The part of this chapter that really resonates with me was the fact that notes don’t convert 100% understanding. I usually like to take bullet point notes that capture the most important ideas or tasks, however I never thought deeply about whether others could capture the whole meeting picture through my simple notes. Like the chapter illustrated the same reading may result in similar yet not 100% synchronized understanding. This can be a major problem because at the next meeting, we would all realize that we are not on the same page causing us to waste time in trying to retrack and re-do the work. Thus, I really want to incorporate techniques such as drawing or responses of member to check-in with each other’s understanding and align the differences.
The part of this approach that I have incorporated in my workflow is to maximum output while minimizing input. This ultimately comes down to the idea of prioritization – which incorporates urgency, production cost, and impact magnitude. I have always believed that only by knowing how to correctly organizing the order of tasks for all members can we achieve the best output. This issue occurs a lot in early stage companies. Because there are so much room to grow and advance into, often times members of the time will just throw “cool” sounding ideas out in the open and hop on to solving it. However, this point is so critical to smaller companies because their resources are limited – both in terms are external partners and internal human capabilities. Sometimes there are just simply aren’t enough people to go around. So to ensure success and stay on track, they must do the least amount of work and get the most amount of achievements.
The last point: Stories aren’t the requirements; they’re discussions about solving problems for our organization, our customers, and our users that lead to agreements on what to build. I think this reminds me that when I am putting out “requirements” and “tasks” to ensure that members understand the purpose and meaning of them before just shoving the work in their arms. I think this issue often gets lost within a large organization, because there is so much happening at once that we forget to stop, pause, and thinking about the larger picture.
Nailed it!