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.

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.