Page-Led Meetings

Page-led meetings are most powerful when you need to make a decision or come to a consensus on something. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Have you been pushing something forward that is stalling out?

• Do you need teammates or stakeholders to make a decision?

• Do you need people to react or provide feedback on your work?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, a page-led meeting is the way to go.

Once you know a page-led meeting is appropriate, create a page using your favorite collaboration tool. Confluence is perfect for this.

To maximize clarity, your page should always include the meeting purpose, scope, desired outcomes, and key discussion points – ideally, right at the top like this:

Here’s an example with content included:

Your page should be customized based on your audience and the goals of your meeting. For example, you may choose to add:

The problem statement: Write a memorable and direct opening sentence about the problem you are trying to solve. Tell your readers the most important information they should know.

Background:  Explain why you’re holding this meeting and why the outcome matters! Help your reader find the most important part of your message with a clear heading, like “Why it matters”, or another clever heading that will catch their eye.

• What has happened to date? Set the context for readers who are new to the project.

• Briefly outline trends, historical data, your approach, and progress made to date.

• Use bullet points to keep your page scannable.

Proposed solution: If you have a preferred solution in mind, share it! State clearly what you’re recommending and why.

• Back it up with data.

• Identify any assumptions and explain your thinking.

• Be clear about where more learning is needed.

Next steps: What would you like to see happen after the meeting is over? This is especially useful if you know the meeting will not fully resolve the issue at hand.

An FAQ section can be a fantastic way to address common questions quickly and in advance.

Once your page is built, make sure to include it in the meeting invite to attendees.

Start by sharing your meeting purpose to inform (or remind) attendees why they’re there. Explain how they’re expected to participate and remember that a page-led meeting may be a new experience for them.

Next, run a silent pre-read of your page to give your audience a chance to understand your page's message and prepare to ideate or offer solutions to problems. Your audience will benefit from others' clear thinking and understand the full context of the meeting.

• Aim for 5 minutes to pre-read or add time depending on how detailed your page is.

• Allow your audience to comment and upvote things they'd like to discuss live.

Finally, dive into the discussion! Conduct your meeting with the page and the added comments as a guide.

To drive extreme clarity on whether your proposed solution is approved, include a check box for each approver on your page.

Aim to end your meeting with a clear outcome, solution, or next steps in place. If your goal is to arrive at a solution to a problem, you can help drive clarity by including a checkbox for each approver on your page.

When it’s time to wrap up the meeting, ask participants to check the box if they approve the decision. If they’re not ready to check the box, they can provide reasons, which can inform your next steps.

After the meeting, your page can live on as an artifact, containing all the comments and decisions made about your project. It can act as a permanent, durable source of information that can be referred to at any time.

There are some things you can do to help it serve this purpose:

• Document any decisions near the top of the page. Include both what was decided and why. This makes it easy to see at a glance what the meeting outcome was.

• Preempt future questions. If questions came up for your attendees that weren’t answered in the page itself, fixing that could help answer those same questions for future readers.

• Strengthen ideas. Some feedback may have provided ideas on how to improve or strengthen the recommendation on the page. It can make sense to add these directly to the page content.

Once you’ve updated the page, share it with the meeting attendees and any stakeholders who should be informed of the decision, but weren't present at the meeting.