The other critical type of communication that product managers do a lot of is meetings. Whether it's meeting your engineers for a standup, presenting to potential customers, or just a weekly one-on-one with someone, having some principles of communication can help you a lot get done what you want to get done.
Let's look at some of our previously discussed principles and apply them to meetings or otherwise verbal, synchronous communications.
Who is in the room
Always cater your meetings to who is in the room. Look around to see who is there with you, look at the Zoom participants, and make sure you understand who is listening. See who is engaged with what you are saying. See who isn't and use that as a context clue that you may be discussing the wrong things. As much as possible, adjust your course to make sure you are heading towards the goals of both you and the participants in the meeting.
The right amount of context
The same principles as writing apply here. Make sure you're giving just enough context but not overly too much. We will get into this more later, but every word you say in a meeting (particularly in large meetings) is a surface area for someone to derail your conversation. If you are trying to get people to sign off on a plan, but people are arguing about something you said in the context-setting portion of the meeting, you are probably not going to meet your goals very well.
Set the right amount of context to have a fruitful discussion. Leave out any details that you wouldn't want to dwell on and unnecessary controversial subjects.
Prepare for 100% to say 5%
This particularly applies to meetings. You will do a lot of preparation to say only salient details. You do not have to discuss everything you know, and you shouldn't. As the PM, you are the expert, and people expect you to do a lot of work to sift through the unnecessary to find the necessary.
At Microsoft, no joke, I would spend a month preparing for a meeting with the executives that would last an hour. And that was a really good use of everyone's time; the decisions that came out of those meetings moved millions of dollars.
Don't convince those who don't need convincing
A really good idea when you're going into a meeting where you are trying to convince folks to get on board is to find out early where everyone in the room is. If you get a good pulse of "everyone agrees with what I'm trying to convince them of," then shift gears from "this is why we should do this" to planning how you're going to get that thing done. Spending too much time on the why is both unnecessary and could end up accidentally talking someone out of it.
