#meetings

The AI gets the what. My notes capture the why and the weird. Now I run both systems in parallel. The AI recording gives me a searchable archive I can query across weeks of meetings. I use it for things like “what did we agree about the roadmap for X?” or “who raised the concern about Y?” That is genuinely useful. I can pull up a decision from three weeks ago in seconds instead of scrolling through my own messy handwriting. But my handwritten notes are where the real PM work lives. They are a mess. Half sentences, arrows connecting ideas, question marks next to things I need to follow up on. They would make no sense to anyone else. That is the point. They are my thinking, not a record. The combination works because each tool does what the other cannot. AI is perfect for recall and search. It is terrible at judgment. My notes are terrible for recall. I regularly cannot read my own handwriting. But they force me to process what I am hearing in real time, to decide what matters while it is happening.

One company had a rule that the last to arrive was responsible for taking meeting notes. Another required that last person to clean up the meeting room when all was said and done.

"On the SUSE Studio team, we had a “level playing field” rule for our weekly meetings. Even though a lot of us were clustered in Nürnberg, Germany, everyone dialed in to the meeting, putting every single person on an even footing. There’s no “local” and “remote.” Everyone has to speak clearly into the telephone. When we instituted this rule, we noticed the “remote” participants joining in the conversation a lot more often, and the calls went a lot smoother. This worked well for us. It might help you too. Let me know how it goes."

"This is my attempt to communicate some of the previously tacit knowledge on the benefits and consequences of common practices for daily stand-ups"