When I took over a team at FB earlier this year, I made a change to how the team meeting was run that worked pretty well, and has scaled to ~20 people without going past 30 mins.
The meeting was on Tuesday afternoon. Monday morning I would post a skeleton agenda, basically listing people who I thought had stuff to update the group on. I would also assign a number of minutes for that part -- usually 2-3. People would volunteer other items (for them or others), and then on Tuesday I'd publish the coming agenda. I had 5 mins (fixed; as the group grows, everyone's time gets shorter) for round-the-table beginning. Some things that were important: • the meeting starts on time; people who were late did shots of Tabasco, but that's a longer story • someone has to be the jerk with the clock; they have to be a jerk, and it turned out to be good assertiveness practice for some people! • the round-the-table part needs some structure. other than "hi I'm new", I gave people specific guidance about what I wanted to hear. When I put it in the agenda it worked even better. (Our two remote people got extra time, via lax enforcement, just because we didn't hear from them as often.) • if you have a lot of people, breaking up the round-the-table section and interspersing other agenda items helps keep people from tuning out. • don't use 30 mins just because you have 30 mins. In the 5 months I ran it we were over 30 minutes once (31, my last meeting), and under 25 more than half the time. If it wasn't on the agenda, I was unlikely to give more than a minute at the end, and then only if we had time. • optional 30 mins after the main meeting that we used for demos or long sidebar conversations; provided a good pressure release for those discussions • if you're not reading the agenda and taking notes, you don't have a computer open. the difference in the vibe in the room when someone came and sat on their laptop in the corner was palpable, and not good palpable. This may not apply fully or at all to the context of the JS team, given how people are distributed and so forth, but it worked quite well for the Android team, and I think they're still using the model with their new manager. Mike _______________________________________________ dev-tech-js-engine-internals mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-js-engine-internals
