LillyIf you found your way here from our previous blog, welcome! This blog will go into a more detailed step-by-step guide with examples, specifically for product teams. We’re talking about meetings that are:
- Regularly occurring, often at least once a week
- Cross-functional stakeholders (engineers, PMs, designers, etc)
- Goal is to align and plan work
We like to use Brainstory for these meetings because it saves time and makes decisions happen faster than synchronous meetings.
How to start meeting prep
Think about the topics that you typically cover at your meeting. For our internal team, it’s usually something like this:
- Product roadmap
- Engineering blockers
- Marketing efforts
- Team logistics
- Miscellaneous news
Brainstory will help you with thought organization , so you don’t need to be super clear on what your topics will be in advance. Because you’ve had this kind of meeting before, you’ll very naturally elaborate and give context where you have in the past. Start talking and Brainstory will do the rest!
Sharing your Brainstory
Once you’ve finished your Brainstory, share it with your coworkers. For a recurring meeting, you typically only need to give people a few hours of advance notice to review it. For our internal team, our usual cadence is sending out the weekly Brainstory on Sunday evenings for a Monday mid-day meeting.
We love Brainstory’s guided navigation, especially through extensive proposal documents because it alleviates that initial sense of being overwhelmed.
Feedback aggregation
Encourage people to respond to your meeting prep within Brainstory. This will aggregate everyone’s feedback onto a singular document for a source of truth. Giving feedback on Brainstory is a powerful experience that levels the meeting playing field.
Meeting time!
Brainstory will flag the topics that need any extra discussion and clarification. Otherwise, it’s simply a matter of deciding what to do next! The hardest part of a meeting— getting everyone on the same page about facts and context— is done in advance.
For us internally, we can often make a decision async based on the feedback aggregation, so we don’t need to meet at all. As you use Brainstory, you’ll get to this stage faster and faster!
