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> AWS purportedly puts design documents forward in the form of six-pagers. They start meetings with a 20 minute silent reading session. It's like the book club

by mabbo 7y ago

> AWS purportedly puts design documents forward in the form of six-pagers. They start meetings with a 20 minute silent reading session. It's like the book club from hell. Not just AWS- that's an Amazon-wide technique. And it's freaking amazing. You should try it. Look, there's two other options. 1- let someone bullshit you with PowerPoint for an hour and skim over critical details. 2- send out the doc ahead of time for everyone to read before the meeting and have every single attendee say "ah yeah I only had time to skim it, but looks good to me". Wasted time. The Amazon design review meeting involves no bullshitting, no homework before the meeting that gets skipped. We all arrive. We read the entire doc, on paper, red pens in hand. Then we dive into questions on the important bits and anything circled by those red pens. Generally takes a lot less time as far as meetings go. [Bias note: I've been at Amazon, but not AWS, for 7 years. These are my own opinions and not company statements]

chid 7y ago
I wish my company would adopt this... been in too many meetings without clear agendas and meetings for meetings sake
falcolas 7y ago
Perhaps I’m just a particularly slow thinker, but 20 minutes is not enough time for me to read 6 pages of highly technical documentation and consider all of the implications and consequences of the proposed technical design. Even a full one hour meeting is insufficient. I need at least a day. I don’t want to come out of the meeting and two hours later have a “L'esprit de l'escalier” about a flaw in the design I just approved come up. If I’m being abusively frank, if you can’t be trusted to read a 6 page document the day before a meeting and put some serious thought into it, you’re not doing your job.
- grogenaut 7y ago
  Typically a 6 Pager is: 1 Page of Press Release and FAQ 2 pages of arch overview 2 pages of business justification 1-2 pages of appendix Or some mix thereof. 20 minutes is a bit short but doable. Generally at 20 minutes the person running asks "need more time" and it can go longer. For a design review I ask for at least 2 hours for the meeting. Or more. Doing everything in the meeting greatly respects everyone's time. It's a thing I'm trying to get evenly applied at the subsidiary I work at as often we don't as people have trouble scheduling the meeting.
  - falcolas 7y ago
    See, that’s what I don’t get. A 2 hour synchronous meeting, to me, is a waste of resources. (side note: If you’re going to destroy an engineer’s morning (or afternoon) with a 2 hour meeting, you may as well make it a 4 hour meeting and jam out a POC.) A day (or week) to review on their own availability, plus the asynchronous feedback during that day (or week) means that the synchronous meeting can conclude in 20-30 minutes (if its necessary at all), with more thought put into it than any two hour review. In the end, the asynchronous method of syncing state between people may take more overall time, but that time is taken from when an person is naturally not engaged with their current project. A meeting, on the flip side, occurs whether they were in the zone or not.
    - pas 7y ago
      Yes and no. In theory the asynchronous mode is more efficient, but then it might mean you never get the ACKs from all the people. If the async mode works, no need for the meeting, after all do it over email or in GDocs. The problem with the sync mode is that inevitably you're wasting someone's time, at best only yours as you wait for others to read.
- prepend 7y ago
  > If I’m being abusively frank, if you can’t be trusted to read a 6 page document the day before a meeting and put some serious thought into it, you’re not doing your job. I used to think this and changed my mind for a few reasons. When you have people with heavy resource contention, it’s actually difficult to set aside 20 minutes to read a document. People are busy and it’s not just jerking around wasting time. It’s also lowest common denominator so if one important decision maker wasn’t able to read it stops everyone. And I’ve found that the more important, the more busy, the less likely to read beforehand. Also, what can the meeting organizer do when people don’t read. Saying “you’re not doing your job” over and over doesn’t really solve the problem at hand- make a decision. At least with reading time, it’s productive. I always send out the document beforehand so one day perhaps everyone reads beforehand, one day maybe. Reading and researching before the meeting is personally helpful so it rewards people do do prep.
- fps_doug 7y ago
  It's probably still much more time than people would spend reading it if it were sent to them beforehand. Maybe quickly skimming it for five minutes. And not necessarily due to malice, but because most people are having a hard time setting those 20 minutes aside when you have 50 other things to do and already know that you can get away with those five minutes and some guesswork during a Powerpoint presentation.

by mabbo 7y ago

chid 7y ago

I wish my company would adopt this... been in too many meetings without clear agendas and meetings for meetings sake

falcolas 7y ago

Perhaps I’m just a particularly slow thinker, but 20 minutes is not enough time for me to read 6 pages of highly technical documentation and consider all of the implications and consequences of the proposed technical design. Even a full one hour meeting is insufficient. I need at least a day. I don’t want to come out of the meeting and two hours later have a “L'esprit de l'escalier” about a flaw in the design I just approved come up. If I’m being abusively frank, if you can’t be trusted to read a 6 page document the day before a meeting and put some serious thought into it, you’re not doing your job.

grogenaut 7y ago
Typically a 6 Pager is: 1 Page of Press Release and FAQ 2 pages of arch overview 2 pages of business justification 1-2 pages of appendix Or some mix thereof. 20 minutes is a bit short but doable. Generally at 20 minutes the person running asks "need more time" and it can go longer. For a design review I ask for at least 2 hours for the meeting. Or more. Doing everything in the meeting greatly respects everyone's time. It's a thing I'm trying to get evenly applied at the subsidiary I work at as often we don't as people have trouble scheduling the meeting.
- falcolas 7y ago
  See, that’s what I don’t get. A 2 hour synchronous meeting, to me, is a waste of resources. (side note: If you’re going to destroy an engineer’s morning (or afternoon) with a 2 hour meeting, you may as well make it a 4 hour meeting and jam out a POC.) A day (or week) to review on their own availability, plus the asynchronous feedback during that day (or week) means that the synchronous meeting can conclude in 20-30 minutes (if its necessary at all), with more thought put into it than any two hour review. In the end, the asynchronous method of syncing state between people may take more overall time, but that time is taken from when an person is naturally not engaged with their current project. A meeting, on the flip side, occurs whether they were in the zone or not.
  - pas 7y ago
    Yes and no. In theory the asynchronous mode is more efficient, but then it might mean you never get the ACKs from all the people. If the async mode works, no need for the meeting, after all do it over email or in GDocs. The problem with the sync mode is that inevitably you're wasting someone's time, at best only yours as you wait for others to read.
prepend 7y ago
> If I’m being abusively frank, if you can’t be trusted to read a 6 page document the day before a meeting and put some serious thought into it, you’re not doing your job. I used to think this and changed my mind for a few reasons. When you have people with heavy resource contention, it’s actually difficult to set aside 20 minutes to read a document. People are busy and it’s not just jerking around wasting time. It’s also lowest common denominator so if one important decision maker wasn’t able to read it stops everyone. And I’ve found that the more important, the more busy, the less likely to read beforehand. Also, what can the meeting organizer do when people don’t read. Saying “you’re not doing your job” over and over doesn’t really solve the problem at hand- make a decision. At least with reading time, it’s productive. I always send out the document beforehand so one day perhaps everyone reads beforehand, one day maybe. Reading and researching before the meeting is personally helpful so it rewards people do do prep.
fps_doug 7y ago
It's probably still much more time than people would spend reading it if it were sent to them beforehand. Maybe quickly skimming it for five minutes. And not necessarily due to malice, but because most people are having a hard time setting those 20 minutes aside when you have 50 other things to do and already know that you can get away with those five minutes and some guesswork during a Powerpoint presentation.