How to Run a Successful Product Team Meeting
As a product leader, one key responsibility is to keep your product team aligned and on track. This means ensuring that everyone is aware of the product roadmap and objectives, and that any blockers are quickly removed. A great way to do this is to hold regular product team meetings.
In this article, we'll cover why you should run a product team meeting, how often to hold them, and who should be invited. We'll also walk through each item on the meeting agenda and explain why it's important.
Why Run This Meeting?
Product team meetings are a great way to keep everyone aligned on the product roadmap and objectives. They also provide an opportunity to discuss any blockers and make important decisions about the product roadmap.
How Often, How Long, Who's Invited?
Product team meetings should be held twice a week and should last for 60 minutes. The team meeting should include the product manager, product designers, and any other needed stakeholders. In addition to this, it's important that the product manager attends as many engineering meetings as possible in order to stay up to date on the latest updates and releases.
What to talk about in your Product Team Meeting:
1. Check-in on our goals:
This is a good time to review the product roadmap and objectives to ensure that everyone is still on track. You'll want to hear from the team if certain projects are ahead of behind.
For example, if you are finalizing the MVP for your product, you should ask your product manager to confirm that all features have been properly tested and released. In addition to this, it's important to ensure that all project managers are up to date on their OKRs.
Also, if you haven't recently, share what current goals of your team. You should be doing that weekly.
2. Metrics review:
Reviewing metrics is a great way to gauge the success of the product and identify any areas that need improvement. Share an overview of the top KPIs the product needs to hit in order to hit it's goals. This may include metrics such as conversion rate, user retention, or session length.
Other prompts for this section:
- What metrics do you track? How often do you review them?
- Are there any metrics you should be tracking?
- What have you learned from tracking these metrics?
3. Product updates and upcoming releases:
This is a chance for the team to provide an update on the product and any upcoming releases. Ensure that designs and tickets that need finalization are being worked on head of engineering.
4. Backlog grooming:
This is a chance to review the product backlog and ensure that it is up-to-date.
Other prompting questions for this section:
- Is the product backlog up-to-date?
- What is our current focus when prioritizing the product backlog?
5. Film review:
This is a chance for the team to review any user research or feedback that has been collected.
6. Blockers to discuss:
This is an important time to discuss any blockers that are preventing the team from making progress. Some blockers could include:
- There are no tickets assigned to [person] in Jira.
- Need design feedback on the ticket that I just submitted.
What to do After the Meeting
After the meeting, it's important to follow up with any action items that were assigned. This will ensure that progress is made on the product roadmap and that any blockers are removed.
