How to better run weekly PM meetings?

[NatashaMartin]

Super embarrassingly considering how long I’ve been doing this, one meeting I never seem to get right is the product manager weekly/monthly/whatever.
PMs are obviously drenched in meetings, and there are usually so many other places for “sharing the work.”
Equally it feels hard to get into “the craft” in short sessions. Bigger chunks of time have worked better for my teams for that sort of thing.
External participants and speakers from other parts of the organisation are always interesting, but can be hard to keep relevant over months and years.
What are the best meetings you’ve been to like this, or run? What made them work for you?

[RisaButler]

Having seen and organized various different iterations of meetings like this, I would flip the question around and ask what you are trying to achieve with these meetings. There are many potential purposes for such a meeting and they will require different formats and cadences: sharing status, aligning on strategy, team building, learning/growth, administrative items,… Also depends on the team size: a round-the-table status update is feasible with a handful of participants, but with 10+ folks people will invariably pay attention.
Over time, I’ve moved away from cross-team status updates in meetings, it’s really hard to find the right balance that will keep people interested but informed.
What worked for me in my previous role with a very small PM team (4-5) was weekly very short administrative meetings (skipped if nothing to discuss), weekly one-hour product review / critique meetings where people would show work in progress stuff (people signed up to the agenda with any things they wanted feedback on, this meeting included also design, research, sometimes stakeholders, skipped if nobody signed up), and then a half-day or full-day offsite for capability building dedicated to PM every quarter.

[Nathanendicott]

Agree … I’ve been there. At a certain scale, these types of general meetings with large teams rarely work and feel more like ticking a box. Everybody thinks the right thing to do is have a team meeting. That’s what managers do, right?
I like the idea of smaller, more focused meetings to work through specific problems and layering in the occasional team building meeting with the larger group.

[MariaWilson]

I always used my PM Weekly mtg for working through hard problems, group feedback on opportunity assessments/product briefs/etc. and open forum for discussing interpersonal challenges like tricky stakeholder mgmt, etc. I also included our research lead to discuss any broadly applicable research and Q&A that couldn’t be done async.

Never a status update. IMO that’s a poor use of live meeting time and can be relegated to an email or a slack “standup” post.

[MariaWilson]

Btw, don’t be embarrassed. I’ve worked with CPOs who have terrible versions of this meeting. Don’t assume that because someone has done something for awhile that they know what they’re doing. Meeting best practices have changed quite a bit over the last decade.

[FelipeRibeiro]

I like the idea of conversations that get PMs thinking together, and understanding the value of each other’s feedback. It can be a solitary job and hard to learn.
Perhaps linked to this, is that the PM team so rarely feels like a real team, most places I’ve been. They have loyalties to their mission/tribe/group or whatever, and of course to their product. They might even have some loyalty to me or their direct boss. But a team? I think the honest answer is I’ve never completely succeeded there.

[JesusRojas]

I’ve struggled with this too. Something I’m trying that’s getting a positive response from team members is using the meeting to share strategy frameworks that I or my team members have researched and then applying them to a particular business problem or our own product strategy. This helps us all level up our product strategy chops while giving team members more context on what each of them is working on and how it contributes to the broader strategy.
Obviously I don’t do this every week, but it might form part of my rotation.

[HeatherKurtz]

One suggestion I’d add to the solid one’s here already is a practice I used at my last company, Procore, which scaled up really quickly. Every 2-3 weeks I’d bring a leadership guest speaker from another department so revops, bizops, various sales segment leaders, corp strategy, CS, L&D, folks from international offices when in town (pre-covid), other product line leaders, interesting new hires etc…
The intent was :

• Create the roots of cross functional relationships that were otherwise tough to foster in a hyper growth org
• Create empathy for Product with x-functional leaders who didn’t know the team well
• Learn about different parts of the org/biz

Those sessions were usually the best of our team meetings, the rest were 50/50 good/crappy

[FelipeRibeiro]

Feels like there are some common threads emerging.
a) Run it from a playbook of activities, not a standing agenda.
b) Build in time to think together, share challenges and tools of the trade.
c) Bring leaders and externals in to build relationships and grow the team’s org sense.
Probably more I’ve missed!

[Kathrynzaroulis]

Not sure I can add much here, but just saw this in another thread. Big +1 to making sure you’re clear on what you want to accomplish. My approach in my last job which worked quite well was:1. To keep status updates written, using whatever tool you have, 2. To make the weekly about the team knowledge sharing. We landed on an agenda which looked roughly like:

• Context from the team lead “from above”
• Tough nuts to crack (problems people needed help with)
• Sharing Learnings (usually about process, communication, frameworks, things which are working within an individual cross-functional team, etc)
• Just pondering (loose/crazy ideas people needed help finding a home or framing for; these often became projects)

3. To have a separate meeting to exchange feedback on their thinking/artifacts to improve skills/quality of the work. I ran weekly Critiques for that.Two weekly meetings was a significant time investment, but we generally got good ROI from it. Attendees would sign up upfront with what they wanted to discuss, and I’d curate things a bit, which helped keep them engaging. HTH.

[rossjayp1]

A lot of the responses here are on point. Here a couple of other things to think about:

• Remove some formality - PM’s can get siloed into their pods (their product, marketing, design, and engineering group). Just getting the PM’s together for some watercooler style time is great teambuilding.
• Do you need a weekly meeting? I know, I know, some company cultures demand a weekly “staff” meeting… other than 1:1’s with direct reports, I have had success moving to bi-weekly or monthly staff meetings that leverage some of the agenda topics others listed with great success.