Product
A planning meeting in forty minutes
The agenda we use every month to go from a list of themes to a decision about what to build next, with the time each part takes.
Ines Varga, Co-founder, product1 min read
Our monthly planning meeting used to take two hours and end with a list of things to look into. Now it takes forty minutes and ends with a decision. The difference is not the tool. It is the agenda.
Before the meeting
Everyone reads the top six themes on their own, with the quotes. Reading together in the meeting is the slowest way to read.
The agenda
Ten minutes: what changed. Which themes grew, which shrank, which are new. We only talk about the changes; the rest we already know.
Fifteen minutes: the top three. For each of the three largest themes, one person makes the case for building something now and one for waiting. We keep it short and specific: who is asking, what it costs them, what it would cost us.
Ten minutes: decide. One item goes onto the roadmap as next. Sometimes it is none. That is a decision too, and we write down why.
Five minutes: who hears back. For anything we decided, someone owns telling the customers who asked. Even a no deserves an answer.
What we stopped doing
- Debating whether a request is real. The quotes are on the screen.
- Ranking every theme. We only need the top of the list.
- Leaving with homework. If we cannot decide, the theme waits a month.
If you try this agenda, tell us how it went. We change it a little every quarter.
