In short - all at once, very quickly, if at all.
I hate meetings just as much as the next guy - but I feel like we do them pretty well at Argyle. On Monday mornings, I have:
- 8am sales team meeting to talk about the number, the pipeline, and any interesting/important opportunities. Since we have a small and growing team, we also discuss process and best practices. Salesforce.com drives all of the reporting automatically.
- 9:30am client services team meeting to talk about our customers, outstanding and/or tricky support inquiries, and projects like demo videos, collateral, surveys, etc. We're not as data-driven in this area as we need to be...but we also just hired our first Account Manager. So we're still finding our way.
- 10am meeting with Adam - Argyle co-founder and CTO - to make sure that we have at least one time set aside during the week to stay in synch. Lately we've been talking about fundraising and baby raising. (Adam has a 3-month old and I'm expecting baby #1 - a boy - in a couple months.)
- 11am all-hands meeting to talk about the company and each of the moving parts. It is important that everyone knows what everyone else is doing so that we're always pulling in the same direction. It is also important to share individual and team successes across the company. There are 9 of us now, so these meetings are quite a bit different that just a few months ago. And I suspect that they'll be different again 3 months from today.
- The product team uses a scrum methodology, so they have lots of meetings - but they're all very focused and very fast. I join some of these meetings - usually also on Mondays.
Aside from scrum meetings, that's it - so we get it all out of the way at the beginning of the week.
The meetings are very focused - we use the same agenda format for each meeting and focus on the same core metrics and topics. We generally don't make decisions during these meetings - they're usually status updates, feedback sessions, Q&A, etc.
Because the meetings are focused, they're also usually very fast. All are less than 30 minutes, sometimes less than 15.