Episode 2: Planning meetings: the gap between natural language and user interface

Many companies have tried to bring a solution to the universal pain point of setting up meetings. Probably the most famous ones are Calendly and Doodle. Calendly offers an efficient interface to set up one on one meetings, and is an ideal tool for sales, customer relationship managers and business developers, letting customers or prospects define convenient slots for a demo or an appointment. Doodle set up is an easy to use product despite the fact it is 12 years old. The organizer sets up a list of times and days during which they would be available. The attendants inform slot by slot when they are available. Once all guests have answered the poll, the host sends the invitation to the invitees.

Also, Google and Microsoft each have a solution for setting up meetings. It identifies slots available only for members of the same company, and offers a very limited user experience if you have 10+ guests.

If we agree that organizing a meeting is a recurring and universal pain point faced by millions of workers in the world — 55 million meetings occur every day in the US — how come no solution has managed to challenge the status quo in years? What are the challenges to go over ?

We had the opportunity and duty to work hard on this question, and identified 2 main challenges to tackle:

1) the gap between user experience and our natural way of thinking

On the first point, it is interesting to analyze the way we think when we want to set up a meeting.

Today all softwares to organize meetings offer you to define potential slots and share your available slots with the persons you want at your meeting. In fact, when you set up a meeting you never have this approach, it is a counter-intuitive one. What happens in your mind is you set up a goal by telling yourself “ in order to move forward on this subject I need to meet these people as early as next week”. By selecting slots, sharing them, checking the answers of the guests, you are already starting to work on the means and the solution to reach this goal.

The other thing you are doing -especially in big companies- is prioritization. It applies for the invitees as well as for the meeting itself.

On the attendant’s side, you set up meetings with some guests you consider as “must have”, and others as “nice to have”. As an example, you want your boss to be there, but the marketing product manager is not mandatory for this topic, even if it is important to invite him. It will not impact the outcomes of the meeting if he does not join. With the same dynamic you have meetings that are more important than others and are top priority. As an example, if you need to set up a “closing meeting” to finalise the acquisition of a company for hundreds of millions, or if you simply need to have a meeting with the CEO of the company, it will overrun all other meetings.

2) the complexity of all preferences we unconsciously set up in our agenda.

The second reason is more complex to define and solve. Even if your agenda is filled with details, the information it contains is a small part of your preferences and constraints you take into account when you plan a meeting.

We identified 3 categories of criteria that are not included in your agenda, but are still important inputs in your decision process about when to set up a meeting

• Logistical: when you organize a meeting, you know your location prior to this meeting and therefore, the time to go from one point to your meeting place. Even if your agenda is showing an availability before, the reality is you will be in the car or train and not able to join the meeting. You also know if you will be commuting by car, bike or train.
• Comfort : many of you set up rules to have some breaks or time to work on specific subjects. As an example some want 15mn break between 2 meetings, some of you want to have 1h twice a day to work without being disturbed, and many french executives I interviewed do not want to have meetings starting at 2PM, because they are still finishing their lunch.
• Privacy : Accessing the agenda of someone also means that you see the “fill rate of the agenda”. This means you can see how many meetings he has, and guess (at the end wrong or right) his level of activity. Some of you are not comfortable with sharing this information.

Those are the main outcomes of probably close to one hundred interviews we ran for Meeting’s Monster.

In the next episode, I will share with you how we implemented the different solutions to address the points above.