Running Effective Meetings

"My three questions to end the meeting are, what did we decide here? Who needs to do what by when? And who else needs to know?"

"If you're in a meeting with a large executive team... you probably want to get a few people just to... I would just even say as a facilitator, two or three people, 'Okay, two or three people, what do we decide here?' And if you can kind of get common, great."

"People generally think the purpose of a meeting is for three things, discover, discuss, decide. The only thing that's ever supposed to happen in a meeting is the discussion part."

"The best way to get somebody's opinion is independently of other people's opinions, independently asynchronously. So the way that I put is I want people to stop talking to each other so much."

"So what I heard you say is that not all functions are created equal... Is that what you meant? And then they have the ability to say, 'Yes, that is what I meant'... you're reflecting back what they say without offering your own opinion."

"The first step that I found as very useful, and I use this tactic every single day in meetings, is just summarization. So, bringing people together, lots of different voices into a room and hearing what they have to say and at various times in the conversation summarizing what people are saying and summarizing what that means in terms of the direction that we could go in."

"When you first start, it might take a half hour, but after that it should just take 10 minutes... It's all about those conversations about, is our current strategy, not just at the company level, but at each departmental level, are these strategies working?"

"The work of a meeting is not calling the meeting. Calling a meeting is easy. In fact, that is a problem... What you really want to know... People need to know why are we meeting, and what is the point, what's the objective of this meeting? Is it to make a decision? Is it to share information? Who needs to be here?"

"I am really thoughtful that reoccurring meetings do not drive next steps. It's a very tactical thing, but when somebody says, 'Oh, we'll discuss this or we'll decide this in the next meeting,' it's, 'No, we should discuss this now. We should decide this tomorrow.'"

"If we're clear on the objectives of something, it might be that the last 20% of polish on the document is a really bad use of time... The reason we're doing the quarterly business review is to have a really candid conversation about how we think things are going... It's not to have a perfectly polished document for that conversation."

"We all meet every day. Pretty much the entire team gets on a call... every day at 8:00 AM Pacific, we're on a Zoom for at least an hour... everything, every day, is being audited front to back, and being discussed front to back."

"Meetings, generally speaking, are a combination of priming and decision making... A lot of meetings skip the priming step altogether. They launched directly into decision making."

"It's way better to have a debate about the principles than it is to have a debate about the tactics that are rooted in the fact that you have super misaligned principles."

"The second thing that I would say is the biggest waste of time is meetings and status updates... I've never had a status meeting. I've never scheduled a status meeting. Statuses are done async."

"minimize meetings, okay? Minimize meetings. That sucks the life out of everybody, including you."

"I'm trying this thing... could we get to 15-minute reviews basically instead of an hour and see if that alleviates some of this? I'm very curious to see if this is going to be a different kind of system where we might be able to get to clarity quicker, or realize we're not at clarity and then break and come back."

"Every additional person in a meeting has a cost, because every additional person in a meeting makes the people in that meeting less candid than they would have been if there were fewer people in that meeting. ... It's really important that you earn your place in this meeting and let's work on how to do that."

"I want to make most meetings very timely and very informed by real alpha. There's got to be some kind of value and insight to seed that with."

"The big idea with a design Sprint is to go from a zero to a prototype and a test of that prototype in just five days. And it's a recipe, it's a scripted set of activities that we developed over a number of many years."

"The very beginning of your project, we recommend this kind of crazy idea that you clear your calendar. So the core team come together for 10 hours roughly and go through a sequence of activities so that we can make all of the key decisions together."

"The best salespeople never leave a meeting without a next step. The next step does not have to be a check... but what's the next meeting? ... Whatever the next step is, 'What's the next step we can get on our books?'"

"One of the things I like to say about how to change a company is that the atomic structure of a company is the meetings and the decisions. ... One of the things we do is we talk about what we call five-star meetings, which is how do you make every meeting enjoyable? Literally, how is it that everybody when they walk out of a meeting, they're like, oh, fuck, that was great?"

"If you are about to jump on a zoom or something, you can totally do it with your eyes closed. Things like expanding your awareness or bringing your awareness down to your feet and your hands, which creates a kind of grounding calming effect that also you can do if you're in a busy room."

"I really try to spend more time being mindful of that and say, I want to hear from other people first. I want to create space and I don't need to win the argument in the meeting. There can be a follow-up. It's not like this is my last chance to say something, but that's also more true when you're more senior because when you're more junior, it's like, well, this is the one presentation I have with Dara for the next six months."

"I like a crisp dock and a messy meeting. The whole Amazon thing, if you have the three-page or seven-page narrative, it's written with the clarity of angels singing from on high, at least describing how the problem statement or feature or whatever. And so it's super crisp and organized and well articulated. And then you might have a meeting where you pick it apart and you talk a lot."

"Brain writing is I'm going to expose an idea and I want everyone to now write and weigh in on there... in an async way that no one else can see until it's all combined, maybe even ideally without authorship identified. Then when the founders weigh in, you don't know, they're just a part of the mass."

"There is a very long-running doc that has had to be chopped and purged... It's really where we coordinate what we're doing. The team meets on a daily basis, we spend whatever amount of time we need to get on the same page about what we're building."

"We built Catalyst to really solve those two problems [standing attendees and single-threadedness]. And so the way it works is it's essentially three one hour blocks throughout the week, and the assumption is that the whole company is free. So you can get anyone in the company for those three hours. And each topic has essentially four roles. Driver, maker, braintrust, and interested... the day before, that hold that's on calendar gets removed, and then you have specific topics that get added. So there may be three topics going all at the same time because they don't have overlapping attendees."

"The core idea is have a group one-on-one with the key stakeholders... we'll have a tag-up with a small set of people from a given team... and then they meet with their braintrust and it's once a week. It's the same mindset of a one-on-one. It's their time. So anything that they need to unblock a decision or to make progress, they should use that time for."

"Moving away from meeting culture and being able to be in a position where we can work async, whether it's one-hour sprint over Slack, make decisions and go back and forth, 20 people, and then everyone's made a decision by the end of the hour and we're moving forward."

"You can actually set up a lot of your communication situations, a presentation, a meeting, et cetera, as conversations. ... For example, what would it be like if you were to start a presentation by saying, 'Today I have three questions I'd like to answer. Question number one is...' And you state the question and then you answer it."

"You know what would be exquisite? It would be exquisite if everyone pre-prepared their update, which said how they're doing against their priorities, regular green, what they did last week, what they're going to do this week, and then they pre-route any problems they saw in the company and any proposed solution they had for those problems. If everyone did that, then we could spend the first 15 minutes of the meeting just reading, processing the decisions and we could take a three hour meeting down to a 45 minute meeting."

"The leadership team, for example, met every day, and because the leadership team was spread across the world, we met at 11:00 PM when I was in Singapore every day... which meant that none of the decisions were blocked for more than 24 hours."

"A full calendar is a badge of shame, not a badge of honor."

"In the early days we'd stand up and everyone would present their goals... and then they started to become six hours long because we had so many people and so many teams. And so trying to find that right flavor at every stage of scale is definitely hard."

"Sometimes I realize that at a scaled organization, the meeting operating system is as important as the products that we're building because it sort of speaks to how we scale and how we ensure we have the right degree of delegation, the right conversations, and then the right acceleration on the right decisions."

"If we're going to have a business meeting or a personal meeting, we're going to declare these no-phone zones because that's who we are. We want to be indistractable."

"We are using a reading format of meeting. So it's a doc reading. We just read in comments and understanding the context again. It is the doc, bring everybody together, and then we discuss the things that we want to make a decision with or the things that we feel is a blocker or things that we need to celebrate."

"using calendar blocking to really effectively manage your time that way. And then doing calendar audits of yourself as well as of your team to say, okay, what are your highest priorities for this week, this day, this month? And how does your calendar reflect your priorities?"

"Clarify what kind of meeting is it. Is it just an update?... Or is it a decision in which case, what are the pros, cons, et cetera?"

"I would give you an interesting one that I use a lot in my prior company and then I use a different form of it here in Waymo is what I used to call as the rule of seven. If there have been seven emails in an email thread and you still haven't resolved the issue, just call the person or get in a room huddle, resolve it live."

"a simple exercise of weekly focus. What are you focused on this week? And then reflecting on, did you get done the things you were focused on last week? Seems super simple, but just the exercise of thinking about what matters, writing it down, and having a little bit of social proof or articulating it out to others creates some degree of accountability"

"the state change method is that you should punctuate your monologues with state changes. So state changes are anything that shakes your audience awake and adds some variety. So it might be asking people to put something in the chat box. It might be switching from gallery view... to screen share... It might be having someone else speak."

"If you even take 30 seconds to one minute to ground yourself on why am I in this meeting? What do I want to share and make sure I get across in the time that we have, you're going to go in there so much more focused."

"Once a year at a random time, we will delete all recurring meetings that have more than two people, so not one-on- ones, and are internal people only... it forces you to rethink, 'Do we need a recurring meeting? Or do we just need one meeting? Or do we need a different cadence?'"

"I personally hate having status updates as a meeting. So I make it really clear that if we're having a meeting, this is to solve a problem. And if it's just a status update, that's fine, then I can read that asynchronously at a time that works for me."

"We have one weekly sort of strategic meeting. It's more open-ended, there is time for discussion. It's longer and it's sort of more unstructured. We also have one weekly operational meeting, which is highly structured where we go through all of the priority projects."

"I will often have a visual in a meeting. I will leverage that visual to literally real time edit what is being decided. For example, if we have multiple options, I will edit the slide that's being projected to say, 'We decided on option one, here are the next steps, 1, 2, 3.'"

"What I will do is send an agenda 24 hours prior to the meeting. That agenda will include a pre-read... During the meeting... I think it's really important for a group of people to be looking at something and anchoring people on something."

"After the meeting... within 24 hours post-meeting I will send the notes, reply all to the meeting invite and send the notes. So just tactically, I use the calendar invite as the canonical unit by which to handle all of this communication"

"If a meeting has more than 10 people on it, we ask the person hosting the meeting to kick out the other people and write better decision notes."

"I use Asana to run all my meetings and assign pre-reads. So I use the multi-assign feature in subtasks all the time where I make a task with a due date that says, 'Read this thing by this date,' and then I assign it to a team or a set of individuals like that really quickly."

"First he does not speak until everybody around the table speaks. So he goes around to all his leads and said, 'What do you think? What do you think? What do you think?'... And he always spoke last. He is by far the smartest person I've ever met in my life... But he wants to make sure that it's a team effort and that he's listening to what everybody in his organization thinks."

"We had a Slack channel for each team, their OKRs, a planning channel for each one. And people would post a doc and then a Slack video of going through the major points. And we had a time limit of how long they were allowed to be... And then Cal and I would do a marathon and we would watch them all together."