From friction to flow: how to keep cross-functional meetings productive when building an app Bucharest

From friction to flow: how to keep cross-functional meetings productive when building an app
Bucureşti
Bucharest, Romania

Building B2B software isn’t easy, even more so when multiple unique departments will be using it. You have to find the best ways to make meetings productive, both when brainstorming and when reiterating. Such meetings can run long with no clear conclusion.

Organizing productive meetings is an art in itself, and you can’t expect everyone in your team to be good at it. We’re all human and it’s easy to get sidetracked when having a meeting about building software.

But having a
- functional team shouldn’t be an impediment: you need all of their input in order to build great software. The trick is finding a good balance between ideas and noise.

So in this article, we’re going to give you a series of tips on how to organize better meetings when building an app, and thus overall improve your workflow and boost productivity.

What qualifies as a
- functional meeting?

Let’s start with the basics. What does “cross-functional meeting” even mean? In our perspective, a
- functional team is composed of members having unique roles. For instance, a team of: a software developer, a UI/UX designer, a project manager, and even a CTO.

In our cases, a team such as the example above is the type of team we involve in meetings discussing software projects with our clients. In such meetings, our already
- functional team often meets a team with the same types of members.

And thus, you’ve got a big group of highly specialized people, where one side will build software for the other. Oftentimes, such software serves the complex
- functional team we’re interacting with.

The big challenge here is understanding each other and finding the best ways to brainstorm together and come up with good software solutions.

Pick a good leader

You can’t expect just anyone in a complex,
- functional team, to be able to lead a meeting. Even more so when such a meeting is composed of designers, developers, product owners, CTOs or CIOs, and so on. Not everyone might be social or good enough of an extrovert, especially when faced with a big team from the client’s side.

In order for our other tips to work for you, you need someone apt to keep everything in check, to lead the discussion and bring it back on course when needed.

This can be a project manager, a CTO, a CIO, or whoever in your team is on a high enough level to be able to make decisions, to know what your team does & what it can deliver, and who can work best as a liaison between your team and the client’s team.  

The person you choose to lead said meetings should be a good public speaker, punctual, well organized, and good at making plans.  

Alternatively, you can select a speaker and someone else to organize and plan the meeting. The speaker will be in charge of putting that plan in place and making sure the discussion stays on course, while someone more technical can plan the meeting discussion itself.

Why can’t it be a senior designer or developer, you might ask? Since they’re highly specialized, they might be unable to see the big picture when discussing a piece of software. And plus, management skills are important when organizing meetings and handling complex teams.

Create a solid meeting agenda

You don’t want people coming out of your meeting saying, “this meeting could have been an email”. Holding meetings just for the sake of gathering people and seeing their faces in tiny boxes is not very productive.

Each meeting you hold, especially with big
- functional teams both on your side and your client’s, has to have a clear goal: are you discussing design? Are you reviewing something? Are you showing new features coded by your team? Are you just asking questions?

Once you’ve set a goal for your meeting, you can set up an agenda. Here are a few key elements that should go into a meeting agenda:

Your agenda should be written and ideally sent to everyone participating before the meeting takes place. Leave space for your team members to contribute with talking points and keep an eye on it during the meeting to make sure it’s being followed.

Keep
- functional meetings on theme

When holding meetings with a big variety of roles, it’s easy to get mixed up in different topics and discussions. A way to fix that is by assigning time slots to talk about, for instance: app scope, design, development, timeline & deadlines, and then business logistics and/or invoicing.

Having a clear subject guideline is a great way to make sure you stay organized, on topic, and that all team members are ready to contribute when they’re supposed to. This is why it’s important to create a
- structured meeting agenda ahead of time, and make sure you stick to it.

One caveat to have in mind: with a
- functional team, some members might end up getting confused when your conversation becomes highly specialized. In other words, if developers start talking very technical, a business owner might have trouble understanding. In such cases, make sure to invite everyone to ask questions whenever they get confused.

Here are a few pointers:

Holding meetings with a complex,
- functional team, can be a real challenge - but it doesn’t have to be. Planning ahead goes a long way, and so does leaving space for questions.

Keep meetings short and to the point

Meetings that run extremely long aren’t exactly productive. We keep hearing about our attention span being lower than ever, and it’s hard to imagine you can keep a big
- functional team attentive for 2 to 3 hours.

As much as you think you can get more done if you hold longer meetings (or “workshop” meetings), these can do more harm than good. Not everyone can store as much information in a short period of time, especially when the subject matter is complex.

Most of all, physical needs will always prevail and team members who get hungry or tired during such meetings will inevitably lose focus - and that’s simply human.

What we recommend is:

But the best advice in this situation is creating a solid meeting agenda ahead of time. With just the plan to hold a meeting, you’re running wild and can go through a million different topics, stopping only when a key team member is pulled into a different meeting. And suddenly you didn’t even cover the subjects you needed to.

Overall, complex
- functional meetings when building software can be a real challenge, but not if you know how to plan ahead. Keep it simple, to the point, and don’t consider it mandatory to keep everyone from their day to day tasks just to be part of empty discussions.

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