What defines a good meeting?

From today I've started to work with leader of second team in my project on introducing a few improvements in their work. Of course, it will require many changes, each change needs to be accepted by whole team, we need to show them, that is worth to try, that it make sense. We need to talk, discuss and even argue. And perferct place for such an activities are meetings.

But before we will start, I need to face with one great challenge - I need to convince them, there is value with doing meetings at all. They got many bad experiences with those kind of activities, they participated in boring meetings, in meetings, that was for them just a waste of time, they doesn't like interruptors, they want to work, work efficient and they're treating almost all meetings like a break from real work.

What can I say? It's great when people want to work and doesn't like those horrible moments when they need to do something else. But we need to make improvements to work in more efficient way, we need to remove impediements to do better all things, that we want to do as best as we can. If we want to, we need to schedule a meeting to discuss all ideas and propositions of potential solutions, we need to prepare a plan and each teammate should know and accept it.
That's why all team members should participate on the meeting.

If we want to convince people that meetings aren't just a waste of their time, each meeting needs to bring value for them, needs to show them how important it was to done it. Each meeting needs to be good. And what defines good meetings?

make evolution, not revolution

I love changes and improvements, I always looking for new ways of doing thing faster, better, in more efficient way.

I know that would sound like a cliche, but if you're not going forward, you are going backward. It doesn't matter about what we are talking, is it job, learning, personal life, relationships or hobbies - we just need to get better. To be honest, I think it's natural and this is the way how human beings works - we get excited whenever we can try or learn something new, it's like journey to the unknown land. Who cares how many people already been there, know this and saw everything. Right now it's your turn.

what achievement is?

Recently in company, where I work, we tryied to introduce new ways of people evaluation. I don't want to go into details, today I want to write down my thoughts on one word, which occurs on each meeting. The word is - achievement.

I noticed that we are using this word on those meetings in so many different contexts, so I proposed, that we should firstly define what achievement is, before we will go further in this discussion. Everyone agreed and each of us had to bring proposition of this definition on next meeting.

I thought about this definition, I even had my own propositions and just few hours before the meeting I sit down and asked myself - what we're trying to do? We want to define word which is already defined? We want to invent a circle once again?

ladies, wall and sprints

improvements in team in progress

I recetly put our's sprint backlog on the wall. It's more readable, it requires no additional effort to know what is going on and you are always up to date. I wrote more about this here. We are still using reguar tools to manage sprints, but wall is used not for managing purpose, but for visualization. And from what I can see, everyone likes this idea.

The wall was only a first step to increase motivation in team and identification with product, that we are delivering. There are lot more in my head and I will definitely share everything just after I will have any observations.

Recently we startet to do meetings, which main purpose is to know our's customer better, to know what they want to get and to know what we need to beware. I need to admit, that I see many positive aspects of them and after few more meetings I'll describe how it works in our team.

what our customers want to get?

let's talk about what really matters

We are making preparation to start working on huge improvements in our's best selling product and one of the thing, that we recently done, was a revision through expectations which our's customers have.
We agreed it cannot be a features list, rather simple adjectives, generalities, not specifics, something which should be valid and important for any functionality that we want to add or improve, something which will be always true, at any time.

I believe that was pretty well invested time, even if each point on this list can looks like something really obvious (maybe even like a cliche?), but I think (and whole team agreed), that going through this list whenever change will come, can show us are we going in the right direction, before we start working on it.

In my opinion, the list which we created, can be useful not only for us, that's why I decided it would be worth to share the results. So let's see how this list look like?