Dori Clark is a business professor and author. She talks about being strategic with our time and priorities. One of the points she makes is for us to say "no" to meetings where we don't need to be, doing things we don't need to do. Many people use an urgent/important matrix to prioritize tasks, mapping it out or doing a quick mental assessment.
What does that mean for us? We should do it, too, right? Yes, we should prioritize our time, too.
What it also means is that our cross-functional team is doing it, too!
We want to have a working meeting with them to get design inputs and prioritize them, before we start engineering design.
Our team is judging our invitation. How is our team going to prioritize our request? What has been their experience in participating in our meetings? Some things they consider:
- Was it value-added? Did people walk away from our exercise with better understanding?
- Were they respected and given a voice?
- Was their opinion considered, or was it just lip service (saying we wanted their input, but didn't really want it)?
- What happened to the information - did it affect the design?
A problem we may have is that they say "no, thanks". And, now, we are missing an important viewpoint and source of design inputs of our concept product.
In this week's episode we talk about ways to overcome this challenge. What we can do about it:
- Our mindset: our teammates are our customers of our meeting
- Be prepared: information (scope and background), supplies, and a plan for co-work
- Own the meeting - facilitate and guide the team, make it easy for them
- Start on time - end on time or early
- Allow time for proper co-work session closure: teamwork stuff - action items, notes, meeting evaluation (if doing)
- Follow-up: show how the meeting results are tied to design inputs
Being consistent will the above will help the most.
