I’ve been thinking recently about how to get more value of 1:1 meetings with my manager. Over time I got into the bad habit of treating 1:1s like a personalized status update; just talking about what I’m working on and any potential impediments. I’m giving a lot more thought now to what I want out of my career and how to improve my performance outside of the quality of my code, and the first thing I’m trying to fix is approaching 1:1s as a meeting for me, and not an extension of daily standups.
For my last 1:1 meeting with my manager, I tried coming up with an agenda ahead of time, and sent it over to him in advance to let him know what I wanted to talk about. This worked great for me - it felt like one of the most productive meetings I’ve had in quite some time!
I think there’s two reasons why this works. First, it gives my manager the ability to prepare better - if I’m going to ask specific questions or request feedback on something in particular, letting him know ahead of time means he’s more capable of meeting my needs.
Second, setting an agenda makes me think about things - what am I looking to do in order to improve? If I’m not thinking about this ahead of time, there’s no way I’ll be prepared to have a productive conversation, and I’ll end up back in the habit of just telling my manager what I’ve done this week.
I’m going to keep setting agendas for my 1:1 meetings moving forward. Of course, the hard part is defining what to do during the meeting. There are a few experiments I plan to try to see what works best for me, but I’d also be curious what has worked for others in the past. If you have something in particular that you cover in 1:1s that you think is really valuable, let me know in the comments!