How to structure your product team meeting — with helpful templates
What makes for an awesome product team meeting? While the specifics will vary, a great product team meeting will likely make you feel focused, energized, and aligned. You and your teammates relish the opportunity to connect and work through blockers. You discuss everything from product strategy to recent customer feedback to ideas for future enhancements. And you leave your time together with a clear understanding of what is coming next and why.
Before we dive in to how to achieve positive and productive product team meetings, let's cover some fundamentals. A product team meeting is a gathering of the cross-functional product team — ideally including team members from product, engineering, marketing, and customer support. Broadly speaking, these meetings give everyone a chance to review the product roadmap, discuss product-market fit, and prepare for upcoming releases. These sessions are also a good opportunity to surface questions or concerns and reflect on how to improve processes going forward.
Save time with product team meeting templates — try Aha! software today.
This is an example of our brainstorming session template.
Typically, product team meetings occur on a weekly cadence. But they can occur more frequently at certain times — especially as the team gears up to release a new product or major new functionality, for example. That said, every company and team are different. Attendees and meeting frequency will vary based on the company, release cadence, and development methodology you follow.
Feel free to jump ahead to any of the following sections:
What is the value of regular product team meetings?
Meeting regularly helps you and your colleagues build a better product. These sessions give everyone the chance to hear multiple viewpoints from the cross-functional team. For example, listening to feedback from customer-facing groups (like support or sales) helps you gain a more holistic understanding of the Complete Product Experience (CPE). You can discuss how to best address pain points throughout the user journey and deliver more value to customers and the business.
Product team meetings also provide a forum for folks to talk through thorny problems and visualize how to solve them together. Our team at Aha! uses our own note and whiteboarding software to collaborate in this way — both in real time and asynchronously. Our team finds whiteboards particularly useful for brainstorming new product ideas, illustrating user flows or customer journey maps, and using visual frameworks to determine which features to pursue next.
In short, regular and productive meetings are a forcing function — empowering the product team to focus on improving the product deliberately and incrementally.
Other benefits of recurring product team meetings include:
Accountability — discuss and measure progress towards product goals and assign action items
Alignment — reorient the team around the product vision, strategy, goals, and roadmap
Prioritization — rank features transparently and make informed decisions about what to build next (and what you will not pursue)
Sharing insights — learn from cross-functional teammates about customer needs
Trust — connect with your colleagues and drive meaningful conversations that boost team morale
Types of product team meetings
Some companies have separate and dedicated product team meetings for specific purposes, such as brainstorming or retrospectives. Other teams use their time together to cover a variety of topics — devoting 10 to 15 minutes of each meeting to ideating, planning, answering questions, reflecting, and more. There is no one "correct" way to structure your product team meeting.
No matter what the focus of your meeting is, a product manager or other product leader typically oversees the session, which lasts for 30 minutes to one hour. Let's take a closer look at some of the different activities you might engage in during a product team meeting:
Activity | Purpose | Key participants |
Brainstorming and ideation | Generate and discuss ideas for new products or enhancements |
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Customer research | Document and analyze learnings from polls, empathy sessions, and in-app community feedback |
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Go-to-market planning | Coordinate all the cross-functional work that must be done in order to release a new customer experience on time |
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Product operations | Review ways to improve product team processes and help the team scale with the right tools and software |
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Retrospectives | Dive into product analytics and reflect on areas to improve after launching a new customer experience |
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Your exact agenda for each session will depend on what the team needs to accomplish and where in the product development cycle you are. Naturally, if there are any time-sensitive topics to address or upcoming launches to prepare for, you will spend more time on those.
Key agenda items include:
Review goals
Sync on progress towards upcoming dates, deadlines, and deliverables
Discuss team capacity issues or any at-risk dependencies
Coordinate work needed to deliver upcoming features or functionality
Analyze customer feedback
Brainstorm bold ideas for future features
Whiteboard solutions to problems
Celebrate wins and reflect on areas for improvement — including the product itself, team processes, and launch activities
How to run a product team meeting
Like all types of meetings, product meetings benefit from the typical advice for making your time together more efficient and enjoyable. Some general best practices? Create and share an agenda beforehand, come prepared to participate, start with an icebreaker, keep the discussion focused, and define next steps going forward.
But because of their cross-functional nature, product team meetings have their own set of additional best practices — specific to building more lovable products together. Our own product team at Aha! meets weekly and typically includes team members from product management, UX, product marketing, customer success, and engineering.
Below is advice from our team of product experts on how to make your meetings better. While the advice is especially relevant to fully remote software companies like ours, you will likely be able to apply it to your own product team meetings — no matter what type of company you work at.
Lead with curiosity: Be open to learning from cross-functional teammates such as engineering and customer-facing groups. Give members of each team an opportunity to share information and learnings. Listen, seek input, and ask questions to better understand their different perspectives.
Return to customers: Use empathy to approach problems from a customer-centric lens. How to achieve this? Ground your discussions in real customer examples, and rely on a mix of quantitative and qualitative data. This will help you internalize what your users are feeling and experiencing as they interact with your product.
Utilize visuals: Diagrams, early-stage designs, and other visuals are a unifying force — making it easy for the entire team to picture and understand exactly what you are talking about. This is where whiteboarding software comes in handy. You can map out potential solutions to customer problems, discuss sketches for product enhancements, and collaborate in real time.
Debate with kindness: Welcome disagreements and debate respectfully. Absorbing different viewpoints can help you uncover insights you can use to improve the product. Remember that you are all working towards the same goal — delivering a lovable experience for customers.
Build momentum: Devote five to 10 minutes at the end of each meeting to recap key points and discuss what comes next. Assign action items for specific team members to complete before your next gathering. Using Aha! software, you can add to-dos directly to the meeting note — so everyone can see who is responsible for completing important tasks (and when).
Guided templates for product team meetings
Ready to quickly improve the quality of your product team meetings? Try any of the 50+ templates from our library of expert-crafted, guided templates available in Aha! software.
Guided templates offer myriad benefits — improved productivity, visibility and transparency, and collaboration, to name a few. Everyone on the team can contribute their ideas, notes, and comments to your notes or whiteboards, either live or asynchronously. Because templates are customizable and reusable week after week, you also save time and effort preparing for meetings.
You might find the templates below particularly useful for product team meetings:
Every product team is different, so take some time to figure out how to structure your meetings for success. By focusing on a few core areas — centering around customers, solving problems, and collaborating as a team — you will be well on your way to more effective product team meetings.
