Meta-meeting stuff
Last week the Launchpad team leads gathered in London and had an absolutely huge meeting. Fifteen or sixteen smart, opinionated & passionate people in a room talking about the next six months of Launchpad development. It was a lot of fun.
When planning the agenda, Martin Albisetti and I were a little worried about things wandering off track, so we thrashed out a lists of dos & don’ts. I’ll blurt them out here, with the really terrible ideas filtered out so I look more clever, and then offer some thoughts on how they worked.
Do
- be happy with the results of this meeting.
- ask questions, especially “why”
- be punctual
- stay on point
Don’t
- design features
- check your email, i.e. laptops closed
- leave the meeting without being clear
- leave the meeting without being happy
The “laptops closed” one didn’t work so well. It was great for the first couple of days, but by Thursday afternoon there were always people in a corner with those open LCD screens sucking chi out of the room like little dragons of despair.
The “Don’t design features” rule was awesome. The rationale is that feature design leads to long discussions, and that it does a disservice to the many excellent engineers we have who aren’t at the meeting and will be actually implementing a feature. At best, it’s waste and at worst it’s us telling people how to do something that they know how to do better. The clearest sign that it was a good idea came when other people started using it to shut me up.