The best meeting I ever had 📅

Meeting are a menace for most. Often there isn’t a clear reason why we are here, and what is asked of us, or we are just snoozing off on social media while other give passionate presentations we don’t care about. Well, the situation is slightly different as a PM. As a Product Manager, meeting time is one of the scarcest resource available, and is treated delicately, and defended vigorously.

PMs don’t attend meetings, they lead them

Most PMs don’t attend the majority of their meetings, they lead them. This means they use them as a tool to

• drive alignment,
• get buy-in and secure resources, or
• ensure progress towards a common goal.

Meetings are one of the main tools for a PM to achieve impact and enable product teams.

This one morning I am sitting at the airport, ready to start my vacation. I am excited and start to fully relax waiting for my plane to board, when a ping from my manager at the time catches my attention. Hoping he is simply wishing me a fun trip, I look at the phone, and realize this might be something different altogether.

His chat reads: “Hey Stefan, some changes, we have a leads review in 3 days and will need to present an update on your project. Can you put a couple of slide together so we can work on crafting the story?”

What reads like a harmless quick request is in fact a very serious situation. Let me translate this for you: “Your project was identified as something senior leadership (think VP and SVP level) wants to know more about. They are likely wondering if you have enough impact to justify the existence of the project going forward. We need a rock-solid deck, crafted to the highest precision in 3 days. Drop everything else and start on this asap. I am here to review your work and critique, but this is on you now.”

Here is my facial reaction in case you wondered: 😱

Having spent time at places where communications aren’t as cryptic and in need of translation (Goldman Sachs in 2008) is a true benefit for me. The soft messaging of a California company isn’t helpful to me as it costs me time and effort. But I get it, we should be nicer, and what might feel like barking orders at folks simply isn’t the tone of the time anymore (which I think is a good thing). Having said that, I can see that a ‘translation table’ might be helpful for folks who are new to this form of management, where urgency is covered up like this.

Would I rise up and bite into this opportunity to present my work to SVPs? Hell yeah I would!

So there I am, in my vacation mindset, sitting at this gate, waiting for my plane to board. I had a call to make. Would I rise up, let my vacation mindset go, and bite into this opportunity to present my work to SVPs? Hell yeah I would.

Some context: the project in question was the reason I relocated from Europe to the US, and it was something I was truly and deeply invested in. You know, they say as a good PM you have to be able to let go of your project if there is something else that shows to have higher impact for your company? Well, all great PMs I know have something that they simply wouldn’t let go, no matter what. funnily enough, it seems that these are the projects they go through the fire for, and most often this is what is required to get from good to great. Well, this was no exception.

So instead of sipping sparkling water and kicking back, I was vigorously typing away on my laptop during my flight, desperately trying to get the visual on the slide perfectly aligned on my ting comedy class airplane seat. At these times you sigh the person in front of you ins’t reclining their seat, and if they do, you could invite them to understand your desperation. “You know, I really need this deck to come together.” But they are you, without the ping from your manager. So you just breathe, and inch a little deeper in your seat to get that slightly better angle on your trackpad to move boxe son the slide.

I was confused, but decided to go with my gut

Couple of days later I am sitting in front of the meeting room, waiting. I am nervous, the mood is tense. My manager hasn’t been super helpful. He critiqued, said a key slide wasn’t precise enough to be added. The slide showed the main thing: the ROI of our project in terms of ad revenue. In my mind, it was the key slide. Why did he not want it in there? I was confused, but decided to go with my gut and leave it in.

When the door opens, a team of people storms out. They have just been through the same thing I would go through right now. A 30 minute (well, 20 minute, really) slot with a top executive at the most profitable company in the world. Top wow them, to quickly give the context on something you and a team of highly specialized experts have worked on for the past 6 months or so. It is an unimaginable task. But you portray confidence, you smile, and you hope. I learned that in those moments it is best to surrender. Things happen now they way they happen, things will appear in your mind, or they wont, and literally imagining yourself squeezing your brain won’t change a thing, it will simply make the experience tougher on you. Not to speak about worrying about things you can’t control, like technical issues or whether the audience had a chance to grab a drink.

This day I was lucky. No tech glitch, the machine worked, the slides came up right away, the room felt welcoming, executives seemed at ease. Most importantly, I felt at ease. For months I have been deeply immersed in this topic, have crafted detailed narratives, and high-level summaries, have spoken with countless executives from some of the most successful companies in the world. They have listened, they used my product, they became more successful through it, and we made money in the process. I felt as ready as I would ever feel.

There are moments where you get paid to learn what would otherwise be a ridiculously expensive MBA program. This was one of those moments.

I started to present. The SVP stopped me after 3 sentences. He gave me a critical yet warm look and said: “You have 25 minutes left.” My face must have looked confused as I said: “You want me to speed it up?” “You have 25 minutes. I want you to pace yourself so you get through your content.” You dork! I heard myself say in my head. But I could move on from this quickly. “Alright.” and off I went. The presentation went flawlessly. Flawlessly. In my mind, at least.

The slide my manager wanted to remove was the highlight of the show. The SVP said something incredibly insightful: I don’t read the exact number, I want to gauge the magnitude. It isn’t important whether the return is x% or y%, but whether it is xx%, or .x% that is the key insight.

There are moments where you get paid to learn what would otherwise be a ridiculously expensive MBA program. This was one of those moments.

When I left the meeting I was glowing. We secured buy-in for the project to go ahead. At the end of the day I have an email in my inbox, from the SVP, just saying: “Thanks for the review Today. Nice work.” I looked at it over the coming weeks and months, just to savor the energy it provided. 😎

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