Weekly team meeting: how our startup team shares its work every Friday

If you want to know what it is like to work at Coursebox AI, start with our Friday meeting.

Every Friday at 12:00 Perth time, the whole Coursebox AI team stops what they are doing for 30 minutes. The Perth team squeezes into a meeting room, and everyone else joins online from all over the world. We call it WIP, short for work in progress, but I just call it VIP because it sounds more fun!

We designed this meeting on purpose, tested it, threw out the parts we did not like, and we are still not done.

Why we created a weekly team meeting

Our engineering team spends most of the week deep inside 1 part of the product: a new feature, a bug fix or a small corner of the code. We wanted every single person, in every department, to see the whole company too: the strategy, and how their work fits into it.

How we tested and changed our weekly team meeting

Test 1: lunch and a show. The first version was a lunch meeting: we ate while our co-founders, Travis Clapp and Alex Hey, and our CTO, Toni Arrebola, walked us through everything that had happened in the company that week. Lunch and a show (or this is entirely my interpretation of the highly classified and very truly important weekly meeting). Well... we hated eating through it (somehow chewing through a strategy update just felt weird), so we kept the time slot and moved the food. Now we go for lunch together before or after WIP, like we do most days when we are in the office.

Test 2: the founders talk, everyone listens. Hearing the week from Travis, Alex and Toni served its purpose, and everyone got the full picture of the company. But sometimes words were not enough: we wanted to see what the new feature looked like and how it worked.

Test 3: the demos. We asked people from the team to quickly present their idea or their progress (quickly is very important!). The engineering team demos a new feature live, and when I have a new customer testimonial video, the whole team watches it together. It is magical to see how a feature changes and grows from 1 Friday to the next.

Test 4: a time that works for an international team. We picked 12:00 Perth time so the team in India, Adelaide and Sydney can join live. When Valentina Mercatini joined us from Montevideo, Uruguay, 12:00 Perth time meant 1:00 in the morning for her: now we shuffle the day and time when we need to, so she can be part of it too. Every WIP is recorded, and anyone in a different time zone can always watch it afterwards.

What is the purpose of our weekly team meeting?

In Alex's words, our goal is to be "the easiest way to create and manage high-quality online training", and WIP keeps the whole team moving toward it together. The purpose is to keep everyone up to speed and to be as transparent as we can about our decisions, our goals and the whys behind them. It is an overview and a strategy session, so the detailed feedback and the long conversations happen later, with the people involved.

Every week, WIP makes it obvious:

• What is on the roadmap and what we are focusing on
• What is in progress, what we finished and what went into production
• What our internal research is showing us
• What our customers are saying: reviews, feedback and the big changes on their side
• How the company is changing
• Who deserves a moment of celebration, for their work, an achievement or something happening in their personal life

How a weekly team meeting brings a remote team closer

WIP is the 1 meeting where everyone is in the same room or on the same call, from remote teammates to interns. Because we all know who is working on what, it is easy to spot where 2 teams could work together, and ideas reach the right person faster. It takes us out of our own small boxes, and we can see how everyone else is helping the company grow.

Visibility also drives morale: when someone shows their work and the whole team reacts on the spot, that instant feedback keeps a small team motivated week after week.

Is a weekly all-staff meeting a waste of time?

Like every startup, we go through phases. When we have too many meetings, we step back, look at them again and cut. When there is not enough time to talk, share ideas and work together, we add it back.

WIP is the 1 meeting where we want everyone, because it shapes the kind of culture we want to create.

I work more and more with our engineering team, I talk to customers, I run our customer case study interviews, and I get feedback from every department during the week, so most days I am already on top of what is happening, and I do not need WIP to stay informed.

I am there because I believe a high-performing team is about what we build and also about the connections we make with each other: how we feel walking into the office, whether we know each other outside of work, and whether we enjoy the time we spend together (and we spend a lot of it!).

I want to be part of a team where I enjoy my time, where I feel valued and loved, and where I can be my most creative self. Alex and Travis feel the same way about the culture we are building. We are a high-performing team, and we should enjoy our time together too.

Celebrating small wins at work

For me, Friday is about making sure every single person feels valued: a really loud (and probably a little annoying) shout-out, clapping, celebrating the tiny moments, the improvements and the goals. When someone shows what they are working on and gets an instant reaction, it makes a difference to their whole day, and for me that is worth 30 minutes every week.

If you are thinking about joining Coursebox AI, this is what your Fridays will look like!