Why not to have meetings

At Sig we spend a lot of time thinking how to not spend more time taking decisions in the future.

First things first, our company had flexible meetings and SCRUM boards with the purpose to track and be aware of when and where – in which project – our devs were working, but, with time, I figured out that this was not the answer to our concerns.

The bad part of meeting

Everyone had already worked on a company that used a lot of meetings to talk about meaningless stuff, got away from the meeting subject and started talking about bullshit or some other worse experience.

The main point of meeting someone to talk about business is: to solve a problem without misunderstandings, wasting of time and one of its major advantages: consensus.

Said that, we need to start thinking about a way to solve the problems mentioned above and spending less time and money to make it work.

A-sync first

DO NOT WAIT FOR ANYONE TO GET SHIT DONE

You need to know what will be the next step that you need to take to evolve the product you are working on. That is why all of your decision making patterns, project scope, client meeting minutes and dev specs are available on our documentation.
All you need to know is written, not spoken nor recorded.

Do you have some issue? Send a message to your squad
The business rule is too hard for you to understand? Get in touch with one of your colleagues and ask

Are you afraid of asking? Just ask!

How things work at Sig

First things fist, we avoid having meetings.
It does not imply that we NEVER have meetings, it means that we talk, think and make decisions by forums or messages.
For example: Our mainstream communication system is Discord, if a developer has a doubt, we create a thread and make conversations until his problems are solved.

Does non-verbal conversations reduces cognitive potential?

Shout-out to Sam for bringing this issue to the table.
It actually does reduces cognitive potential, and that is why we need to understand that there are moments that we need to have meetings.
Those moments are:

• A new member enters the team – if he knows nothing about your company, you are obligated to introduce him to how things work at your environment;
• Kickoff meetings – the initial thoughts of a project are the ones that carves how it will be in the future, so you need to humanize the decision making and Search & Discover process so everyone can get to know which problems are we going to face;
• 1v1 meetings – you must understand that each people had different mentalities and different approaches to daily problems, and this also implies in the way they are going to solve your problems. So, if you like things the way I do, solving problems via text, running off of meetings, you must open an exception to your colleague that is having trouble with its tasks.
• Personal issues – the best part of a blazing fast company must be its humanity. If one of your team workers are having personal issues or difficulties to perform their work, take a bit of your time to understand why are things hard to them.

Conversation at Discord

Documentation

Final considerations

After all, you need to find which way do your processes work better.
Maybe depending less on people is one of them.
Do not answer twice and make sure your teams have the knowledge to take their own decisions. When you depends less on other people to solve your problems, you become more valuable.

Sig is a blazing fast startup, but it does not imply that we are not humans.

Sig Coding
Sig is a community-first DAO startup that produces SaaS applications powered by its own community. We spend time thinking on how to make things better and how to make tech be more environment-friendly.