5min chapter

Between Two COO's with Michael Koenig cover image

Fellow CEO Aydin Mirzaee on Mastering Productivity and Efficiency with AI

Between Two COO's with Michael Koenig

CHAPTER

Efficient Meeting Structures and Communication Strategies for Alignment

Exploring the use of automation tools for effective meetings and the CEO's strategy of weekly emails to enhance team alignment and empowerment.

00:00
Speaker 2
Everyone listening to this, if you can't tell, I'm a fan of fellow. And one of the things that's great is we're always looking for ways to automate processes, we're always looking for shortcuts and ways to be more efficient. Just use fellow and it's just going to get better and better over time. It sounds like you mentioned weekly all hands. That happens every week.
Speaker 1
Yeah, we do it every week.
Speaker 2
Oh, wow. And how long are those?
Speaker 1
So they're 50 minutes. And that's another thing that we, again, that we don't have one hour meetings. There's no 30 minute meetings, 25 minutes or 50 minutes. And all of our meetings start after the hour. So we do 10 past the hour and we do five past the hour. That yeah, that's how we. And because again, by the way, like, how do you do that? That short hack of 10 minutes less for your meetings, that's 16. I think that's 16% 17%. Right. How do you reduce your meeting time by 17%? Is this one hack? But it doesn't work if you just shorten your calendar event, right? That's not how it works. What you actually need to do is you need to have a plan. And if you have a structured agenda that's very well prepared, you can actually do that and finish things in 50 minutes. And but yeah, every week, 50 minutes.
Speaker 2
The questions around this are just all hands are actually a lot of work, right? These are really expensive meetings. And you want to make sure that it's the best use of everyone's time and that they should actually be there to do that on a weekly cadence. One, that's a lot of prep work. Two, is there that much new information every single week that needs to be conveyed in that setting? Yeah.
Speaker 1
So great question. So not every meeting is an hour. So we've certainly had meetings that have ended in less time than that. We don't keep people if we don't need to. One of the things is that the end of a town hall meeting can also turn into a Q&A session. So we also use that opportunity. And the questions aren't necessarily for me. It could be for anybody in the company. And but in terms of like the way that it's structured, we always have a section for a presentation. It could be like a product demo. It could be something someone else is presenting. But the way that it's not a lot of work is that every team, every or every department in the company has the ability to bubble something up to the town hall level. And it's just we have a cadence where everybody bubbles up. Like the most important thing that needs to be mentioned or at a town hall setting. And so that's just like a process that kind of happens. And the most important things are bubbled up. And if there aren't super important things, then that section gets skipped. And so it's just like on a cadence where to some extent, it's like this show that we produce every week. So we just have a process of like how to minimize the amount of effort that's required to get that there. But one of the things that I think is very important to me, I do a few things. One is the, we do this town hall. The other thing that I do is on a every week, I send an email to the company. And this is something that I write on weekends usually because it's my creative brain space. But what it's really about is giving people the why. The best analogy that I've heard about in terms of what it's like to run a startup is that it's like you're driving this bus. You're sitting in the front row. You're the driver. And everybody else is in the back. They're doing things. They're building things. But the problem is this bus doesn't have windows. So they can't really look outside and see what's going on. But part of your job sitting in that front row is like to see what's coming, what you need to avoid, what the promised land looks like. And when you see the promised land to be able to describe that. So this weekly email is about me describing what I'm seeing, but also explaining the why, right? So why are we doing things? So a lot of it would be like something happens in the town hall and then I'll riff on that in the weekly email. Now you heard this person say this about this customer. And here's why this is super important. Let me give you context. Because ultimately, if everybody had context and understood the why behind things, it's not about learning processes or following like a step by headset procedure. They become it's like a higher order solution. And so that's what I do. So to me, like my town hall and my weekly email, like these things go really hand in hand. I think at the most basic level, when you think about company building, when you're one person, you have all the context, all the things, every additional person you have, you're a little bit less efficient because not all the knowledge is centralized in this one place. Maybe AI changes that, right? And you can have one. You'll have one to cows general AI and I'll have one for fellow and it'll have all the knowledge. But in the meantime, these are opportunities where we can like share context and just get everybody aligned. And so you just have to do this work to really empower everybody to function.

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