RFD 537 Record Every Meeting

First and foremost, the act of recording meetings is an expression of our transparency. Indeed, in the very description of transparency in RFD 2, meetings are explicitly called out:

The phraseology wasn’t an accident, but rather an intentional embodiment of specific wisdom from an early advisor to Oxide: in his experience in the formative stages of companies, when meetings didn’t have an open invitation, it was too easy for people to believe that meetings conveyed status — and to feel like those who were not were being deliberately excluded from decision making.

While we have made clear that everyone is invited to every meeting from the outset at Oxide, recorded meetings allow us to do one better: one can attend a meeting after the fact, without disrupting participants — and at 2X. This, in turn, gives us the space to trust one another: we do not have to fear our colleagues meeting without us!

Recording meetings is essential to our teamwork, in many dimensions.

First, in organizations of all sizes, miscommunication impedes teamwork. Often, the miscommunication is well-intentioned: someone attends a meeting that they believe is germane to someone else, and they attempt to relay what they heard — but due to miscommunication or mistaken inference, the wrong conclusion is drawn. Add a few hops, and one has the childen’s game of telephone, with results that are often not merely silly but also destructive. By recording meetings, one can go straight to the source, minimizing the potential for miscommunication.

Second, recording meetings allows even attendees to hear things that they might have missed. Especially when one is always at a keyboard when in a meeting, it is easy to have gone down a tangent on a prior subject and miss some important details of the current subject of discussion. Having a recording allows one to go back and relisten to those missed bits.

Third, recording meetings makes it easier for someone to join a team. Especially when one is new, a team can sound as if it is speaking a foreign language; by having a recording, a new teammate can replay aspects of a conversation that they did not understand (repeatedly, if necessary), allowing the new member to quickly learn the argot of the team. Moreover, that meetings are recorded allows a new team member to listen to past conversations to get fuller context for the team’s current work and future roadmap.

Finally, recording meetings makes it easier to be absent from a team. On a fast-moving team, weeks can feel like months of progress — and it can be very difficult to return from being away. Recording meetings allows one to catch up on the salient bits, if and as needed.

At Oxide, we like to get the details right — and we have a team with very deep technical expertise. By recording meetings, we are able to capture that expertise and broadcast it. For example, if the need for an RFD arises from a discussion in a meeting (a not uncommon occurrence!), it can be extraordinarily helpful to be able to replay the conversation to make sure that necessary detail is being captured.

It can be a struggle to hear ourselves as someone else hears us; by recording a meeting, we are able to hear ourselves in a different light — and can learn new things about ourselves. For example, it is very hard to listen to a conversation while also waiting to make a contribution to it; more than once, someone has listened to a meeting recording and realized that while they were waiting to make a point, someone else made an important point that sailed by them.

By recording meetings, we can stoke our curiosity and build our own versatility: it becomes much easier for anyone in the company to learn about disparate domains. It may be tempting to think of this purely in terms of technical domains, but this is just as true in non-technical domains. For example, when meetings are recorded, one can learn how a sales team functions, or how an engineering team works through a roadmap, or how a marketing team might brainstorm a whitepaper, or what a support call sounds like. By not only sating our curiosity but also building our versatility, recorded meetings present us with unique pedagogical value.

While it almost goes without saying, recording meetings is very inexpensive — and in stark contrast to the relatively recent past, when recording every meeting would have been economically infeasible. That it is so cheap allows us to easily switch our disposition from "why record?" to "why not record?"

Scheduled meetings that are not specifically called out in what not to record should always be recorded.

Unscheduled meetings should also be recorded. We have not historically been deliberate or consistent about this, and it has been to our detriment. For example, during the earliest days of talking to potential partners and vendors, we would often have a debrief call to discuss what we had just heard. These debriefs were not recorded, and it’s unfortunate: while the written notes from these calls were often outstanding, the calls themselves weren’t recorded — and our debriefings would now provide additional context that would be especially relevant when we want to revisit or better understand a past decision.

It has proven to be very valuable to record debugging sessions. We elaborated on this explicitly in [oxf-s4e9], but having recorded debugging sessions allows for many benefits, including pedagogical (there is much to learn from watching others debug!) and in terms of the debugging itself (reviewing a recording can help others ramp up, and potentially reveal missed clues).

We have found that it can be invaluable to be able to later listen to a customer in their own words. Further, we have found that customers are broadly amenable to being recorded, especially as they understand that the recording will be used to improve our offering. Clearly, we need to get consent to record a conversation with a customer — but we should not hesitate to ask. As part of asking for customer consent to record a conversation, we should always offer a link to the recording.

While it is understandable that a potential partner might not want an initial conversation recorded, once we are developing a partnership and not merely considering one, we should seek to record all conversations and (as with customers) offer links to recordings once available.