Oh, and by “big” meeting the CPM does not necessarily mean large, but important.

Too often, the meetings that you recommend the CPM embrace degrade into male pissing contests. The various men in the room do the equivalent of “whipping it out” and try to show how frakin’ smart they are, all while putting down the others. The loudest and most obnoxious often win. But I guess you’d categorize the ones who don’t partake in this type of verbal contest as “weak-minded fools”. Well, the Cranky Product Manager disagrees. Some of the best ideas and most important points come from the people who are quiet in meetings.

Perhaps because the CPM is female she is especially annoyed by this type of thing. Premeetings work lots better.

Could you please provide some additional insights? How do you accomplish this with remote teams, which may have a 12 hour time shift from your normal office hours? Late night conference calls help but the communication remains strained. What frequency do you suggest for face to face meetings, which are more helpful than voice or video calling.

Please enlighten more, there may be some sushi in it for you :)

There are other ways to handle this. Do more than one big meeting. Why are meetings so big? Allow engineers to do what they do, engineer things. Recommend things to them, explain etc.

The problem with pre-meetings is when you manage to get too many of the weak minded fools on your side when you are wrong. Embrace the contentious meetings. Feel good about losing every now and then.

Oh and if you have not gathered… I have been on both sides of the table, in engineering (not software) and product management. I am wrong a lot :-) and I hate the political bs of pre-meeting. And yes I am from Finland.

As far as the Asian thing, having worked with Asian businessmen a lot (large companies) the “big meetings” are usually a rubber stamp. Consensus building, face saving etc happens first. Initially I thought it a very frustrating and slow approach. It is slow, and I don’t like it, but I hate it less now that I’m older.

If somebody is too busy to actually spend time with all of the team members, that’s not unreasonable. But their opinions will be treated as those of an outsider. If you want people to take your ideas seriously, you have to take them seriously. As people.

I think the idea was hinted at when CPM said that meeting with people ahead of time allows the PM to hear unforeseen objections. It also gives engineers time to digest the problem.

There are many reasons why this helps. It gives people time to get past any emotion flare ups that even the most rational of engineers have from time to time. Perhaps they can think of better solutions and compromises while not in the heat of an argument. Maybe a good night’s sleep just changes their perspective on things.

As for the idea that there are two types of environments, rational and irrational, I just don’t buy that at all. First off, this is the real world. Every person has different capacities for logic and emotion. There are many people that have more of both characteristics than others. And it is hard to know what will set off different people.

I concede that having rational, cooler heads involved in a discussion makes meetings go better. But if your engineers are always so rational that you can drop bombs on them and they never let their emotions affect them, I question whether you really have the best workers.

I want people that care working on my projects; they do a better job.

Caring is an emotion. Emotions are unpredictable at times. Yes, sometimes those emotions can cause problems. If you do have continual problems with an individual, mayhaps they don’t belong at your company. But giving most real people warning when contentious decisions are about to be made gives them time to get their emotions in check and think about things rationally.