Avoid meetings

At MUI, we avoid meetings, as much as possible. Meetings should be a last resort escalation for things that can’t be solved asynchronously:

• We avoid meetings because they don't support the asynchronous workflow and are hard to conduct due to time zone differences.
• We avoid brainstorming meetings because brainstorming is almost more effective done async.
• We avoid ad-hoc because:
  1. each one requires schedule coordination of attendees, and with many different time zones, it’s hard.
  2. the lack of a clear structure can often lead to unproductive meetings.

Meeting times

The best times to have meetings:

• Group meetings. Plan for them as much as possible around 1 pm UTC. This is the time the most friendly with the team’s timezone and the need to push more toward the US timezone.
• One-on-one. Plan for them as much as possible where most of the other meetings can’t happen. For example:
  • with Europe + US: plan them as much as possible around the end of the day for people in Europe.
  • with Europe + India: plan them as much as possible around the beginning of the day for people in Europe.

Meeting timezone

Meetings

Meeting types

Tag-up

Objective: For groups that need consistent coordination.

We treated these like group 1-1s, they fall into a few natural categories:

• Product team meetings. Once a week, usually at the beginning of the week.
• Functional leadership Tag up: We tend to run most meetings across functions (PM, Eng, Design) so we needed a couple of forums that are function-specific:
  • Engineering Manager. Once every two weeks.
• Leadership meeting: With @Matthew Brookes and @Olivier Tassinari once a week on Monday.

Decision making