Here’s a quick way to make meetings more fun!
Happy day! Short post today.
I just want to share with you two tips to make meetings more fun!. And I’m particularly thinking about those meetings where geeks have to share their results with plain human beings… You know, mixed audiences make it even more difficult to find the appropriate tone.
Being that a worldwide situation, our Development team has been thinking of how to overcome such problem and make our meetings more comprehensive and less Klingon-like. In one word, more fun!
So, they came out with the following ideas:
- A Client Demo checklist, and
- The Trump Mode.
Probably you can guess what a Client Demo checklist is, but… what about the Trump (yes, Donald) Mode?
If you want to know, just keep on reading 😀
In a prior post, I told you about what actions we are doing to make our Company Values stick. During our last bunch-up, we decided that each month two Quarizmatics were going to promote one of our values. Jordi and Andrés, two regular writers in this blog and part of the Development Team, chose _”We look at the company from the customer’s perspective”_ to be their Quarizmi Value for the month of May.
Each pair of promoters decides which actions they will push and how they will involve the rest of the team. They are free. There are no boundaries or restrictions. It’s absolutely up to them.
So well, here you are the first decisions Jordi and Andrés have made! I’m just copying the original message they uploaded to our Slack because it’s cool and fun and very Quarizmatic!
How to make meetings more fun in two steps
Over the next few days, we will be sharing the details about all the activities we have planned. As usual, we hope they will be fun and interesting! 😎 Feel free to contact us at any time for all related questions.
Today we have our first two announcements:1) The *Client Demo Checklist*
As our first action for this value, we are introducing the *Client Demo Checklist* (taaa-da!!!) Just as Iván recently introduced the “campaign upload checklist” (a list of steps everyone must follow to ensure a campaign is correct before uploading it, to minimize the risk of uploading our shopping list instead of a campaign 😀 ), we want to apply the same approach to determining what’s new and newsworthy for each Client Demo.
Why? Because, let’s face it, our Sales colleagues are very kind and they somehow find the inner strength to sit through our demos awake and with a straight face (Mikel and Íñigo, thanks for the patience, you’re great! but we on the development side are fully aware we are a bunch of huuuuge geeks (and proud geeks, of course! But geeks above all 😉 and we often go into too much technical detail or, even more often, fail to explain the benefits of our actions for the customer in a clear way.
So, the idea with the *Client Demo Checklist* is to have a list of questions we ask about any given Sprint task and *have to be able to answer _”Yes”_ to* before we can talk about that particular task during the Client Demo.
If the answer to any of the questions in the checklist is _”No”_ , there will be a high probability that a task should not be addressed during the Client Demo and, at any point, the more_”Yes”_ a task has received, the higher its priority during the demo (so, we will start with the tasks with more _”Yes”_ ).
This will ensure that we keep the first part of our Friday meeting laser-focused on the client and that we don’t make the Sales team hate us forever 😉
I will soon share with the devs a spreadsheet with the checklist, so that we can keep track of everything. Every week we will have a new *Checklist* spreadsheet based on that week’s Sprint tasks.
2) The *Trump mode*
We will also be turning on the “Trump mode” in our explanations: as you probably know, Donald Trump will be one of the candidates in the next US general election and he has a vocabulary of roughly 30 words 🙂 (with the most frequent ones being “great”, “terrific”, “best”, “I” and “Mexico”). If you listen to any of his speeches, you’ll notice he speaks with the intellectual depth of a 13-year-old.
As simple as the man is, his messages are so equally simple and easy to understand that he has turned out to be a massively popular communicator with the voters. The “Trump language” has turned out to be the most effectively dumbed-down means of communication for any politician recently, and we thought that it is a really good way of making sure a message gets across. That’s why, for the rest of the month, we will encourage everyone talking during the Client Demo to turn on the “Trump mode” and speak as Donald Trump speaks to the average voter: as a rule, any words longer than 3 or 4 syllables should be avoided! 🙂
Similarly, during the demo anyone will be able to scream or write “Trump!” on the chat every time they hear a term which is too long or that they don’t know, and the speaker will then have to turn on the Trump mode.
The Trump mode will be automatically turned off in the second half of the Friday demo.
This is the end of their message.
Well, I’m not usually in the second half, so guys feel free to relax and go back to your geek language! 🙂
So, a big thanks for letting the Sales team know what you’ve done during the week that directly benefits the customer. Thanks for explaining it in plain language. Thanks for detailing how your work will benefit him. For telling us what the improvement over the previous state of the art is and how we will measure its success. And above all, thanks guys for making the effort of walking in the customers’ shoes and speaking their own language!!
Originally published at blog.quarizmi.com on May 16, 2016.
