High-level summary of the points discussed:
- Attitude: your goal is to get it into production meeting the quality. It is not about defending a position--it is about helping your project succeed.
- Mindset: open, humble, respectful, listen. Build trust by listening and together trusting the process. If possible, get a written proposal of the alternatives, listing pros and cons, and list their assumptions, and ideally eliminate them.
- List out the areas of disagreement, and one by one seek resolution. Visually show what has been discussed, where agreement has been reached and where there's a difference of opinions. To show progress, what remains remains, and recording the decisions for later reflection.
- Poll the room, explicitly, checking that all have been heard and everyone buys-in.
- Carefully document the proposed solution at a high-level while still in the room and check for explicit agreement--to ensure the decisions stick.
- Don't just focus on technical agreement and viability, ensures other constraints like cost and time limits can be met.
- Before the meeting, try to meet separately with those involved to understand their individual motivations.
- Build social relationships with those you will later depend on before you need to--you can't do relationship building "just in time", you have to start the process early.
- Utilizing the social relationship you already built, followup a day or two later to check that the decision is sticking--not just with those directly involved, but perhaps also with those tangentially involved, like coders and testers.
Listen now: (download)
Reading recommendations:
Bett: How to Argue and Win Every Time by Gary Spence
Russ: Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement without Giving In by Roger Fisher (Author), William L. Ury (Author), Bruce Patton (Author)
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