Come together: A multiplayer guide to great meetings | Figma Blog

Great meetings are intentionally designed collaborative experiences, not merely calendar events or “glorified emails.” The article argues that successful meetings depend on four pillars: purpose, preparation, participation, and follow-up. Both facilitators and participants share responsibility for creating focused sessions that use everyone’s time and strengths effectively.

Meetings as Designed Experiences

• Meetings often fail because they lack a clear purpose, adequate preparation, active participation, or follow-up.
• Effective facilitators design an experience that helps the team collaborate and accomplish concrete goals.
• Participants also play an important role in making meetings purposeful and engaging.

Before the Meeting: Plan for Success

Preparation creates the conditions for inclusive and productive collaboration.

Define the Meeting’s Goal

• Clarify whether the meeting is intended to:
  • Track progress
  • Make a decision
  • Share information or insights
  • Build context across a team
• Choose the meeting format based on its purpose.
• Shishir Mehrotra’s framework groups meetings into:
  • Cadence: recurring staff meetings, standups, and project syncs
  • Catalyst: decision forums, product reviews, and design critiques
  • Context: all-hands meetings, off-sites, orientations, and one-on-ones
• The right category helps determine the questions, participants, and structure required.

Prepare and Share an Agenda

• Circulate an agenda before the meeting, ideally a day in advance.
• Include pre-read materials such as:
  • Project briefs
  • Documentation
  • Sketches
  • Other background information
• Use an existing template rather than starting from a blank page.
• FigJam templates can structure the discussion, collect participants’ ideas and questions ahead of time, and organize meetings around prompts or “provocations.”
• Successful formats can be saved as reusable shared templates, while AI can help generate customized meeting structures.

A practical meeting recommendation is to define the intended outcome first, then choose the appropriate format and share enough context for participants to contribute before the meeting begins.