Shishir Mehrotra’s 10 rules for leading great team meetings
Figma Chief Product Officer Yuhki Yamashita and I talked about rituals at Config 2023, Figma's annual conference; I'm told that the talk is one of Figma's most rewatched sessions to date.
In the world of product development, Shishir Mehrotra is a consummate collector—not of patents or C-suite titles (though as a product leader at Microsoft, Google, and now Co-founder and CEO at Coda, he’s amassed his fair share of both)—but of workplace rituals. Shishir became enamored with the idea when his friend and mentor Bing Gordon pointed out that you can tell if a company is worth its mettle by the quality of its “golden rituals,” which, he went on to note, are often marked by three core attributes:
- They are named
- Every employee knows them by the first Friday on the job
- They are templated
The idea stuck with Shishir. “I got pretty obsessed. I talked about it on some podcasts, and people started emailing me stories of their rituals,” says Shishir. “During the pandemic, when we all got trapped in our homes, I decided to run a series of biweekly dinners with interesting leaders to hear about their rituals.” It didn’t hurt that Shishir’s passion project also became a number one priority for product leaders and teams everywhere desperate to cure ailing company culture, run effective virtual meetings, and restore team building in a hybrid-work world. What he learned from these gatherings was that building a repertoire of reliable behaviors, norms, and frameworks doesn’t have to be a 0 to 1 activity. In fact, it’s often best to borrow from leaders and teams that have come before. Here, Shishir offers a few golden rules—which he’s collected from interviewing over 1,000 people (did we mention he’s writing a book!)—for rituals that will make your future meetings more effective, productive, and hopefully, a bit more enjoyable.
Rule #1: You are always building two “products”—the first is for your customers, the second is for your team
Dharmesh Shah, founder of Hubspot, really helped crystalize this idea for me, and I think he’s right. If you ask people to name this “employee product,” they would most likely call it “culture.” But if you ask them to really describe it, describe how it works in practice, they will immediately start describing the company’s rituals. And Dharmesh really convinced me that great companies and teams put as much thought into their rituals as they do their product.
Rule #2: Not all team meetings (or rituals) are created equal
I spent a bunch of time with Elise Keith, founder of Lucid Meetings, an organization dedicated to helping leaders run successful team meetings, to try and come up with a taxonomy for meetings. We landed on three. I think that you can slot every type of meeting into these buckets, and it’s important to have a healthy mix across all three.
Cadence meetings: These are your staff meetings, stand ups, or project syncs. They’re represented by a circle because they follow a natural cadence: You set goals, you execute, you reflect. They tend to be recurring with the same group of people, and like a circle, they keep things moving forward. A great cadence meeting comes down to one question: “Are we on track for the goals we set?”
Catalyst meetings: For these, picture your decision-making forums, product reviews, and design crits—they’re direction-changing. They serve as a catalyst for making progress. If you have too many of them, you'll probably burn out. A catalyst meeting tends to be decision focused: “Did we get an answer to our question?”
Context meetings: These can be everything from an All Hands, to an off-site, to new-hire orientations, and one-on-ones. Think of them as a foundation that you can build on. This type of meeting is primarily focused on establishing context, sharing information and insight, and building connections. Context meetings tend to have the broadest outcomes: “Did we come away better enabled to do our job?”
If you ask people to name this ‘employee product,’ they would most likely call it ‘culture.’ But if you ask them to really describe it, describe how it works in practice, they will immediately start describing the company’s rituals.
“ If you ask people to name this ‘employee product,’ they would most likely call it ‘culture.’ But if you ask them to really describe it, describe how it works in practice, they will immediately start describing the company’s rituals. ”
JFK made a provocation in 1961 that we were going to put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade—a really bold statement that motivated an entire country around a common goal. So how did he make sure that we were actually going to put a man on the Moon by the end of the decade? He scheduled a weekly meeting with the head of NASA. This is a classic cadence meeting.
Cadence meetings can be an effective way to move work forward, but they’re rarely the most inspiring. In fact, I hosted a discussion with 50 people from 50 different companies and asked people to write down what their cadence meetings feel like. Their immediate responses were things like “these meetings are boring,” “they’re a chore,” “they feel inhuman,” and probably the worst, “they feel like something I have to attend instead of want to attend.” But when I interviewed the best teams, they had created some unique rituals to combat this and drive employee engagement.
Rule #4: Decide whether you want to thread the needle or weave a tapestry
One of my favorite cadence rituals from YouTube is called Bullpen, and the idea is simple: Set up a 90-minute time block, invite the leadership team, and intentionally supply no meeting agenda. Very quickly, small groups would form, and many, multi-threaded conversations emerge at once. It was a perfect sponge for absorbing those ad-hoc five-minute conversations that can easily turn into boring single-threaded topics in a meeting, or into separate 30 minute ad-hoc meetings that always seem impossible to schedule and eat away your time.
At Coda, these Bullpen meetings are typically for smaller groups. They can even be impromptu one-on-ones and are typically no larger than seven or eight people.
This became really popular, and we started running Bullpen multiple days per week in lieu of other meetings. This ritual spread throughout Google and to other companies as well. Interestingly, when we started Coda, we wanted to create a similar format, but we are a distributed team, so just putting our entire team in “one room and letting them self-form” wasn’t going to work. We ended up building a new workflow that has scaled well: People list out topics and indicate who they need and a guess at the length of time needed to discuss. These groups are no bigger than seven or eight people. It even has a fun way to highlight conflicts, so people can order discussions, and because it’s all organized in a table, we’ve been able to measure the impact of this initiative. At a recent Bullpen, the team covered 30 topics in a single hour. That’s really the value of being multi-threaded.
Use this Multi-threaded staff meeting template with your team.
Rule #5: Remember that great ideas can come from anywhere
This template offers a look at the Dory/Pulse in context. (And yes, in case you’re wondering, Dory is named for the fish in “Finding Nemo” who asks all the questions.)
Dory/Pulse is my favorite Coda cadence ritual: When we have questions and discussion topics, rather than raising our hands or trying to get a word in, we add our topics to a “Dory” and we upvote/downvote the topics. The second part is “Pulse,” which is how we get feedback and alignment. We ask meeting participants to write their view on a particular decision. This could be anything—should we ship this feature, should we hire this person, buy this company, etc.? Everyone puts in a numerical score to represent their alignment and a written description of why. We hide everyone’s Pulse response until everyone is done answering. That’s how we combat groupthink.