What kinds of ongoing, cross-functional meetings do you think are important to have? Which teams are involved, and what agenda items do you recommend?

It really depends on the nature of the project and the teams involved — but a few foundational cross-functional rhythms have worked well for me. Managing cross - with your 3-in-a-box (3-iab) (PM, Design, Eng):We maintain regular ceremonies — weekly stand ups, sprint planning, refinement, retros, and design/tech reviews. These are table stakes for execution. Managing down (with my teams):Me and my 3-iab do a monthly progress check-in with a broader set of stakeholders We use it to review roadmap ...Read More

At the VP level, these are the meetings I try never to miss: Engineering, Design & Operations peers [Weekly] – Having this at my current has made the biggest difference. My peers are my "first team" and we have time set aside to proactively problem-solve together, instead of being brought together only in escalation situations. Anyone can add agenda topics, and we order them at the beginning of each meeting based on urgency. GTM Sync & Launch Readiness [Weekly] – This is a regular touchp ...Read More

This is a very critical aspect of a PM role, to manage cross functional stakeholders (upper managements, teams and your customers). Customers can be internal or external. Here are the XFN meetings I recommend: Weekly meetings with engineering teams who are helping you build the product. This can be used to manage requirements, setup milestones, backlog grooming etc Bi-weekly meetings with customers (internal customers are more demanding). This can be less frequent for external customers. Use it ...Read More

The lead on this question is about meetings but that is just one context for the more important part of this, what information do you need to radiate out and who needs to hear it? Sometimes as PMs it easy to fall into one of two camps when it comes to updates Try to tell everyone everything. This can be a reaction to hearing that we are . . . not telling enough people or stakeholders what we are doing and someone complaining about "being out of the loop" Neither of these is the right answer beca ...Read More

The structure and frequency of cross functional meetings vary by audience & project phases.  With your core development team of engineering, design, data science and productOps, if there is one meeting I recommend - that would be a weekly touchpoint. Try to make every one participate in this touchpoint - mainly to avoid too many 1:1s & message passing that leads to chaos. This cross functional team meeting also helps bring forth unstructured discussions through which new ideas surfaces . ...Read More