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Comment by DamonHD | Hacker News Reader

As the slightly unwilling current receipient of the role of chair for several local organisations and their meetings - a position that some would call 'leadership' and a sign of greatness or whatevs - been there done that... B^>

Meetings can be made to be good, especially if they have a useful purpose. Meetings that are there to stroke someone's ego or exercise personal selfish power are difficult to justify. Focus on the purpose.

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> Meetings that are there to stroke someone's ego or exercise personal selfish power are difficult to justify.

If you are confident this is the case then a smart person would realise that complaining about the meeting being a waste of time is both true and likely to have significant blow back on them.

In my experience, if you can't create an agenda, then it's more than likely the meeting is unnecessary.

In my experience meetings should only be:

1) 1 on 1

2) Presentation with questions at the end

3) Roundtable status update (so like 2, but each person taking turns)

4) 4-person maximum whiteboard to decide on a very specific point agreed ahead of time

great list of criteria. I'd also add

5) End the moment there's nothing left to cover.

Those were 4 different types of meetings.

I guess the question is: how do you, say, design a new feature that needs input from more than 4 people?

You write a design, accept valued but nonbinding comments on it, and then deliver a presentation after which you’ll proceed with the project unless someone vetoes.

Exactly, also use some kind of design document tool that accepts comments (like Google Docs or Confluence) and try to get people to read and make notes _before_ any meetings.

It’s often useful to meet individually with each person before the presentation too, especially those people who are likely to throw up roadblocks. Ideally everyone is in agreement before the meeting, and the final decision is essentially a formality.

I’d like to see you try that when trying to improve a flow at, say, a hospital where that involves separate teams of nurses, lab workers, doctors pharmacists and admin staff.

But how do you know what to design?

You intuit it from discussions you've had with users about what they want, and with other developers about what can feasibly be built. If there's some reproducible process to identify good product ideas, I've never seen it in action, and I suspect the software market would look quite a bit different if it existed.

Status updates rarely require a meeting. If there is a group and they all need to give status updates to each other, a meeting (e.g. a standup) can be an efficient way to do that, but so can a shared document or group email, which have the benefit of being asynchronous.

If a team of people need to give status updates to their manager, that should certainly not be a group meeting. Nothing worse than the "status meeting" where you spend 5 minutes giving your report and then 25 minutes waiting for the meeting to be over.

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