As product designers, we need to conduct and manage meetings with members of our product teams and stakeholders.

Designers use meetings to accomplish different purposes, and from my point of view, there are three types of meetings:

• Working meetings: Gathering perspectives to solve issues together. For example, a design thinking workshop with many participants from the design team or a one-on-one meeting with a developer to get feedback about a specific topic.
• Explaining meeting: Getting more info about specific zones on the product or about the product domain from a product manager or developer.
• Agreement/decision meeting: Gathering opinions to reach a decision. We sometimes call it a design review.

Meetings are fine as long as we only have a few and they don’t consume much time. The problem is that sometimes we look at our calendar and find that it is full of meetings, leaving us with less time to design.

For the last few years, I have tried to reduce the number of meetings I conduct with the people I work with as much as possible. However, this isn’t always possible. For example, if I conduct a working meeting with a developer to solve issues, it is more efficacious to take one hour, think together, reach an agreement, then continue.

However, in many meetings, we can spend a lot of time. Often, meetings can go out of the meeting agenda if the meeting organizer can’t manage the meeting facilitation well.

In that article, I aim to show you some techniques for avoiding meetings and reducing them to a minimum.

Use the Comments in Figma

One of the main advantages of Figma is that it allows easy communication with other team members with the feature. Sometimes you just need a brief overview or agreement on a specific point in the flow, so rather than convening a meeting, leave one or two notes and ask for feedback.

Please be aware that not all people receive the notification directly in their inbox. Therefore, you should ensure the person you sent it to knows about it.

One thing to remember is that it is better not to bombard a team member with many notes and questions in that manner. This is because it can be quite annoying to reply to so many comments.

Comments in Figma

Write a design decisions document

You may wonder what the connection is between writing decisions and design meetings, but from my experience, many questions that we ask are related to information that we discussed previously. This is because we do not remember all our design decisions.

If you write down every single decision you had about the design, you will be able to go back later and find all the information you needed. You can read more about design decisions documents in the article I wrote about them.

Design decisions document

Send Slack text messages

Messages can be sent quickly and easily to any member of the team and can be used to ask questions, give feedback, and request help. It is so easy sometimes to ask a question in Slack and get a quick answer that it is perfect choice.

A good tip here is to schedule the message. Suppose you are working on a complex flow and need to keep your focus. The question you want to ask is irrelevant right now. It is a good idea to type it and schedule it for two hours later so that you can continue to work while the software sends the message.

If you have a team with different time zones, you can use the schedule feature to send the message when the person is working. This way, you won’t bother them in their free time, and when they’re online, they’ll respond.

Slack video messages

In some cases, explaining a flow with text only is difficult, so recording a video and talking throughout can be a great approach. In this way, you can share your screen and explain yourself with visual support.

This makes the question much easier to understand since a picture is worth a thousand words, and a video is worth a thousand images.

Slack video messages

Record the meeting

This tip is helpful for meetings you attend to gain knowledge about a product or its domain.

These meetings often contain a lot of information we can’t remember. If you record the meetings, you can easily watch them again and find answers to the questions you may have. This will help you avoid having to conduct a new meeting and ask the same questions again.

As we work remotely today, online meetings are the most common way to hold meetings, so recording them is no problem.

Google it

This is as simple as it sounds. Find information online instead of setting up a meeting to reach it. That way, you can save your time and your team members' time.

Google it

Take a look at the documents

Surely, there are many documents at your workplace that provide a lot of information about the product and the company. Therefore, instead of conducting a meeting to ask questions, go to the doc software (for example, Confluence) and search for the information there.

Study the domain well

If you are joining a company to work on a product in a domain unfamiliar to you, it is important to study that domain thoroughly. This will reduce the number of questions you have over time and allow you to focus on the design rather than conducting meetings to ask the same questions about the product domain.

Know the product

As you work on a complex product, it is normal to have many questions about its features and history. However, with time, you should strive to become more familiar with the product so that you do not need to ask questions about areas that you already know well. Doing this can make you more efficient and avoid meeting to ask questions about the product.

Do not schedule a meeting for updates

Avoid scheduling meetings for updates about your progress and the time needed to complete a task. Instead, send a brief, concise update via Slack or another messaging platform.

Updates should be clear and communicate important information without taking up too much of your team’s time. This will help keep everyone focused and productive.

Do not schedule a meeting for updates

To summary

An effective meeting can be great, for example, when you need to collaborate with a developer to solve design-related technical issues.

However, we often join ineffective meetings where the meeting participants feel like they could be spending their time better.

In this article, I have shared some tips and tricks to avoid unnecessary meetings. Below is a short list of the tips.

• Use the Comments in Figma.
• Write a design decisions document.
• Slack text messages.
• Slack video messages.
• Record meetings.
• Google it.
• Take a look at the documents.
• Study the domain well.
• Know the product.
• Do not schedule a meeting for updates.