Called Fresh

Most meetings don’t go exactly how people hope. If they did, most meetings would end in roaring applause and fan fare.

The meetings I always hope end in manic applause are the “Look, here is a problem that I think is worth solving for, which is completely different from what we have been doing” meetings. I’ve maybe led 6 such meetings in my career of over 10 years so far. The most recent one was yesterday.

My first one ever was in 2016. I was just a few months out of business school and working at a travel reviews company – think TripAdvisor, but regional.

I remember some parts of that meeting. I remember it was in the board room and in the room was the CEO along with most key leaders. The agenda of the meeting wasn’t my pitch. It was a totally different meeting and I somehow hijacked it.

I remember that the meeting did NOT go well. A colleague messaged me after the meeting, “that wasn’t nice of them. They should have let you finish your presentation.” I remember that text. I wasn’t allowed to finish my presentation.

Yesterday meeting went differently.

Yesterday’s meeting was online. It was to my boss and his boss. I was prepared for the meeting. I had been working on a doc for a month which was rich in data and I had analysed every word on it. During the meeting, I shared my screen and walked the group through the document.

The meeting lasted for an hour and half. It didn’t end with “Ok, this is great. Let’s do a bunch of these things immediately.” It also didn’t end with a “No, this isn’t the right direction“. It ended somewhere in between. There was some buy-in on the insights shown, the problem statements articulated and some parts of the solution at a conceptual level. There was also no clear acceptance of the proposed solution in the format given. No indication of how urgently should we solve the problem and how much resources to invest into it.

After the meeting, I was itching to call one of the participants and discuss the discussion, but they got pulled into another call.

This made me think about ranking meeting outcomes. It’s a little like setting up success metrics.

Not Dead – are there clear next steps taken from the meeting that will progress the product/project? If yes, then we’re surviving

Making Progress – are any of these next steps more than data analysis using existing data? If yes, we are progressing

Converging – were any decisions made on the call that conclude any open point from before? If yes, then we are converging on a solution

Accelerating – Did the meeting end with more energy than it started with? Are there fewer owner-less items or blockers than before the meeting? If yes, we are getting close to a “YES”

After some thought and reflection on yesterday’s meeting, I think we are MAKING PROGRESS.

Ok. See you. Bye

Postscript – Don’t feel bad about the 2016 me. Within a couple of months, I got to experiment the product idea I pitched. And it did well. Like really well.