Town Hall / Strategy Call

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We are looking at changing the frequency of our Town Hall calls and introducing a monthly internal strategy call.

Proposal

Town Hall

  • Run monthly instead of fortnightly
  • Continue with same format - update from team leads & external Q&A

Strategy Call

  • Introduce a monthly internal Strategy Call to include:
  • Jarrad’s update
  • Team leads present to peers allowing collaboration
  • Q & A
  • Opportunity for all CC’s to be together and aligned as one cohesive team

Example:

Week 1 - Town Hall (external)
Week 3 - Strategy Call (internal)

Would love to hear your views or any objections with the new Town Hall / Strategy Call structure.

@jarradhope @carl

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Great idea. I’m new to Status, and my role encompasses various tasks that touch all teams or combinations of different teams. One challenge I’ve had in onboarding is that each team (of brilliant contributors) operates in a bit of a silo. Highly suggest this monthly collabo to encourage cross-team communication and coordination of efforts. The proposed replacement of a biweekly Town Hall makes sense given the high work effort it takes to produce the TH vs the low number of attendees/viewers; TH once per month could be more effective.

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Sounds good! Also gives a bit more to report on during Townhalls to keep things interesting for community members joining.

I’d suggest the weekly product development call to be replaced by the Strategy call. cc @jonathan @petty @iurimatias @cammellos @Simona @guylouis @Carly @AK47 @simonam

Over the last period there’s been this product development weekly call. Starting with Andre, Iuri and myself to align Mobile and Desktop. This has organically grown to a cross-functional alignment call; Usually including updates from Mobile, Desktop, Keycard, Security, Marketing legal. During this week’s call we discussed moving to bi-weekly as well as the purpose of the call. A bi-weekly strategy call seems to cover the needs (notes from Monday’s call):

  • How is the call different from Townhall?
    • It is different, but reporting is similar
    • Coordination, on what’s starting, not what’s in progress or done
    • More discussion, input and questions on work
    • Alternative to keeping up with Discord
    • Platform to discuss things that should not be documented (yet)
  • How can we safeguard visibility to those not on the call?
    • Not have the call; Improve async visibility
    • Recap on Discord
    • Rotate notetaking
    • Disseminating by PD teamleads on call
  • What would you say is the ideal frequency and duration?
    • No call - Bi-weekly
  • What things are we not doing that could help keep each other informed?
    • Standups per team for example, or easier access to boards, more cross-pollinating among teams
  • How can we make sure the call runs without an owner?
  • Other
    • Focus more on future planning
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Great idea @Terry.

If we run the Town Halls monthly, I think we can try to get a bit more out of them. As Carly mentioned, attendance is low and participation is limited. By reducing frequency, the updates should be more more detailed and aim for total transparency into our work. It would be cool if we had more participation from community as the Q&A has also been lacking. We can come up with ways to drive this. We should probably just ask the community what the want out of town halls and make sure we cover those topics (i suspect things like product roadmap and metrics will be important).

Monthly strategy calls also sounds good to me. @hester - im ok if we replace the product development call with the strategy call so long as there is a weekly/bi-weekly recap of progress across all streams of work. They are SUPER helpful for me to understand timelines for things like releases and avoid the “hey jonny, we are releasing tomorrow can you prep comms”.

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