Purpose, Process, Payoff! How to define better meetings

When I started my second IT job eight years ago, I was 26 years old. I still had so much to learn, in both technical and soft skills. I hadn’t had much experience in soft skills, and within the first few weeks of working at the job, I organised a meeting to discuss something. I sent out a meeting invite with the title of the meeting, the time and the location.

One of my colleagues I had invited declined the invitation, I was confused. Why? The invite had everything someone needed to know. I thought the title explained everything.

Or so I thought…

My colleague told me that they wouldn’t accept a meeting that was empty. My meeting invite was blank. And that’s when I realised that to someone else who knew nothing about the issue, this invite wouldn’t tell them anything about the meeting at all! If you work in IT, you probably have also had a meeting invite without a description appear in your inbox.

I went back to my meeting invite, updated it, and the invite was accepted. Crisis averted. I ended up writing basic descriptions for each meeting from then on. Were the descriptions the best? Probably not. But it gave the attendees enough information about the meeting.

What got me to write this post was something that happened recently. A colleague that I worked with shared something that I’ve never heard of before when defining meetings, my colleague shared that a meeting invite should have the following; Purpose, Process and Payoff. Coincidentally, they also didn't like empty meeting invites.

These three points should define everything someone should know about the meeting. But what does each point mean?

• Purpose - What is the purpose of this meeting? Why are we all here? Give a description that informs everyone what the meeting is about. Share some links to JIRA tickets or confluence pages as well.
• Process - How is the meeting ran? Is there going to be any demos? Give an overview of how and who is running the meeting.
• Payoff - What will everyone get out of the meeting? Will anything be resolved? Describe what the outcome of the meeting will be.

Here's an example:

• Purpose - to discuss the findings following the spike we brought into our sprint.
• Process - I will walk through a confluence page and share my discoveries with the attendees.
• Payoff - Feedback will be given, questions will be raised for further investigation, attendees will gain knowledge on what was discovered on the spike.

You could expand this invite more by providing a link to where the results of the spike are located, diagrams and more.

I’ve now started to get into the habit of defining the purpose, process and payoff whenever I create a meeting invite. I think it’s definitely helped me in taking the time to clearly define what the meeting is about, what will happen and what the outcomes will be. I’ve found it to be a good way in being more organised, it’s an improvement to how I used to write meeting descriptions.

But what are the main reasons why you should define a process for meetings?

• Inform - People need to know why they’re being invited to a meeting. I originally thought for years that just providing a meeting title would be sufficient, but it isn’t.
• Organise - Taking the time to define these three points will help you organise the meeting, making you look more professional and resourceful.
• Prepare - Using the three points will allow yourself and others to prepare for the meeting, in case anyone needs to bring a set of notes or something. Plus, it allows you to prepare the ‘process’ step of the meeting.

Although this should help you to define better meetings, it’s important to remember to avoid having too many meetings or long meetings. But that is an entirely different topic altogether.

If I could go back to when I started work, I’d definitely share this process to defining better meetings. It’s something that University didn’t teach me, or prepare me for.

Are you ready to redefine your meetings? Start by implementing the Purpose, Process and Payoff framework in your next meeting invite. Don’t forget to share this post with your colleagues - because better meetings start with us. If you implement Purpose, Process, Payoff, let me know how it goes!