Vampire Meetings Are Sucking the Life Out of Your Day (With Christoph Steinlehner)

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In this episode of the Product Agility Podcast, Ben welcomes product coach and consultant Christoph Steinlehner to discuss a universal pain point: unproductive meetings. If your calendar is flooded with time-sucking, pointless meetings, you're not alone. Christoph dives into the root cause of this meeting epidemic and offers practical tools to reclaim your time, energy, and focus.

Key Takeaways:

• Multiplying Meetings: Why they lead to more and when to intervene.
  Vampire Meetings: Use the “wooden stake” of visual mapping to end life-sucking gatherings.
  Power of Visual Mapping: Even rough sketches bring clarity, alignment, and actionable outcomes.
  Keep it Scrappy: Stay humble and simple to encourage collaboration and avoid over-preparation.
  Avoiding Tangents: Use visual tools to spot and address off-track discussions.
  Psychological Safety: Create a safe space for collaboration and better decision-making.

Practical Tools & Methods:

• Customer Journey Mapping, Impact Maps, and more: Christoph shares some of the key methods that product teams can use to map out their meetings, systems, and processes visually.
• Mapping doesn’t need to be complex: You don’t need fancy software! Sticky notes on a wall or a whiteboard can work wonders for getting on the same page.
• Tools of the trade: Learn about some digital tools for remote mapping, including Miro, Mural, and Figma, and how to get started with them.

Quotable Moments:

• “Meetings are like vampires, sucking the life out of us. But mapping is the wooden stake we need to slay them.”
• “Start visualising! You don’t need expensive tools. Just a few sticky notes and arrows can transform how your team collaborates.”
• “When people can see what’s in your head, they can point out what’s wrong. That’s when real collaboration happens.”

Links and Resources:

• Connect with Christoph on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/csteinlehner/  
• Want to learn more about visual mapping and how it can help your team? Reach out to Christoph on LinkedIn for his free guide to the Mapper Method.
• Loved this episode? Leave us a review on iTune

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Ben Maynard

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Product Agility Podcast

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