Beyond Code: Crafting Effective Discussions to Further Technical Decision-Making

Imagine this. You're sitting at your computer in a meeting, and sure, you're paying attention, but you're also answering that quick Slack message, trying to write that easy bit of code, then waiting for the test to pass and watching the presenter walk you through something. Any questions, they say? You think, nope, no questions for me, because, of course, why would you have any questions? You were really only kind of paying attention. You hope you didn't miss anything, but if you did, it's fine. You'll review the pull request or read the spec stock later, and you can always comment on it when you actually have time to give it some deeper thought.

Now pause and switch roles. Think of the time that you've been that presenter, hoping that people are listening because you took the time and effort to prepare for this meeting. It's important that everyone is aligned and on the same page. Any questions? You see none. That must mean that what you've talked about has been clear and is clearly understood and that folks agree with it. Now, we've all been both of these people, and telling this story here, I'm sure that you can see all the holes. We often go into meetings with these expectations and mindsets, and that's because, honestly, so many of the meetings that we're in kind of suck.

I mean, think about it. Did you pay attention fully in the last meeting that you were in? Did you remain fully engaged in the last deeply technical meeting that you were in? Are the meetings that you're in generally a good use or a bad use of your time? This is because, again, so many meetings suck. They just, they don't feel valuable enough for us to give them our undivided attention amidst the tons of additional things that we're trying to do at the same time and all of the different things that we're trying to get done, even if we know, theoretically, that they're valuable and necessary, and we don't necessarily want them to disappear. I'm Allison McMillan. The best compliment that I ever got was that I run meetings like I hate meetings, and I think that so many of the times that we get together in person for meetings, et cetera, are just not great because they just kind of happen. They're on our calendar. We just attend instead of them actually being facilitated in thoughtful ways.

And so, a little bit about me. I'm a fractional engineering executive. I also run workshops, trainings, and offsites for teams and companies, particularly those that are heavy on the engineering side. I'm also formerly on the Ruby Central board. I had a podcast about being a parent in tech, and I love helping people have better conversations, because the core of all of the work that I do is really helping people work through those pain points and the issues that they're facing by getting work done or just getting through that point in time in ways that are fun and engaging.

Much of what's written about meetings gives you those starter suggestions, right? They say things like have an agenda, think about the attendee list, think about the cadence of the meetings. And all of these things are important, but that's really where it starts, right? Running a meeting, especially a technical one, is so much more than that.

Here's some information about meetings. 71% of senior managers believe that meetings are inefficient. How workers feel about the effectiveness of meetings correlates with their general satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their job. Almost 40% of employees consider unproductive meetings to be the highest cost to their organizations. 62% say that meetings miss opportunities to actually bring the team closer together. And only half of all meetings are effective, well-used, and engaging. And those numbers drop even lower when you're talking about remote meetings. But meetings are also necessary, right? Especially the ones where we're talking about technical approaches, feasibility, postmortems, next steps.

So here's some of the reasons why technical meetings can be really helpful. More brains are better than fewer. We can build on each other's approaches. It can be a tool for teaching, learning, and knowledge sharing, and it decreases the lottery factor. What happens if someone wins the lottery and leaves tomorrow? Who else knows about that part of the code base? And these skills are critical to career growth, right? It's something that you do more and more as you grow in seniority. At some point in your career, you're still shipping code, but that's not what it's only about, right? It's about getting people on the same page, creating alignment, solving some of the gnarliest problems that your company is seeing, and helping unstuck or unblock others.

When engineers come to me and are trying to figure out that next promotion or how to level up to that next step, more often than not, it's this skill set that is a primary growth edge for them. What would people say about the last technical meeting that you ran? Would they say it was really informative? There were lots of tangents. It was the same people talking. It was really interesting, sort of chaotic. It was really inclusive. It didn't end with any action items. These conversations are usually really frontal, right? You share your idea, you talk through some code, you ask for comments or feedback. Sometimes you provide a pre-read. Sometimes people actually read that pre-read. Other times they don't. Did you know that employees multitask in at least 41% of meetings? You are potentially multitasking right now. And we know that especially in remote meetings, we're always fighting against dozens of other distractions.

What if all of the reactions to your meetings could be things like, it was really engaging, super informative, I had a chance to provide my own approach. I felt really comfortable sharing my opinion. And we walk through the current thinking and understanding. This is done through facilitating. Facilitation helps you meet your goals more effectively by actively engaging people in conversations and making them a part of what's going on. The first thing that I ask people when they come to me is, what are you trying to accomplish? What is the conversation that you want to have? And what do you want the outcome to be? So not just the agenda or something that's sort of vague and nebulous, but how will people walk out of that meeting and out of that time together? This again goes beyond that agenda or that outline. It's the purpose. What do you want from people? And then tie everything about the structure of your meeting to that purpose. What is an effective structure to reach that outcome? How will you ensure that people are following what you're saying? How will you get those diverse opinions in the room? How will you limit that person who's always taking over the conversation from doing so? And how will you hear from that person who's really quiet but who you know usually has good ideas? And how do you get the opinion of that person who always has one but frequently offers it too late? And then in order to address those concerns, you feel like you need to take 10 steps back. And then tell people that. Tell people what you want the outcome of the meeting to be for every meeting and everything that you're doing. Let people know what the purpose and the outcomes are so that they can mentally prepare themselves.

This also helps set expectations, which allows you to keep the time really focused and engaging. If everyone knows why they're at the meeting, when you go down rabbit holes or through these different tangents, you can bring people back to that purpose.

Now onto the approaches. There are two ways to think about making meetings really engaging and interesting to better accomplish your goals. The first is modalities. These are like exercises or things you can do. And the second are instructions or framing, right? How people have these conversations.

So modalities. I'm going to give you a couple of modalities or approaches that you can utilize with your groups. So the first exercise you can do is have people think about different approaches to a problem. So the goal here is to have a massive quantity of ideas because you need a lot of bad ideas to pick out and figure out what the good ones are. You can do this by providing a technical approach first and then having people play with that. Like, think of all the ways you would change this approach. How might we alter this approach? You can also present a problem that you're trying to solve and have people brainstorm different solutions. Right? And again, these ideas will have varying levels of technical feasibility, but that's the goal.

You're trying to encourage this and lots and lots of different thoughts towards solving a problem. So you can do that by providing some of these different prompts that really help people think outside of the box. Also start with how might you frame the problem? Right? How might we build X feature? How might we have resolved this incident faster? How might we make X part of our codebase more stable and more reliable? Or how might we give feedback to each other more effectively? Another option, if you're not looking to open up the conversation quite so widely, is to present an approach and then have participants change one thing about it. To change one thing shapes those constraints and narrows down what people are thinking. It also allows for additional participation because the barrier to entry is lower. Right? People don't have to think through an entirely new approach.

These exercises and approaches are important for a number of reasons that build on some of the reasons that we have meetings, these meetings to begin with. Right? They give more ideas a chance. At least 30% of workers believe that their ideas are shut down far too quickly in meetings. They allow people to build on each other's ideas. They enable creativity and creative thinking and solutioning. And they foster a deeper sense of curiosity and discovery. And for these approaches, these are sort of exercises that you start with in order to get people talking, engaging, and interacting.

So, that's a slightly different set of exercises that you would do next. Something like dot voting or different ideas like that, that really narrow down that large set of inputs that really gets you from idea stage to specific next steps and action items. The other way to make meetings engaging and interesting are through instructions. Right? The instructions are the ways that people participate in these modalities, in these exercises. Instructions and varied instructions are great for introverts, great for neurodiverse folks, and just greater engagement of everyone. Right? Not all discussions have to be large group discussions. By varying the instructions and the ways that people are participating, not just what they're participating in, you're accommodating different personalities, different learning styles, different thought processes to create a more inclusive atmosphere and ensure that all voices are being heard and considered.

Right? The instructions are the ways that people participate in these modalities, in these exercises. Instructions and varied instructions are great for introverts, great for neurodiverse folks, and just greater engagement of everyone. Right? Not all discussions have to be large group discussions. By varying the instructions and the ways that people are participating, not just what they're participating in, you're accommodating different personalities, different learning styles, different thought processes to create a more inclusive atmosphere and ensure that all voices are being heard and considered.

Okay, so what does this look like? What do I mean by instructions? So, here's an example. You're having people discuss a question or an approach. You can break it up into parts. Right? So, first, give people a minute or two to think on their own and get their thoughts together. Then have them talk with a pair to share those ideas. Then two pairs get together into a small group of four. Then those small groups can share with the larger group. Right? There's this progression that allows people to participate on a different level and makes your meeting more dynamic, more effective, and more efficient because not everyone has to share at once and not all in a large group. And you don't have to do that entire progression. Right? Frequently, you can just have people in pairs and then share or then go back to those same pairs or go into different pairs depending on the goals of your meeting. Or just chat in small groups and then have them bring the one thing that their small group decided was the most important concern to the larger group for future thinking and discussion.

So, I know there are probably some of you in this room that are thinking about all the reasons that this is much harder than just doing a regular presentation and all the ways that it won't work or that it's scary, we're engineers, right? Part of what we do is think about all the ways that something could go wrong. And facilitating conversations can be scary because you have to let everyone in. Right? All those different personalities that we talked about before, they're all part of the conversation. So, here's how you can avoid some of the most common conversation facilitation pitfalls. So, first is how might we use through feedback. So, we talked a little bit about this in terms of framing questions in the discussion. But freezing feedback through how might we statements, what are all the ways in which, or I'm curious about can all be really powerful. They can help reframe, rephrase, and refocus what someone's asking. It feels more constructive. It will feel forced and unnatural at first, but it really, really helps individuals be more succinct in their thoughts because they have to specifically figure out what question they're asking as opposed to just sort of word vomiting a bunch of thoughts at you or the rest of the group.

It will feel forced and unnatural at first, but it really, really helps individuals be more succinct in their thoughts because they have to specifically figure out what question they're asking as opposed to just sort of word vomiting a bunch of thoughts at you or the rest of the group.

Next is knowing when to move on. So, establish a parking lot. Explain what the parking lot is at the beginning so everyone is aware. This is the parking lot. When something comes up that we want to talk about more, but it doesn't really fit into the specific purpose of this conversation, we're going to add it to the parking lot. And then, you know, explain when you'll revisit the parking lot. I highly suggest not doing the parking lot in the same meeting, right? But in that way, you're able to focus on your purpose and constantly bring it back to that.

Next are rabbit holes or tangents. So, the parking lot can be one really successful way to deal with rabbit holes. The other is by taking a kind of pull from the group. So, after a few minutes, when it feels like the group probably has enough context on the topic, again, for the purposes of this conversation, but it seems like the conversation is continuing, you can ask the group for thumbs up, thumbs down, or middle thumbs on if you should continue the current conversation thread. So, up is yes, down is no, and middle is, I could go either way. The other way that I use this sometimes is if someone really, really, really wants to talk about something, but I'm not sure if it's actually going to add to the conversation and the purpose and goals and outcomes we're trying to reach, I'll time box it.

So, I'll say something like, I'm putting four minutes on the clock for this conversation. When the timer chimes, please, everyone, show me your thumbs so I know if we should move on or add a few more minutes to the clock for this thread of conversation.

The next pitfall is when no one knows what's being talked about, but everyone is pretending that they do. You can recognize this because there's often complete silence when questions are asked, when people are asked if anyone has any questions.

A good solution here is to take a five-minute break and ask for questions anonymously to be sent to you as folks go on a break. You can ask something like, what's something you need more clarity on? Or if you get any questions around, like, I lost you on X part, and then you can review them during the break, and then when folks come back, you can reset or clarify some of the terms, approaches, questions, etc. If you don't have time in the meeting to take a break, if it's a series of meetings, you can also have a follow-up and you can do this in between that first meeting and that next meeting.

Next pitfall, meeting FOMO. You invite too many people to the meeting because otherwise, people invent stories about what the meeting is accomplishing or what's being discussed, or it's seen as gatekeeping, and you don't want to do that. So, ways to fix this. Record the meeting, provide summary notes, or add people to parts of the meeting as needed. Finally, the ultimate pitfall is having a lot of conversation. Maybe that conversation is valuable, but not actually getting to any action items or to any sort of a conclusion, right?

You have to get to decisions and next steps. When conversations seem to be going in different directions, you can try to recap. What I'm hearing is, do we have any specific actions we want to take or decisions that we want to put in front of everyone? My spicy hot take is that if your meeting doesn't end with action items and next steps, maybe it shouldn't have been a meeting.