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It’s important for teams in any department to strike the right balance with meetings; too many and work becomes disjointed and productivity is slowed, too few and communication breaks down and projects suffer.

There’s no doubt meetings have taken on extra significance amidst the shift to remote work during the pandemic, but still — ?

While there’s no argument that meetings have their place, especially for engineering teams who have to collaborate, brainstorm ideas and work on product development, the average worker spends 21 percent of their time in meetings and feels that 25 percent of that time is wasted. So what meetings should an engineering team have?

The Org has looked into different types of meetings, how to structure them to maximize productivity, and how often they should be held to increase effectiveness for engineering teams.

Who is in an engineering team?

First off, let’s see who is in an engineering team and how it is organized. The ideal size for an engineering team changes based on what stage of growth a company is in. For example, a Series A startup’s “engineering department” may consist of one person — possibly one of the founders. But as your company grows and approaches IPO, your engineering team will need to grow with it.

Eventually, you’ll need to add more titles to your engineering team, possibly including:

Chief Technology Officer (CTO) VP of Engineering Director of Engineering Engineering Team Lead Software Developer Quality Assurance Engineer

Other important roles you’ll find in most engineering teams are developer, product owner, business analyst, UX designer, and QA specialist. Jon titles can change between companies but the general goal of the engineering team remains the same: designing, developing, and optimizing the right products for the market.

Agile development and the scrum

In order to maximize efficiency and effectiveness, many companies have adopted some form of agile methodology for their engineering and product teams.

No matter whether you’re an agile purist or running your own version of the method, meetings are a core part of agile development. However, unlike some traditional meetings, agile meetings are short, sharp and highly-focused.

There is no time in agile meetings for off-topic conversations or tangents, and there are no icebreakers or casual conversation included at all. Every meeting has a clear objective, and that is strictly abided by.

A common framework within agile development is the scrum, which is based on sprints to achieve product goals, and during a sprint – which often only last two weeks — team meetings are held daily. After sprints, there are longer meetings to review and reflect, and, prior to the next sprint, there is always a planning meeting.

These hyper-focused meetings sharpen the team’s workflow and collaboration skills, share information and learnings, and broadcast sprint outputs to outside stakeholders.

They are usually guided by scrum master and include a product owner role, who represents the consumer and outside stakeholders in the development process.

Types of meetings

When an engineering team is doing a scrum, even if it’s not completely by the books, there are five types of meetings the sprint team will typically have:

Stand-up meeting Sprint planning meeting Sprint review meeting Sprint retrospective meeting Product backlog refinement

Outside of sprint meetings, engineering teams will often also have one-on-one meetings, weekly team meetings, engineering all-hands meetings and quarterly reviews.

How should meetings be structured and how often should they be held?

In the scrum methodology, meetings are strictly planned and followed at every stage of the sprint. They include:

Daily Standup

During a sprint, the sprint team will have a daily standup meeting. Typically the meeting will last just 15 minutes and be hyper-focused on what each team member is working on that day, how the previous day went and what barriers are impeding them.

Due to the time limit and focus, the daily standup isn’t a time to talk about successes, it is mainly to tackle blockers and pain points, support cohesion and collaboration and progress.

After the standup, every team member walks away knowing the others’ goals and objectives for the day, and how they can help the rest of the team achieve those.

Sprint Planning Meeting

The sprint planning meeting is for the scrum team to figure out what they need to tackle in the next sprint, and who the best team members are to do that. The meeting maps work flow and priorities, decides on clear objectives for the sprint, and divides out tasks and responsibilities.

The product owner and scrum master are always at these planning meetings, which can last for hours. It is recommended that for every week of your sprint, two hours are dedicated to the sprint planning meeting, meaning a two-week sprint would require a four hour sprint planning meeting.

Sprint Review Meeting

Spring review meetings are a time for the development team to present the work that was done during the sprint and get as much feedback as possible. The meeting is focusing on the output of the sprint, and what was developed, and how the team and stakeholders feel about that. The meeting should include the entire sprint team, the scrum master, the product owner and all relevant outside stakeholders.

These meetings are usually allocated an hour for every week of the sprint.

Sprint Retrospective Meeting

In a sprint retrospective meeting, the development team analyzes how it worked together. This meeting is focused on determining what processes worked and what ones can be improved, what could be done differently in the next sprint and what key learnings were. By the end of the meeting, the team should have a plan of action items to improve on in the next sprint.

The sprint retrospective meeting is for the development team to evaluate itself internally, so only the development team and scrum master need to be in attendance. Typically, 45 minutes is allocated for each week of the sprint.

Product Backlog Refinement Meeting

Product backlog refinement meetings come between sprints, normally closer to the end of a sprint, and give a team the chance to prioritize tasks in the backlog.

By holding backlog refinement meetings, sprint planning is a much faster and smoother process, as the meetings give the team and product owner the chance to ask and answer questions about the product backlog before planning begins. Backlogs can be written in user story form and explain what makes the product useful to the consumer.

The product backlog refinement typically lasts around an hour and has the overall goal of creating a shared understanding on what the new product will be and how it will be achieved.

Outside of scrum meetings, engineering teams often have a range of other meetings to make sure all team members are aligned and workflow is running as effectively and efficiently as possible. They often include:

Weekly Team Meetings

Should engineering teams have a weekly team meeting? Well, that depends. In scrum methodology, the sprint meeting schedule takes the place of weekly team meetings. Continuing with weekly meetings would create too much stoppage time, eat too much into solo work and overall would be unnecessary. With that, there may be some project managers who don’t attend every daily standup and a weekly meeting between the team lead and project manager could be the most streamlined way of communicating.

However, if your team isn’t following scrum methodology or isn’t taking part in a sprint, it is important for teams to have frequent structured meetings for leaders to discuss priorities for the week ahead, divide tasks and priorities, and address road bumps with team members. The weekly meetings help to keep teams accountable for progress and align team members around both strategic and tactical goals.

Weekly meetings should be kept short and should focus on the week ahead and the priorities for it. Similar to the standup meeting, team members can share their objectives for the week and road blocks they face to get there.

Engineering All-Hands Meeting

Depending on the size and scope of your engineering team, an all-hands meeting should be held frequently enough to keep everyone in the team up to speed on what everyone else is doing and what gaps exist that need improving on.

These meetings should not take place more than once a month and can be stretched out over multiple months if that works best for your team.

The meeting should cover the overall direction of the team, product and technology, and is a chance to review and reflect on previous work done and reset upcoming goals and objectives. Given the scope of all-hands meetings it is important to have an agenda and set roles for who does what.

All-hands meetings are important to inform team members of what’s happening across the team, to encourage bonding and foster and collaboration, and get an overall sense of teamwork and shared goals.

These meetings can take the place of quarterly meetings, or if it works for your company, they can be held quarterly.

Tips for successful meetings

Before calling a meeting, it’s important to determine whether the content in question can be resolved over email or in another form of communication. If there is a need to meet, make sure there is either an agenda for larger meetings or a set objective for smaller meetings, and that only those who need to be there are invited.

It sounds trivial, but timing a meeting right is extremely important to maintain efficiency and starting and ending on time helps keep everyone engaged and onboard.

Three from Sendoso's CTO, Qaseem Shaikh, are to keep updates short, take longer discussions offline and allow team members to give asynchronous updates on Slack if they can’t make the meeting.

Another key aspect to increase engagement is to make sure everyone discusses their work during meetings. To keep things interesting, some teams draw names from a hat to determine speaking order or have speakers nominate the next speaker so routine doesn’t become mundane.

It also helps to have clear roles, which can include leader/facilitator, scribe, time-keeper, and participant, and rotating those roles helps to keep everyone on their toes. There are also a number of tools and templates that can help agile teams in meetings, including project management software and performance metric tools, which will share insights and planning details.

But overall, the most important thing with meetings is finding the flow and schedule that works best for your team. If the strict scrum method is too rigid for your team, and tweak it to make it suit your company’s workflow.

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