At Forecast we're not big on meeting but to provide some structure and information transfer we have certain rituals that we gather around. 🔥
Once a month our CEO entertains an all hands town hall, typically lasting just shy of an hour. This is where the big presentation of strategy and current performance is done, and the main way for you to keep in the loop with what the company is focused on at a high, digestible level. It's also at town halls anyone can ask questions about anything that involves the entire company.
At Forecast We work in 2-week sprints. These small iterations enable us to change direction at extreme speed. They give us an internal sense of urgency and force us to break things into very small pieces before starting them. Lastly it enables us to split work more evenly between team members and deliver continuously.
The idea is not that everything we ever decide to work on can be completed in that time. But rather that we think about how we can break big projects into smaller building blocks that can be assembled into a cohesive whole.
On the product level everything is automated so that when a developer merges their code into the testing branch all tests are run automatically and it's deployed to our staging environment. As it passes succesfully through testing we can push code to the live production environment from there instantly.
The general concept of sprints extends to all parts of Forecast. It gives us a regular rhythm and ensures that all parts of the company work in unison and deliver at a regular pace.
It’s hard to keep up on what everyone is doing and what it means, so we have a daily morning standup for the individual teams where everyone spends less than 2 minutes explaining what they worked on yesterday, what they'll work on today and if they need help from anyone on things that are causing difficulties.
Once a week each product team have a one hour demo meeting where everyone at Forecast are welcome to attend. At this meeting the product team members take turns showing what has been built during the previous week and explains everyone what, how and why it was built.
Individual teams have retrospective meeting at their own cadence. At this meeting all team members participate and this is where we reflect on how we're doing, how things are progressing and how we can improve the ways we're working, communicating, making decisions and so on. As always, it's a friendly setting where everyone is allowed to speak freely about anything.
Teamwork over meetings. Meetings should be kept to a minimum.
Inviting people to regular meetings is something we try to refrain from. If you're invited to a meeting without a clear agenda or it's not been agreed to beforehand, then you're free to decline.
Except for the events described above invitations to regular meetings is not something we typically do. If you invite people for a meeting, please have a clear goal and think about all the people's time and company money you're wasting for every minute it's not productive.