10 Tips for Effective Product Management Meetings

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Meetings are essential to align the stakeholders and development team members and make the right product decisions. But we’ve all been stuck in bad meetings that lacked a clear objective, didn’t have an agenda, were dominated by a few vocal individuals, started late, or overran. Such meetings are unproductive and demotivating. It doesn’t have to be this way, though. The following ten tips will help you run successful product management meetings that engage the attendees and help you achieve the desired outcomes.

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1 Set an Objective

Be clear on the reason why the meeting is needed. What’s the meeting about? Which outcome do you want to achieve? For example, a product strategy workshop might have the objective to identify the key changes required to achieve product-market fit. Contrast this with a sprint review meeting, which might help you determine if users can easily sign up for the product. Without a clear objective you will struggle to understand what needs to be achieved, who needs to attend, and how you can effectively structure the meeting.

2 Involve the Right People

Carefully consider who should participate in the meeting to achieve the objective you have set. For product strategy and roadmap meetings, I recommend involving the key stakeholders, for example, someone from sales, marketing, support, and finance, as well as development team representatives — ideally members who know about the user experience (UX), architecture, and technologies. But for sprint review meetings, you may also want to invite (selected) users and customers to collect their feedback.

As a rule of thumb, avoid meetings with more than ten attendees when you have to make high-impact decisions and/or rework the product strategy, product roadmap, or product backlog. I find that engagement tends to decline when the group grows significantly larger and reaching agreement becomes harder. Consequently, you often have to run longer meetings. This can make it harder for people to free up the necessary time and attend them.

3 Have the Right Input Available

Make sure that the relevant data is available prior to the meeting. Which input you need will depend on the meeting type and its objective. Here are three meetings with sample input data:

• Product strategy workshop: product performance data (KPIs), competitive analysis, market trends, development progress, for example, in the form of a release burndown chart, and user feedback on recent product increments. (This assumes that you review and update the strategy and roadmap together, an approach I find very useful.)
• Sprint planning meeting: product goal, prioritised product backlog with enough ready items, development team capacity for the next sprint, and any action items from the last sprint retrospective.
• Sprint review meeting: sprint goal, product increment, definition of done, release burndown chart.

Consider sharing the input beforehand when you run a strategy workshop so that people can prepare for the meeting. This can speed up the decision-making process and lead to better decisions.

4 Prepare an Agenda

Decide how you want to structure the meeting and determine the steps you will have to take to achieve the objective. For example, for a strategy workshop, you might want to choose the following agenda:

1. Welcome and check-in.
2. State objective and agenda.
3. Discuss product performance data (KPIs), competitive analysis, and market trends.
4. Assess product strategy and adjust if necessary.
5. Discuss development progress and user feedback on the latest product increments.
6. Review and adjust product roadmap; check potential impact on the product strategy.
7. Close the meeting.

Don’t forget to allocate time for each agenda item and to add one or more breaks to the agenda if the meeting lasts longer than one hour. Share the agenda — together with the objective — in the meeting invite so that the attendees know what will happen in the meeting.

5 Make Time to Check-in

Set aside time at the beginning of the meeting to check-in, to allow people to casually touch base and reconnect. One way to do this is to ask the attendees to briefly answer the following two questions:

• How am I feeling right now?
• Why am I feeling this way?

While you might be tempted to skip checking-in to save time and get more done, this is usually a bad idea, especially in an online setting where it’s much harder for people to socialise and engage in a chat. Setting aside five minutes to check in shows the attendees that you are interested in how they are doing. It makes people feel valued, and it encourages everyone to contribute to the meeting right from the start. This can increase psychological safety, boost productivity, and lead to better decisions. To put it differently, if you don’t check, you might slow down the progress and achieve poorer results.

Read On …

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Learn More

You can learn more about running effective meetings in product management and successfully guiding stakeholders and development teams by attending my product leadership workshop and reading my book How to Lead in Product Management.

Source: https://www.romanpichler.com/blog/10-tips-for-effective-product-management-meetings/