Your Meeting Needs a Google Doc



The invite was scheduled for an hour, and included another engineer as well as their engineering manager.

The goal of the meeting, presumably, was to talk about Project X — a project I hadn’t worked on for a few months, but was moderately well versed in.

What questions should I prepare for? I wondered. I decided to reach out to the engineer who had scheduled it.

I had easy answers for two of them, shared a link to some documentation and screenshots for another, and had a follow-up question for the last one. The other engineer started a comment thread tagging another engineer to follow-up on that follow-up question, which resulted in a quick back-and-forth in the thread. In its entirety, the whole time I took to write my responses and the back-and-forth probably took no more than 15 minutes.

The next morning, I woke up ready for the meeting — only to find a Slack message from the engineer: they had no more questions! And they had cancelled the meeting.