8 ms·

When I joined, I was perplexed by this way of operating meetings. It surprised me greatly that people wouldn't want to read the doc at ahead, give it time for t

• travisjungroth 5y ago
  The other side I heard from someone who worked at Amazon: The SMEs read critically and take the full time. The PMs skim it and start pitching whatever idea comes first to mind.
  • awsanswers 5y ago
    The PMs are often SMEs of related concerns and own stakes in the new idea being discussed
  • cle 5y ago
    If someone is wasting time in a meeting on tangents unrelated to the goal of the meeting, the person running the meeting has every right and obligation to shut down the tangent. This is a problem regardless of the document culture. If anything the document culture gives you an objective standard that makes it very clear whether a line of discussion is on topic.
    • pm90 5y ago
      When you begin to enforce such rules is when you know the culture is going to shit. The act of “shutting down a tangent” will be seen as hostile and a grudge is created. Hurt parties will refuse to or be difficult to cooperate with. Your culture can survive only if there’s a shared commitment to it and people feel like they belong. Perhaps you would want to shut down “politely” and it’s an art to do it without embarrassing the receiving party? But that means that only people with such political skill/power can take that action.
      • ALittleLight 5y ago
        I think it's pretty easy to politely shut down tangents. "Thanks for raising that. In this meeting I want to focus on X. Why don't you start an email thread with <whoever> or setup a time to discuss this later."
      • planckscnst 5y ago
        Not in my experience. I value it hen someone realizes that a discussion path left to its own will not help with the goal of the meeting and then asks to have that discussion in a different channel. This is true when I was contributing to the distraction as well as when I was wishing we could get back to the meeting's purpose
      • nsonha 5y ago
        Pal, it's like meeting 101, the only people possibly get butthurt about this are those with zero work exp
      • celticninja 5y ago
        Um this happens all the time, and you know what, usually the people involved in the discussion realise it is the wrong forum and it is one of them who will suggest 'taking it offline' so as to not waste everyone else's time.
      • matwood 5y ago
        Meeting is about X. If someone rolls in and only wants to talk about Y they are one or more of these things, a) clueless, b) unprofessional, c) disrespectful of others time. But what typically happens is people get excited and have ideas. That's great, but focus is key and people need to be reminded. TBH, I don't even see any art in shutting it down. I get excited about ideas and can head off on tangents. The meeting runner (or anyone else) should call me out, and get us back on track. And when this happens, I apologize and thank them for the reminder.
  • pm90 5y ago
    I can picture this so clearly it’s painful. To be clear, it’s very possible that both these perspectives can be true simultaneously. Big corps are one in name only, different divisions could be different companies and thus the variance in experience.
  • specialist 5y ago
    PM prerogative. Same as it ever was.
• throwaaskjdfh 5y ago
  What's an SME?
  • spdustin 5y ago
    Subject Matter Expert
  • ThrowawayR2 5y ago
    Engineering jargon for "Subject Matter Expert".
    • dochtman 5y ago
      Is this common across the industry, or mostly used at Amazon? I’ve been a professional software engineer for 20 year and read a lot of HN, but I think I haven’t seen this particular acronym around much (I think I would usually call these people “domain experts”).
      • doctor_eval 5y ago
        Yeah - I’m nowhere near Amazon but I’ve heard it, even been called it more than once. In my experience it’s not a title, so much as a role in a particular context. Like, I could be GM of billing - and therefore in a meeting I might be one of the billing SMEs.
      • emddudley 5y ago
        The term "SME" is common in engineering. It is equivalent to "domain expert".
      • throwaaskjdfh 5y ago
        Same here, 25 years writing software, never heard it, even working in the Bay Area. I got a pretty large number of upvotes on the three-word post above so I think the term is common in some circles, unheard of in others. Someone should map it somehow.
        • 5y ago
• glenngillen 5y ago
  I miss many aspects that are the byproduct of this particular Amazon process. Namely: - it’s also a very email heavy culture, yet I had zero anxiety about what might still be sitting in my inbox unread as I went to a meeting. If it was important pre-work that was required for the meeting we all did it together at the start of the meeting. There was no expectations to have caught up on context prior. - the format was very empowering both as an author and a consumer. As an author the constraints meant you didn’t have to worry so much about the audience or the structure and instead it was a more pure focus on content. Likewise as a reader you quickly build a muscle for how to consume it rather than second guessing if there’s going to be some grand reveal or how a story is building. - it was also nothing short of inspirational being able to observe very senior leadership coming in to a read on something. Near zero previous context about local challenges, the particular business space or problems we’re discussing, and every single time they’d gone straight in on a fundamental issue others had missed or something that seemed inconsistent across the data presented that warranted a closer look.
  • amazoniananon 5y ago
    Agreed on every one of these points. Especially with the inspirational aspect of seeing veteraned industry leaders and principal engineers come in fresh and have questions and misunderstandings. It's given me the courage to be wrong or confused and ask questions. I've also admired a few people's ability to advocate for shared principals and express how this relates to them - especially customer obsession
  • kator 5y ago
    Funny I literally tell people when they join my team that email is the worst way to get my attention. You have a guaranteed slice of attention from me if you schedule time. If you email me you're spinning the wheel and if what you are sending me isn't that important, I'll get to it when I can.
    • afarrell 5y ago
      > I’ll get to it when I can Sometimes that is what I want: the non-urgent attention of a relaxed person who can think more deeply about a problem.
• wildfire 5y ago
  I found printed documents to be much more helpful than using Quip (or WorkDocs). Quip / WorkDocs means you start getting comments, highlights and other things from people -- which are then visible to everyone else at the meeting. If there was a way for you to personally highlight your concerns during the read-through and then the presenter could display them all at once that would be great. By not having that ability, it tends to mean the person with the "most authority" has their comment taken seriously and addressed straight away -- just like having the "loudest voice" in a meeting works against allowing everyone to contribute.
  • grogenaut 5y ago
    I actually prefer the online docs format as there's usually a bunch of things people jump on, and if I see someone commenting on that, I can keep reading and get further down the doc (better coverage). When I did doc reviews on paper, I found everyone would find the same weak point in the first paragraph and would miss getting to the end of the doc. Another major benefit, esp for junior employees, is the person who wrote the doc does not have to take as many notes, they're all in the online doc. Meetings full of senior folks tend to have TPM/PMs in the meeting who are playing notetaker. But junior folks are defending their thesis and taking down notes, it's just a lot to do. Online docs makes that a lot easier. As I've had mentors say... if you find issues in the first part of the doc, what are they hiding at the end... Save your questions till you read the whole thing.
    • alok-g 5y ago
      Understood that with printed docs multiple people may start commenting on the same points, however, the discussion happens only once still. I personally find that many of the comments showing up with online commenting are not worth, and they don't even get acted upon. What's lost in the process are good comments amongst the sea of them. Notetakers should be capturing the key points anyways. Large number of online comments is perhaps even worse than meeting summary notes with a raw listing who said what.
      • grogenaut 5y ago
• grogenaut 5y ago
  I think you're missing one of the biggest features. Do you really think that most L8s have time to read your doc, let alone Jeff or Andy? Their calendars are all completely booked. Asking them to read the documents before the meeting without scheduling the hour for them just means that doc is not going to be read. It's also asking them to value your document over their other obligations and their personal time. Most L8+'s and especially Andy/Jeff are just wall to wall doc reviews and decisions. Putting the time in the meeting is the respectful thing to do for other people's time. I'm a PE (L7) and I have to ask people just to book an hour for me for docs to read otherwise it just won't happen, someone else who does use my calendar will take that time instead.
  • lmm 5y ago
    That's pretty counterintuitive - surely if I book half an hour on your calendar and ask you to take half an hour beforehand, isn't that being more respectful of your time than booking an hour on your calendar? Surely in the worst case you could achieve the same thing by blocking out the half hour immediately before my meeting yourself, but you gain some scheduling flexibility as well.
    • geofft 5y ago
      If your schedule is busy enough, you may literally not have half an hour free between now and the half hour being booked. Calendar UIs are pretty good at making it clear whether you're finding an open one-hour slot and less good at making it clear whether you're finding an open half-hour slot where there's a free half hour at some prior time. And they also won't put a hold on that half hour, so multiple people might send meeting requests that implicitly expecting the same prep window. You can potentially build a culture where it's normal for the recipient to decline invitations if they can't find a prep time, but it's much more coordination overhead. Also, there's an advantage in having the document fresh in your mind, instead of shuffling into a meeting with people grabbing sodas etc. and immediately hearing "So, any comments on section 1." (The article mentions this: "Some people read the document but forgot what it said because they read it days or hours before") Maybe another way to put this: "respectful of time" does not mean allowing the recipient to cram as many things as possible into their working day; it means allowing the recipient to decide how many things they can pay full attention to. If they don't have a full hour to dedicate, the better answer might be "Let me find you someone else who can provide you feedback" (or declining some other commitment in order to prioritize your document) instead of showing up for half an hour.
• xkjkls 5y ago
  More than anything it actually gives people time to read the document. Time doesn't come from nowhere, especially for people higher on the ladder. It's always good when its purposefully scheduled, rather than expected.
• igeligel_dev 5y ago
  What happens if a document does not deliver the data and too many things are unclear? Like too many questions appear and the while meeting is becoming unproductive?
  • kator 5y ago
    Typically you get that feedback, in a very clear and positive way. I've never felt like someone was putting me down when my doc was not answering the questions. The goal of a doc is not to show how smart you are. The goal is to expose the truth as "We" know it and expose it to critical feedback to dig deeper, or decide we have enough to make a decision.
  • ttam 5y ago
    If it's an important meeting, it's expected that you've gone through previous reviews with other people who would've given you that feedback If there are issues that have not been caught until that important meeting, you'll get feedback to come back with the concerns addressed
• agentofoblivion 5y ago
  I’m at AWS and the doc focus meetings is my favorite cultural force of working there. I was surprised to see the article leave out the benefit to author of forcing them to clarify their thoughts and get evidence to support their claims. I am always way more prepared to discuss and defend my proposals after writing a document, even if I thought my idea was pretty clear before writing it. A drawback, if you want to call it that, is it can be exhausting. Both on the consumption side when you have to review lots of deeply technical and nuanced things all day and be on your A game, or in having to constantly write documents. As I’ve gotten more senior it has taken the largest part of my time now. It also seems like a lazy answer from management can be “well write that up in a doc and we can review”. Feels like you can’t discuss anything without a doc sometimes. But still love it, net net.