Monthly Town Hall Meeting Policy for Product & Engineering Teams

Objective: The primary goal of our Town Halls is to facilitate cross-team learning and knowledge sharing within the Product & Engineering departments. By fostering this exchange, we aim to drive continuous improvement and maintain alignment on departmental and organizational goals.

Frequency and Timing: Town Hall Meetings are held once a month, structured into a 60-minute session for presentations and discussions, followed by a social activity also organized by the facilitating team. The Product & Engineering leadership team will schedule the meetings and send out calendar invites to ensure all team members are aware of the dates and times.

Themes: The themes of the Town Halls alternates monthly between two main focuses:

1. Independent Contributor (IC) Focus: These meetings are dedicated to team-led presentations that share technical insights, project learnings and innovative solutions to common challenges. By selecting topics that reflect both their successes and struggles, each team contributes to a richer dialogue that fosters technical excellence and promotes a culture of continuous learning and knowledge sharing across the department. A Q&A session will follow each presentation, offering a chance for further discussion, clarification and deeper exploration of the topics presented.
2. Leadership Focus: Hosted by Niklas and NK, these meetings offer strategic updates and future planning, coupled with leadership insights directly influenced by team input. The primary topics for discussion are proposed by the facilitating team, providing a platform to explore areas of interest or where additional guidance is needed. The facilitating team assists in putting together the agenda to ensure a focused and relevant discussion. A Q&A segment follows where team queries about strategic decisions or company policies are addressed, ensuring transparent communication.

How Facilitation Works: Each Town Hall is facilitated by a different team within the Product & Engineering departments on a quarterly rotation, with each team managing two IC meetings and one leadership meeting per quarter. The rotation order includes the Deal, DevOps, Data, TechOps, and Consumer teams. Notably, in Q2 2024, the Deal team will facilitate only two meetings: a leadership-focused meeting in May and an IC-focused meeting in June.

For both Individual Contributor (IC) meetings and Leadership-focused meetings within the Product & Engineering departments, the facilitating teams play a key role in organizing and preparing the agenda, although they do not manage every aspect of these gatherings.

Responsibilities of Facilitators

Independent Contributor Focused Meetings

IC meetings are designed as platforms for developers to share insights, showcase new technologies and engage with industry developments and user feedback. These meetings aim to foster a culture of innovation, collaboration and user-centric development. While the facilitating team organizes these aspects, depending on the agenda, the hosting of the meeting itself may be conducted by different team members and stakeholders.

Here are some potential examples for these meetings:

1. Tech Demos: Team members within P&E demonstrate new tools or libraries they are testing. For instance, showcasing a new deployment tool that could significantly reduce downtime.
2. Knowledge Exchange Sessions: Technical deep dives, such as optimizing back-end systems for scalability, led by team members with specialized knowledge.
3. Workshops on Emerging Technologies: Focused sessions on practical applications of emerging technologies, like implementing machine learning to enhance user interactions.