Honestly, in-person communication is vastly overrated. If a decision is made in a meeting, you better hope someone thought to document it. If we are planning something that requires engineer feedback, hopefully you’re quick enough (and confident enough) to come up with your questions in realtime.
I’d rather move most of this stuff into slack or confluence. It’s more egalitarian, and it has the added benefit that I can search and find the past conversations to reference them later.
I think for discussion/negotiation with decisions being made, my hierarchy of preference would be (from most preferred to least):
- Message board style like Github issues
- Slack thread
- Email thread
- Video call
- In person meeting
I do really like in-person meetings for brainstorming or collaborative design type stuff. Having a real whiteboard is hard to beat, and I think the discussion can flow a little more naturally without any latency.
I have found that AI notetakers can bridge this gap fairly well—whether in a virtual meeting or in person. If the calendar event has a virtual meeting with a notetaker that joins by default, someone can join the meeting and throw a phone down on the conference table and everyone gets a full transcript, summary, and list of next steps afterwards. One of my favorite real world applications of LLMs so far.
I’d rather move most of this stuff into slack or confluence. It’s more egalitarian, and it has the added benefit that I can search and find the past conversations to reference them later.