[HN Gopher] Show HN: Make better decisions with fewer online mee...
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Show HN: Make better decisions with fewer online meetings
Hi! I am the cofounder TopAgree. We have created TopAgree to help
teams make faster decisions with fewer meetings. My friend Linus
and I are developing it together because we often don't make the
important decisions until the last five minutes of a meeting. And
then, unfortunately, we often make the wrong decisions. I have a
big request for you: Please comment when you like to test the
product and give us feedback. Thanks so much! Kind regards, Bastian
Author : bjuly
Score : 72 points
Date : 2022-09-08 16:39 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (topagree.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (topagree.com)
| playingalong wrote:
| A side comment:
|
| I think you don't stand a chance to have a substantial customer
| base in Scandinavia. Their decision making process is by
| iterative consensus. You hold the meetings on the topic until
| there is a collective agreement for unanimous decision. If there
| is not, you hold another meeting in a few days.
| bjuly wrote:
| Sounds better than what we do in Germany: one meeting after the
| other and no decision!
| curious_cat_163 wrote:
| That sounds like a consensus algorithm.
| [deleted]
| guytv wrote:
| This is intriguing.
|
| Doesn't the CEO / Project lead / DRI at some point just makes a
| decision and whoever does not agree have to "disagree and
| commit"?
| playingalong wrote:
| There are several tricks to get to a decision. E.g. you can
| make sure the next meeting includes a narrower group.
| soco wrote:
| Or you enjoy meeting each other too much.
| igetspam wrote:
| How does one get access? I've written CAB processes for this in
| the past and I'm not sure doing it robotically will be an
| improvement in that but I'd be happy to take a look. I just put
| my email on the early access list.
| bjuly wrote:
| Thank you igetspam! We will contact you asap. Change-advisory
| boards is what we had in mind when we separated between expert
| input and decision making. We create the agenda for a meeting
| robotically only if the decision makers cannot agree
| asynchronically. Looking forward to exchanging thoughts with
| you!
| curious_cat_163 wrote:
| Good idea. Two things:
|
| 1. Usually, there is a larger context to decisions. Have you
| considered integrations around tying these decisions to
| frameworks like OKRs?
|
| 2. Usually, decisions require some form of execution. Execution
| also makes decision matter. People within an org should feel like
| not only they were heard, but when the final decision was taken
| by its owner, there was some form of action taken as a follow up.
| Sometimes the follow up would be merging some code in a git
| branch. Sometimes the follow up would be calling a lawyer and
| discussing long-term consequences. In any event, people should be
| able to see that something happened as a result of their input,
| within your UI. :)
| codingdave wrote:
| It is an interesting idea - you definitely have hit on a problem
| area. I don't think you have the correct solution. But that isn't
| a bad thing -- I think the process of launching this, and
| listening to feedback will allow you to find the correct
| solution. As long as you adapt to the feedback and don't come
| into it with ego, it should be an interesting journey.
| bjuly wrote:
| Hi codingdave, what feedback would you have? And how would you
| change our solution?
| codingdave wrote:
| - Making a decision at the last 5 minutes of a meeting is
| fine - if you make it earlier, the meeting was too long. But
| it has to be the right decision. You don't need to fight
| meetings - you need to fight bad decisions within meetings.
|
| - Getting all the info and feedback and allowing time for all
| stakeholders to vote can drive a culture of decisions by
| committee - while this does allow for great collaboration and
| engagement, it also can be slower than desired, and does not
| allow a visionary leader to really drive his organization. It
| also can make people who truly are experts in a field feel
| dismissed because now everyone is held on equal footing and
| their expertise is devalued. At the end of the day, people
| lower in the org chart will love it, execs will not. And
| without exec support, it won't become integrated into the
| org.
|
| Your idea of bringing asynch discussions and decision-making
| is on-target. But I think you have under-estimated what
| drives people at different levels of an organization, and
| this level of transparency and collaboration is not what
| everyone will want.
|
| In all honesty, I don't know how I would change the solution.
| I know that you need to continue to feed the ego of leaders
| and experts, while allowing contributions from everyone else,
| too. You have to balance different audiences with divergent
| personalities, and let the leaders lead, without the app
| feeling like lip service to non-leaders. In short, I don't
| think your solution is bad - I just think you'll find that it
| will take a ton of effort, listening, and understanding to be
| sure all participants truly feel the benefit of the product
| and there is no way to hit that mark on the first try.
| l7l wrote:
| Hi codingdave, great input, thanks a lot! We are really
| early in this journey and excited to learn and put all the
| pieces together.
| maliker wrote:
| I think you're working on a super important problem. Having moved
| from a software company to a political organization, this kind of
| thing drives me crazy. Used to be hey, what's the most critical
| issue and who's working on it and what's the latest status: oh
| easy just check the company-wide bug database. Now in a politics
| org: first track down 15 vague email threads, go to 3 different
| meetings which are 90% chitchat, get yelled at for not working on
| some other thing that's deemed higher priority. Making serious
| workflow management palatable to non-software organizations would
| be a huge win.
| l7l wrote:
| Hi maliker, thanks for your valuable input. Funnily enough we
| had political orgs. on our list of early adopters. We specially
| want to replace that digging through emails to reverse engineer
| decisions part.
| andix wrote:
| Does it integrate into MS Teams? Or some other established
| enterprise platform?
|
| Otherwise it's really hard to introduce it to a corporation,
| where it's probably most needed.
| bjuly wrote:
| Thank you for your questions andix! We are thinking about MS
| Teams integration. Depends on user feedback.
| westurner wrote:
| Webhook integrations: Slack/Mattermost; Zulip; _Zapier
| Platform_ ; GitHub Pull Requests
|
| Another issue/checkbox:
|
| Re: collaboration engineering, Thinklets: "No Kings: How Do You
| Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?" (2019)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20157064
| bjuly wrote:
| Thank you westurner for the link. Super helpful. Kind
| regards, Bastian
| westurner wrote:
| Great idea. IMHO, Feedback is necessary for
| #EvidenceBasedPolicy; for objective progress.
|
| Evidence-based policy:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_policy
| (Jupyter, scikit-learn & Yellowbrick, Kaggle,)
|
| Town hall meeting:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_hall_meeting
|
| awesome-ideation-tools:
| https://github.com/zazaalaza/awesome-ideation-tools :
|
| > _Awesome collection of brainstorming, problem solving,
| ideation and team building tools. From foresight to
| overcoming creative blocks, this list contains all the
| awesome boardgames, canvases and deck of cards that were
| designed to help you solve a certian problem._
| tpoacher wrote:
| The best meeting tool I've ever seen is the John Cleese video
| "meetings bloody meetings".
|
| Find a way to include all five summary points at the end of that
| video into your product, and you'll have a winner.
|
| Right now I see you only addressing one of them, maaaybe two.
| l7l wrote:
| Hi HN family
|
| I'm Linus, the other founder of TopAgree. We're super excited to
| launch our beta today!
|
| Why we built TopAgree Like many of you, we had lots of daily
| meetings. But with us, there rarely was a clear meeting agenda,
| or it was not followed, or even if so, someone was not prepared
| to make a decision. It often was a mix of private chat followed
| by opinionated discussions, ending in bad last-minute compromise
| decisions that were not actionable.
|
| So we went on a journey to talk to experts and heavy users to
| find out if they figured out what we failed at. This is what we
| have learned about remarkable decision-making: - Providing
| relevant background and reason - Diverging - independent
| collection of alternative decisions and ideas - Converging -
| weighting ideas and choosing the best - Have a clear decision
| that is actionable
|
| How TopAgree can help you? Automated process: TopAgree nudges all
| stakeholders so that you meet your deadlines Decision cockpit:
| All the information you need to decide in one place Decision log:
| Easily access all previous decisions
|
| TL;DR: If you want to have faster and better decisions, get early
| access to TopAgree!
|
| We are super excited to hear what you think!
|
| Best wishes
| elefantastisch wrote:
| Are you worried that you're trying to solve a
| process/people/culture problem with a technology solution?
| l7l wrote:
| Hi elefantastisch, could not be worried more. But we want to
| solve it for us and hopefully some others :)
| bjuly wrote:
| Good point, elefantastisch. Culture is a huge success driver.
| We think it is also about repeat, repeat and repeat the right
| things to achieve a great culture. And technology can help
| people not to forget to repeat. What do you think?
| pvg wrote:
| Your page says
|
| "Join the waitlist and get access soon."
|
| A Show HN needs to be something users can try when it's posted:
|
| _Off topic: blog posts, sign-up pages, newsletters, lists, and
| other reading material. Those can 't be tried out, so can't be
| Show HNs. Make a regular submission instead._ [...]
|
| _Please make it easy for users to try your thing out, ideally
| without barriers such as signups or emails. You 'll get more
| feedback that way.
|
| If your work isn't ready for users to try out, please don't do
| a Show HN. Once it's ready, come back and do it then. Don't
| post landing pages or fundraisers._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
| l7l wrote:
| Hi pvg! Thanks for your message, I wasn't aware of that.
| pvg wrote:
| You can edit the title to take the 'show hn' off although a
| mod will come along to do it for you at some point.
| soco wrote:
| I like the idea a lot. However, putting my company data -
| contacts info included - in some cloud makes me uncomfortable, so
| please comment or add somewhere information about how you (plan
| to) solve things like security and privacy.
| l7l wrote:
| Hi soco, great point! We think about encryption a lot as on-
| prem doesn't make too much sense. Would that work for you?
| soco wrote:
| But I would still need to register using my work address -
| thus sharing it with an external service. That could still be
| acceptable (depending on contractual guarantees). Your cloud
| service will then send emails to internal users, thus it's me
| sharing outside the company the 1. contact addresses (which
| did or did not agree to above contract) and 2. email contents
| (up to users what they put inside). Hmm, not ideal. A MS
| Teams app, if you ever thought about one, would be able to
| use the user's own MS Graph for storage and for the contacts
| info, thus completely independent of external servers.
| l7l wrote:
| Great points. Didn't know about Teams apps, going to look
| into it. Cool!
| akrolsmir wrote:
| Hey! I like the idea of this a lot; oftentimes in team standups,
| I feel our discussions would benefit from a clear issue owner, as
| well as the space for others to give feedback.
|
| I might suggest trying other more granular voting systems instead
| of just up/down voting: 5-star voting, set number of points, or
| my personal favorite: prediction markets! A prediction market
| makes participants calibrate how much they believe in a
| particular choice, and also makes a clear ledger so everyone can
| get a sense of how often they have been correct in the past.
|
| Here's one example of a market we set up for informing an
| important decision (which database our site would use):
| https://manifold.markets/Austin/what-database-will-manifold-...
| l7l wrote:
| Hi akrolsmir, thanks for your feedback! That's a really
| interesting concept, thanks for sharing!
| wcarss wrote:
| A feature suggestion: a way to list specific possible outcomes,
| and have pros/cons/questions/votes relate to them.
|
| In the "We will open a new office in Amsterdam" example, it's
| expressed as just a yes/no situation, but peter@acme.corp is seen
| asking a question which is really an alternate potential outcome.
| It seems like a whole separate "decision" would need to be made
| for that, with its own pros/cons/questions, which would be very
| clunky compared to having that alternative discussed in the same
| place.
|
| A different instance of something similar came up for me
| recently. I lead a small team and a member of the team is
| temporarily in a far flung timezone. We normally have a team
| meeting at a specific time which is very inconvenient in this far
| timezone, but moving to any convenient time would inconvenience
| the rest of the team. I considered a few options and ran a small
| poll, proposed a new meeting time for some of the meetings, and
| everyone on the team hated the idea, so we fell back to having it
| at its normal time.
|
| I think a tool like this could have been very helpful for listing
| out 3-4 possible options and allowing people to express specific
| pros/cons for each of those. We might have ended up at a more
| optimal situation, but instead we ended up with the one that was
| simplest to express, discuss, and agree on.
|
| All that said: even with that feature, I am not sure I would pay
| for this tool. I feel like the friction of introducing "a tool"
| for things like this, with accounts and signups and seats and
| process and payments -- it just isn't worth it for the pain it
| would solve for me. I feel the pain, but I'm not convinced I
| should pay someone to fix it, or that doing so would really make
| things better. I also feel (as a shitty developer customer would)
| that I could build this or something that gets me 60% of the way
| there for free, or accomplish it via existing mechanisms in
| slack/the team wiki, where my team already lives.
|
| (but, don't listen to me -- prove me wrong!)
| l7l wrote:
| Hi wcarss, thanks a lot for your great comment and input! We
| are already working on alternative decisions, but we need to do
| lots of improvements to keep it easy. Your willingness to pay
| sounds reasonable for your use case, we haven't decided on a
| business model yet. Best wishes
| sebhook wrote:
| I agree, this feels like it could be built as a feature of
| Asana instead of a separate tool.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Really, you are talking about CBDM (Consensus-Based Decision-
| Making). That's something that I actually did a presentation
| on, years ago (a well-known soporific that puts many to sleep).
|
| I like this idea, and I haven't studied the system enough to
| know how it works, but it will need to come up with a
| "framework," where action items are derived from proposals or
| motions. I guess that using the system would mean agreeing to
| use their framework. Maybe they can have a menu of different
| frameworks, but each org would need to adopt a framework.
| synu wrote:
| I built something similar. It didn't really work as a business
| (or at least I wasn't able to make it work) so I open sourced it:
| https://github.com/async-go/asyncgo
|
| If there's anything useful there feel free to scavenge, or if
| you'd like to talk about what I learned trying to build it let me
| know.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I remember a similar web app from 5 or 6 years ago or so, I
| thought maybe it was called "Decide Already" but
| decidealready.com doesn't seem to be it, at least not anymore.
| l7l wrote:
| Hi synu! Thanks for your comment! Very interesting! Would be
| great to have a chat! Best wishes, Linus
| synu wrote:
| My contact info is in my profile.
| jitl wrote:
| We've found decision logs and our structured "RFC" process quite
| useful at Notion. The extra structure from a dedicated SaaS for
| this could be helpful. But to me the Pro/Con voting system seems
| like it'll work only for Go/NoGo binary choices. What about
| selecting the best option from a suite of candidates?
| l7l wrote:
| Hi jitl! We are working on alternative decision proposals. But
| it ads a lot of complexity and people would need to come back
| to review those a lot. Thanks for the input!
| sankumsek wrote:
| Do you have any details on your decision log? I'm curious what
| details you add to it. I guess it'd have fields like date,
| decision made, options considered, and who approved the
| decision.
| jrib wrote:
| I was actually looking for good alternatives today and came
| across a few good resources:
|
| * https://microsoft.github.io/code-with-engineering-
| playbook/d...
|
| * https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture-
| decision...
|
| * https://adr.github.io/
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(page generated 2022-09-08 23:01 UTC)