

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

Myself and a group of colleagues in a brainstorming session

This writeup is going to highlight 3 important things that should be done to run an effective and efficient meeting:

1. 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 a conference call on Zoom will be ideal?” “What am I trying to achieve?”. If the purpose of the meeting is to make a decision, ensure all the parties involved have a background 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, a shared understanding of the work ahead.
2. Choose specific Attendees: Invite the key stakeholders into the meeting. People that 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. To come up with a specific action will then be difficult. For example, you probably do not need the whole engineering team to be at the meeting, just the team lead and maybe one more person from the engineering team.
3. Stick to created Agenda: Now that meeting has been decided and attendees have been invited, let start the meeting. The agenda of the meeting must be available to everybody, stick to it as the facilitator of the meeting. Since everybody was aware of the goal of the meeting beforehand, it is easy for people to ask questions or make contributions and stick to the allotted time. It is very possible to have more than one point to discuss, highlight in order of 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 around that. In that case, make the meeting goal drive the agenda of the meeting. It can look like this:

• Determine the features to be pushed out to production.
• Marketing Strategy for the new feature.
• Press Release/Product Review for the new feature.

More things can be done to have an effective meeting, however, these 3 actions should be done. Running meetings is our everyday life, whether face-to-face with the team, online conference or one-on-one at the corridor of the office.