Thinking About a Startup’s Internal Meeting Rhythm

One of the more common questions I get is around managing my schedule and coordinating different responsibilities. My response is that I work hard to build a consistent internal meeting rhythm and look to ensure that I’m not required for the business to operate (e.g. I’m not a bottleneck for any regular tasks). Per the internal meeting rhythm, it helps keep everyone aligned and communicating on a regular basis.

Here’s our startup’s internal meeting rhythm:

• Daily Check-in – A 10 minute scrum every morning with the entire company at 10:20am where we answer the following questions: what did you accomplish yesterday, what are you going to do today, and do you have any roadblocks.
• Weekly Sprint Review / Planning – Two week product sprints where every week we either review the status of the current sprint or wrap up the last sprint and plan the new one.
• Monthly Metrics Dashboard Review – Each month we review our Google Spreadsheet metrics dashboard, which has all the critical metrics for a Software-as-a-Service startup.
• Quarterly One Page Strategic Plan – A simplified one page strategic plan that we update and review with the team once every quarter.
• Quarterly Celebration – Each quarter we get out of the office and celebrate as a team (e.g. a baseball game, picnic, sailing, etc).

Eventually we’ll break out the daily check-ins into smaller groups, do monthly strategic meetings, and quarterly check-ins (lightweight reviews) once the startup matures. While there are a fair number of meetings, they are all specialized and add significant value.

What else? What are some other meetings you like for your internal startup rhythm?