Running meetings

Managing our time is one of the few truly zero-sum games we play. Since our minds are single-threaded and our lifespan limited, spending time on one thing necessitates not spending time on other things. In other words, there is an opportunity cost.

Meetings use time, ergo they are zero-sum too. For one meeting to exist, something else (usually another meeting) must be replaced. Therefore, two things are critical:

1. Meetings must be kept to an absolute minimum.

2. Any meeting that does happen must be rigorously managed to make optimal use of time.

We can't stress how important it is to get a handle on meetings. Whenever I hear about team burn-out at other companies, it is invariably due to an avalanche of meetings. Luckily, as with almost everything, we can use systems to save us.

TLDR

Should we have a meeting?

There is a simple formula to determine how much a meeting costs:

number of participants × $200 × duration in hours

The $200 represents someone's hourly salary. For example, a five-person meeting lasting an hour would cost the company $1,000. This is the minimum cost, as the true cost will be much higher once you factor in opportunity cost.

You might ask yourself, if meetings are so expensive, why not ban them altogether? Unfortunately, this is not possible for the following reasons:

• Broadcast meetings are necessary because people don't read or notice everything

• Some conversations need to be high bandwidth, so doing those asynchronously is inefficient

• Brainstorming is facilitated by in-person riffing

• Lastly, this is not a great reason, but meetings can force action

Meeting types

At Straddle, we have several types of meetings, each serving a specific purpose:

Weekly Leadership Team Meeting (WTM) - The Braintrust

Our core leadership meeting follows a disciplined, time-boxed structure with four segments: Silent Read & Accountability Check, Review, Issues & Proposed Solutions (IPS), and Wrap-up & Cascading Messages. Written updates and advance IPS memos are mandatory.

One-on-ones

See our full section on Running one-on-ones for more details.

All Hands (Bi-weekly)

Broadcast meetings for coordination, strategy reinforcement, and demos.

Tag-ups (Weekly/Bi-weekly)

Fixed attendees with rollover agendas for cross-functional coordination. Examples:

• Product/Engineering/Design

• Support/Platform

• Support/Compliance

Tag-ups are defined by: (a) fixed attendees (guests rarely added), (b) fixed weekly time (not rescheduled), (c) rollover agenda doc (if you run out of time, items roll to next meeting). They're often casual, like 1:1s.

Team Meetings (Recurring)

Recurring status updates for teams, project planning, department syncs. These can be:

• Team standups or check-ins

• Functional team meetings (e.g., Engineering weekly, Product planning)

• Cross-functional coordination meetings

See the Team Meetings section below for how to structure these effectively.

Decision-Making Forums (Ad-hoc)

Explicitly created for IPS/RAPID decisions with advance write-ups required.

How to have a meeting

Below we'll focus on general principles that apply across all meetings, with special attention to decision meetings and staff meetings since those tend to run amok.

Meeting attendees

Only precisely the right people who need to attend the meeting should be at the meeting. For a staff meeting, this is usually only key decision makers and the people who are providing updates.

If you need a specific person to attend a specific meeting, then don't add them to the recurring meeting. Just add them to the one they need to attend. Add them to the start of the agenda, so they can give or get value from that part of the meeting and then exit if the rest of the meeting doesn't give or get value from them.

If you are not adding or receiving any value from a meeting, simply state, "Hey all, not sure I'm providing much value in this meeting. I'm going to step out." If someone does this in your meeting, don't read anything into it—it's Straddle policy.

Meeting owners

The golden rule to meetings is that they must have an owner. This is a person who will emcee the meeting and be responsible for preparing the meeting agenda in Notion, assigning a note taker, ensuring Granola notes are linked post-meeting, and keeping everyone accountable for follow-up actions.

Meeting owners are expected to guide the conversation, cut off conversations that are spiraling out of control, postpone conversations that need more information, and ensure that people aren't distracting themselves with phones and email, while strictly keeping to the schedule.

It's important that everyone arrives on time for the meeting; otherwise, punctual people are left in limbo. As an owner, if you find that people are consistently late, flag it in the meeting's Notion page.

The meeting owner must be specified in the meeting invite or Notion agenda

Note taking and recording

Why do people like being in meetings? Well, one reason is that it's only by being in the meeting that they are kept "in the loop." Thus they waste time going to a meeting when reading about the outcomes asynchronously could have sufficed.

Note taking solves that problem. Effective meeting notes summarize what was discussed in the meeting and what was decided. Notes can then be distributed to your team and read by anyone who wishes to so they don't feel left out. It's far more efficient for people to read a meeting summary than to sit through the meeting in person.

Distributing notes has the additional advantage of not rewarding leaders with special information that individual contributors don't have access to. Information asymmetry is a hidden form of compensation and can make ICs want to become managers just to be "in the know."

It is difficult for most people to simultaneously think deeply and take notes. Therefore, at the start of the meeting, the meeting owner must designate a note taker for the meeting. This role should be rotated between meetings.

At Straddle:

• Meeting agendas are created in Notion

• Notes are recorded using Granola during the meeting

• After the meeting, the Granola notes should be linked in the Notion agenda

• Note takers are also responsible for recording any next-actions that the meeting owner wants to create in Notion

Meeting invites

Every meeting is born with an invite. Even at this early stage, things can start to go wrong.

First, ask yourself, "Is this meeting actually required?" because it's the first question that people you invite to the meeting will ask you. Can the meeting be replaced with a Slack message, email, or doc that the team can asynchronously collaborate on?

Then gain express permission from everyone you intend on inviting. Do not send people random meeting invites. Conflict-avoidant people will just show up at your meeting (rather than decline the invite) and silently resent you for wasting precious hours of their lives.

Definitely do not send out an invite to a meeting you are not attending.

A good meeting invite must:

• Invite precisely the right people. When in doubt, mark people as "optional." Inexperienced leaders will tend to over-invite people to meetings in an effort to make people feel included. There are better ways of achieving that.

• Clarify what kind of meeting this is (e.g., staff meeting, decision-making meeting, tag-up, etc.).

• Have a comprehensive description that details the purpose of the meeting, expected outcomes, and the meeting owner who will run the proceedings. This should include a meeting agenda, with time allotted to the various discussion topics.

• Include a link to the Notion agenda that everyone will be working out of.

• Be the right length. Meetings are often too long or too short, leaving dead space throughout the day that isn't long enough for focused IC work.

• Include a Meet link this is common courtesy to remote or folks.

One way to decide who are the right people is to identify how a person will contribute to the meeting. There are three ways in which participants can contribute to a meeting:

1. input

2. decision

3. commitment

If a person cannot make any of these three contributions, don't invite the person because this person just needs to be informed by broadcasting the meeting notes.

If you receive a meeting invite or request

Don't be afraid to decline meetings or request for their duration to be shortened. If you think the topic could be better handled in another format (e.g., asynchronously via doc comments), then suggest it.

Other meeting guidelines

Decision meetings

Decision-making meetings are one-off events designed to gather information and key stakeholders in one place to—you guessed it—make a decision.

Most decisions will not need meetings. They can either happen asynchronously in an issue and proposed solution document or in staff meetings. Every now and again, a decision big enough will crop up to warrant its own meeting.

Just because you are meeting in person does not excuse preparation! Every decision-making meeting should include an issue or proposed-solution document linked to in the calendar invite.

The meeting should start with the owner assigning a note taker and then distributing the prepared document. Everyone reads it in silence to get in sync. Then the document is discussed and commented on.

There are two outcomes of a decision-making meeting":

• Either a decision is made,

• or it is noted that more information is required to make the decision.

Any next-actions made should be impeccable agreements. That means they are recorded in Notion, have an owner, a due date, and a good description.

Once the meeting is over, the meeting owner should distribute the notes to the relevant places, such as appended to the issue document and posted in team/project Slack channels.

Staff meetings

Staff meetings are recurring meetings for status updates, decision making, and action assignments. They are generally related to collaboration within a team, or between teams. Common types include:

• Team standups: Quick daily or weekly check-ins on status and blockers

• Planning meetings: Sprint planning, roadmap reviews, quarterly planning

• Department syncs: Functional team updates and coordination

• Project team meetings: Cross-functional collaboration on specific initiatives

Staff meetings easily derail because they don't have a clear goal. Therefore, it's important for these meetings to have an owner who is ruthlessly managing them.

Every recurring staff meeting must have a corresponding Notion page that it is run out of. While the exact format may vary by meeting type, effective staff meetings generally include some combination of:

Updates

Every key stakeholder must prepare an update prior to the meeting (for longer meetings; standups can be verbal).

At the start of the meeting, everyone silently reads the updates. This is a huge amount of information transfer in the first ten minutes of the meeting, and it ensures that everyone is on the same page.

For standups: Keep updates brief and focused on:

• what did you ship?

• what are you working on?

• what's blocking you?

For planning meetings: Include progress against goals, upcoming priorities, and resource needs.

Issues (+ proposed solutions)

Prior to the meeting, issues are created. Each issue must have an owner, a good description, and ideally a proposed solution. If this is too long for the Notion page, link to an external doc.

Time-box each issue, and use a timer to ensure that you spend no more than five minutes per issue (Google "three-minute timer"). The idea is to get issues out of the way to spend more time on free-form discussion.

For standups: Flag blockers quickly; deep-dive discussions happen offline.

Discussion topics

These are general topics of discussion that aren't necessarily actionable. We find having some open-ended topics to be the most fruitful strategy when it comes to coming up with new ideas.

Examples of these might be a pre-mortem around an upcoming launch, a discussion on how to avoid partner channel conflicts, or debugging a team's performance issues.

For planning meetings: This is where strategic discussions happen—roadmap priorities, technical decisions, cross-team dependencies.

Next actions

Any work to be done must be recorded in Notion; otherwise, it'll just be lost. We use Impeccable agreements for this. Every task must have an owner, a due date, and a good description.

The worst reason for a meeting

Most meetings are created in good faith by people who believe they are acting in the best interest of the company. Unfortunately, this is not always the case.

If our company starts rewarding people on relationships rather than outcomes, you will start building a toxic culture where junior people book meetings with senior people just to get “face time” and advance their careers.

The simple solution to this is not to reward "face time." Cancel meetings you think were created for this purpose. The only way to grow at Straddle is through impact and outcomes, not who you suck up to.