Check-in meeting idea

After releasing OpenverseOpenverse Openverse is a search engine for openly-licensed media, including images and audio. Find Openverse on GitHub and at https://openverse.org. with the new brand and audio content support, the team jumped quickly to work on improving what was online. Most of the improvements made during these weeks have focused on the backstage infrastructure and what supports Openverse to keep running. We have consolidated significant progress.

I do not gauge all the development work as I dedicate my time to designing Openverse and thinking of how visitors browse and interact with the content. Still, I have noticed in our weekly meetings some doubts about what the next steps are and the releases’ scope for the following months.

During those meetings, I see we tend to lose our main path and assign tasks to ourselves that we consider relevant based on our priorities and current progress, but with a blurry milestone of what we intend to achieve. Even when we have a roadmap for this year, it is not clear on the outcomes we planned. This performance risks doing inopportune work and solving problems not chained to agreed outcomes, like a crew where each of us paves a different road.

This conduct is understandable as the weekly meeting focuses on the weekly and bi-weekly progress portrayed on the project board, plus a couple of minutes for questions that attend to the same ongoing tasks. So no blaming anyone here.

To take care of this, I propose having a check-in meeting to review the goal and milestone at that time and discuss what is coming next. This should be a high-level discussion to see the year’s scope and not dive into ticket details. The idea is to have a broad picture of what we are working on, answer doubts related to any upcoming release, assess deadlines, and any other strategic aspect to align us and be on the same page.

What do you think of this idea? Do you share my diagnosis about the lack of direction tendency? Let me know your thoughts and if you agree, share a tentative structure of the session.