Engineering teams that believe in light meetings

We have light meetings by design.

Meetings are special and valuable times to discuss things as a group that would otherwise be impossible to do through 1-1s or asynchronous communication channels. More informally, we communicate with one another using our own product, Coast (dogfooding) so that we can respond to and digest information at our own pace. We’ll have ad hoc in person/video meetings if it helps us to get unblocked.

You can expect to attend ~2 hours of meetings each week. Our only regular meetings include:

• Daily 10-minute stand-up
• Weekly 30-minute kick off meeting on Mondays: to review priorities for the week, review data about product
• Weekly 1-hour on Friday: for reviewing the week’s work, demos, and/or a retrospective on the week

In-person meetings can be distracting so we ensure that everyone in a meeting is prepared in advance. Whoever is holding the meeting is responsible beforehand to prep people and create a realistic agenda for decisions to be made.

As engineers, it’s important to have uninterrupted blocks of flow.

Aside from a weekly sprint-planning and all-hands meeting, we do our best to avoid regular, mandatory meetings. As a company, we have a short (<5-minute) stand-up every morning at 10AM, but the way we stay in tune with what everyone is working on is through our demos once every other week. Instead of meeting to tell everyone what we’re currently working on, we spend time showing what we’ve built. Engineers demo their new features, ops showcase their new models, and our provider interaction team shares the new scripts they’ve written. (Show and tell is still as exciting as it was when we were younger!) It’s natural to go into a meeting-heavy state, so we are constantly fighting against that and making sure engineers have the schedules they need to work effectively.

We have two regularly scheduled meetings every month. That’s it.

Our all hands meeting takes place once every 2 weeks. All other meetings are intentionally done ad-hoc. In general, we prefer communicating in Slack and in person. We default to asynchronous communication in Slack or Github issue as a first step. When meetings need to happen we keep them small to the key decision makers and strive to make decisions in the room (not necessarily by consensus, but more often via disagree and commit).

We use RAPID decision making framework and do most of our communications on Quip. We never hold a meeting without a clear agenda. The only mandatory meetings you’re expected to attend are:

• Daily stand up (10-15 minutes)
• Retrospective meetings at the end of each 2-week sprint (for engineers)
• Demo / retrospective meetings at the end of each initiative

We shield engineers from unnecessary meetings wherever possible.

On Mondays, we have a quick standup meeting to go over anything big that's happening in the coming weeks! We meet again as a team on Fridays and each person shares something notable they focused on that week and gives any shoutouts to those who helped them most..We also have people answer a random “Mary Question™” chosen by Mary, our operations manager. Some recent questions include “What movie would be better if it were made into a musical?”, “What was the best toy of the 90s?”, and “What is your favorite vacation memory?”.

Engineers will also have a 1:1 with Dom on Mondays to quickly catch up on current assigned tasks. The engineering team as a whole meets once every two weeks. Aside from this, engineers are shielded from calls with customers and support, and we default to asynchronous communication via Slack – no one minds if you set yourself to Away for the afternoon, you can reply tomorrow! We recognize the cost of context switching and do what we can to reduce it. As big fans of Jason Fried's Rework, we keep meetings to their expected range and actually give everyone a copy of the book when they start.

At ReadMe, we’re committed to cultivating a diverse and inclusive workplace. We welcome people of all different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives. We are an equal opportunity employer and a pleasant and supportive place to work. And if you don’t believe us, come over and find out for yourself!

To stay productive and be efficient, we are deliberate about our meeting culture.

For engineers, we have one weekly product roadmap and company sync on Monday, one retro on Friday, and daily standups in the morning. And that’s pretty much it! We use Slack and email as preferred methods of asynchronous communication and reserve interruptions for show-stopping or urgent situations. Ad-hoc meetings between individuals and groups may occur, depending on the product you’re working on, but our culture has always been rooted in empowering people at the company to do deep work whenever they can. By being thoughtful about what we want to build and carefully planning how we want to build, we’ve been able to limit the number of meetings we have and protect people’s working blocks. We plan to keep communication overhead to a minimum as we expand the company, too.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, please reach out – we’d love to hear from you!

We believe in shorter, more focused days.

We hold ourselves to high standards and consider ourselves to be hard workers. All of our teammates have read Deep Work by Cal Newport. We’re big fans of his methodology and the idea that distraction-free concentration allows you to best maximize your cognitive capabilities. We bring these practices into our work life and have established two meeting-free days a week. Wednesdays and Fridays are our ‘Maker Days,’ and we work to keep all other meetings as efficient as possible. This means defining agendas, setting outcome expectations, and having clear, actionable items (with a default meeting length of less than 45 minutes).

Our daily standups are asynchronous (we use Geekbot!) and can vary depending on the team. Since every moment counts, we want all team members to be able to shape their schedules to suit their individual needs, and create work-life balance. For instance, some of our teammates shift their standard hours so they are available at home when their kids are awake, and then re-join our team after their kids go to sleep.

We’ve found this system means teammates work shorter, more focused days than at other start-ups and we produce higher-quality, more fulfilling work.

Source: Michael Karnjanaprakorn. We pull many of our philosophies from Cal Newport’s Deep Work mindset.