More productive one on ones with your direct reports
Hey all,
Working on a tool to help managers have more productive one on ones with the direct reports. I am an engineering manager, and sometimes it is easy for one on ones to devolve into status reports or chit chat.
One on ones exist for people on my team to get the most out of my time. They are for me to provide guidance, context, and support. A lot of this depends on my direct reports putting some thought into what they want to talk about.
Even if my team is good about this, sometimes there are questions I can't answer on the spot because I either need time to research (higher chance of forgetting) or need to think about it.
I am building a tool that will let managers send out their one on one invites (either one off or reoccurring) from my tool. They can set a general purpose for the meeting / reoccurrence.
Example
Daryl => Ann
Meeting Purpose: This is 30 mins once every 2 weeks to chat about how things are going and whatever may be on your mind.
The magic happens 24 hours before the meeting. An email / text reminder goes out to the employee to set the agenda,
They have time to think about whats on their mind and put it in the tool.
It might look something like this
Agenda
- Feeling blocked on the X project
- Want to understand why the business made Y decisions
- Feedback about the meeting we had with Z team
I get an alert when it is filled out and I can put some thought into our meeting.
This time, in my experience is so valuable to building great teams. My hope is that this just creates more intention around the process.
I am building the MVP to use myself to see if its actually useful.
After this I will try and get some early testers onboard to continue to get feedback and then launch a for pay.
Plan is free for companies of <10 employees
29$ / month for companies 10-50 employees
59$ /month for companies 51-100 employees
99$ / month for companies 101-unlimited employees
Future features could also include some random team temperature checks. Maybe a random poll throughout the week where the team can provide anonymous feedback for their manager (similar to tiny poll).
Could also add stuff around managing employee development and long term plans. A lot of my teams development plan lives in their reviews, my one note, or my head. Would be cool to have some tooling around this.
All those could come afterward.
Open to critical feedback! Also let me know if you would be interested in beta testing.
