The worst meeting in my entire life
The day it all started …
Summer 2017, I am consultant in a mission for a client who is starting a digital transformation, big project over 2 years, critical and strategic for the company.
It’s 14:00 and I attend my first “weekly meeting”, I’m not the meeting facilitator but a simple participants, let’s start !
And there I experienced the worst meeting of my life, everything went wrong:
- 14 people were invited: physical & online with skype
- some participants were (very) late
- there was no agenda
- some topics without any connection to the meeting were discussed
- no output / todo-list
- I thought I had reached the bottom when I noticed that one of the participants allowed himself to answer his phone during the meeting
I was watching the disaster, when suddenly in my head the little Agile coach said :
“at the end of the meeting we absolutely have to get feedbacks from the participants and make sure that this nightmare does not repeat next week”
At this moment I am thinking of ROTI (Return On Time Invested), this easy and quick agile ritual that enables you to quickly evaluate the satisfaction with the meeting and get some means of improvement.
Frustration
We started late, and of course we finished late, the clock is running, the room is reserved, the participants have other meetings that are already starting, the Skype participants are disconnecting … no more time to do the Roti, I feel like a fool, alone with my idea of getting feedback, I feel hopeless
I went home terribly frustrated and on the way back (in the subway) I decided:
“It does not matter, I could not do it live but I’ll do it offline, I have the email addresses of everyone and I intend to ask for their feedback through e-mail”
I spent a good part of the evening looking for a tool that would simply ask those two questions to the participants:
- On a scale of 1 to 5 how would you rate the time spent on this meeting?
- What could be improved for next time?
After reviewing what Google offers and various survey tools I ended up realizing that there was no tool that would answer simply to my need.
Creation
After that, next steps came quickly! It is 9pm I contacted Guillaume (the other co-founder) by phone, I explained my problems of the day.
Ideas are spinning in our heads, it’s no longer just a feedback tool that we are thinking about, but an online platform that allows companies to do ROTI surveys instantly, track their progress over time, identify quickly a meeting that goes wrong : continuous improvement applied to meetings!
Our minds are set, the following days I wake up at 5am to draw the screens, Guillaume writes the first lines of codes, we decide on a name “roti.express” and choose a nice logo !
Prototype, MVP, cloud architecture, field tests, scalability, acceleration at Station F! … But all this is another story, see you in the next article!
(to be continued !)
