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’re intentional about meeting time.

Outside of customer calls, there are only three main meetings engineers can expect to attend. The first is our weekly all-hands meeting every Monday, where we get the entire company together to discuss any high-level items. It’s also a great time to ask questions or share highlights so we have visibility into what everyone is working on. We also have a weekly dev meeting to talk about any roadblocks folks are facing or do a deeper dive into a certain topic. Lastly, you’ll have a weekly 1:1 with your manager to discuss anything on your mind, whether it’s a workflow issue or you just need a sounding board. If there’s not much to be addressed during a 1:1, we’re not afraid to cancel it – we never feel the need to meet just for the sake of meeting. Beyond that, we keep our days open so there’s plenty of maker time and people can take advantage of the flexible hours. More informally, we’re active on Slack and Gather, but we understand that people need time to digest and respond to information. Keeping meeting time intentional and setting priorities more often than processes is important to us as we continue to grow.

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.