Meetings

Many of these meetings have a designated or rotating facilitator, and will “run themselves” so to speak. Hosting generally just means “ensuring there is a facilitator, and that they know what they are supposed to do and when” rather than necessarily running the meeting yourself. Hosts ensuring the meeting keeps happening, and happening smoothly.

Send your engineering directors a message if you are interested in hosting, or if you need a calendar invite to these meetings.

💻 Innovation Engineering Weekly

Weekly: Wednesdays 3:30–4:15pm

For all engineers (including contractors) - we typically switch every other week between a “Spreadsheet Day” (context-sharing what projects are working on and need help with), and deep-dive sessions where someone facilitates a topic of interest.

Host Responsibilities:

Spreadsheet Day

• Keep track of each new Spreadsheet Day facilitator in the “Resources” tab of #engineering-all
• On Wednesday morning of Spreadsheet Day, reach out to the facilitator to remind them of their facilitation responsibilities for the day
• Ensure new facilitator is chosen and recorded at the end of the meeting
• Ensure that topics are tracked in “Deep-Dive Topics” if they come up

Non-Spreadsheet Day

• For non-Spreadsheet Days: solicit or choose a deep-dive topic, to be facilitated by you or by someone else
• Some past topics have included:
  • Something that came up during Spreadsheet Day for us to dig into further (“Deep-Dives” tab on spreadsheet)
  • Project team report-out about a topic of note (example: BizX dev sprint)
  • Mini-workshops focused on learning specific topics (example: cybersecurity)
  • Followups on topics or workshops previously discussed (like LLM demo or frontend frameworks workshop)
  • Revisit previous discussions and update our processes (prettier, code review, etc)

🎤 Tech Talk

Monthly: Thursdays 3–4pm

An optional session where we get together to watch a tech talk (like a recording of a conference talk) and discuss what we learn. Tech Talks have a rotating facilitator chosen for the following month who is responsible for picking the topic & finding content for the following meeting.

Host Responsibilities:

• Keep track of the next facilitator in the “Resources” tab on #engineering-all
• On Monday the week of the Tech Talk, message the facilitator to confirm they will be prepared to facilitate and have content ready
• Ensure new facilitator is chosen and recorded at the end of the meeting

⚡️ Lightning Talks

Monthly: Thursdays 3–4pm

An internal session where we have a rotating schedule for everyone to give a 15-minute lightning talk on a technical non-NJ topic of your choice.

Host Responsibilities:

• Track the upcoming rotation of lightning talks, which is an embedded Slack canvas in the “Resources” tab of #engineering-all
• One full week before the lightning talks, message each upcoming presenter to remind them that lightning talks are next week and confirm that they will be good to present
• Week of the lightning talk session, update the calendar invite agenda to list the presenters
• During the lightning talks, act as timekeeper to ensure each talk stays under 15min (this is very important if you have 4 people presenting) and pass the baton between each presenter
• After the lightning talks, update the Slack Canvas to move the session to the “done” section to track prior order of talks.
• Right after the talks, determine the next 4 presenters given the list in Slack Canvas (this is determined based on past presentations — who has presented least recently) and message each one of them to confirm that they can plan to present on [date in four weeks]
• If anyone says no, move their name down on the list so that they can delay to the following month, and reach out to the next person instead.

💬 Engineering Social Hour

Bimestrial (every other month) Fridays 4–5pm

Getting the team together to play online games, do a round of icebreaker questions, or otherwise hang out. Works best when there is a small bit of facilitation (breakout rooms, or a planned activity or icebreaker)

Host Responsibilities:

• Plan an activity for the social hour (icebreaker, game, whatever you want)
• On the day of the social hour, send a reminder Slack message

✏️ Engineering Workshop

Bimestrial (every other month) Fridays 10am–2pm

We do a 4-hour workshop focusing on specific engineering skills (in the past, things like TDD, facilitation, or a hackathon) and getting a chance to pair with people who you don’t usually get to work with on something fun.

Host Responsibilities:

As the host, you’re not responsible for running the workshop, you are responsible for ensuring that someone facilitates it!

• At least 3–4 weeks before the event, start considering what the topic of the workshop will be, or soliciting workshop ideas from the engineering team. Find one person who is willing to take on facilitation responsibility (can be tag-teamed by should have one primary facilitator)
  • Facilitate something yourself!
  • Come up with ideas based on prior conversations or deep-dives and solicit a facilitator
  • Reach out to individuals who you know has been doing interesting thinking or work in a certain interest area to see if they want to facilitate
  • Solicit workshop ideas from the group at large
• Ensure the facilitator has ample time and opportunity to plan and design their workshop by checking in with them regularly over the weeks leading up to the workshop
• If needed, work with the Weekly Sync host so that a Wednesday meeting can be used to prep the workshop
• The day before the workshop, send an agenda in Slack so that people know what to expect when they show up (and can plan around their lunch breaks!)

🌱 Onboarding Doc Sessions

Ad-hoc when we have a new team member hired

When a new engineering team member is hired, we try to complete onboarding doc sessions to read and discuss our onboarding doc within the first two weeks.

Host Responsibilities:

• Solicit a facilitator in #engineering-internal for the engineering doc sessions. Ideally someone who has never done it before, or who has not done it in a while.
• Solicit 2–3 other participants for the meeting. Between these folks sitting in and the facilitator, there should be at least one BizX representative and at least one ResX representative.
• Ahead of the session, send a note to the new hire explaining what the meeting is, why it’s happening, and a link to the doc.
• Schedule the first onboarding session within the first week of the new hire joining. Ideally we want to front-load these as much as possible and try to complete the entire doc within the first 2 weeks if we can.