Meetings are essential to the way we work. They are a place for people to come together, exchange ideas and make progress on shared objectives.

But too many meetings are a source of frustration. People spend most of their workday in meetings, but many of them are poorly run and unproductive. This is a major problem for any organization, because every minute spent in a wasteful meeting is a minute lost in productive work.

With Noda, our goal was to build something that would help make every meeting meaningful. We wanted to give meeting facilitators better tools for maximizing time spent in these forums.

To learn more about why most meetings go awry, we did diary studies, interviews and observational studies with multiple teams in different companies. These allowed us to analyze people's behaviors, pain points and preferences in actual meetings they were participating in.

Through our research, we identified three core pillars of effective meeting facilitation:

• Staying organized: Managing and structuring the meeting effectively

• Maintaining focus: Keeping people engaged, gathering diverse perspectives and aligning on outcomes.

• Emphasizing execution: Translating meeting discussions into actionable decisions that push team objectives forwards

These insights informed multiple iterations of prototyping while gathering user feedback throughout the process. We used Miro and Figma to initially prototype our ideas and create functional early versions of what we would want to eventually build in code.

Doing this allowed us to quickly get our ideas in the hands of users and actually facilitate meetings with a bit more structure. Eventually, we built out several features that were directly tied to the key insights we'd identified during the discovery process. Some of these include:

• Collaborative note-taking: Enabled users to take meeting notes in one place with multiple contributors

• Centralized meeting directory: Search, filter and find meeting information from any previous meeting.

• Agenda keeping: A shared agenda that allowed facilitators to transparently set clear plans.

• Documenting key outcomes: A shared place to define the outcomes of the meeting ahead of time

• Decision and action item tracking: Document the what, why and who of decisions that were made

Optimizing the way you run meetings is one of the best ways to improve team productivity. Bad meetings are stressful, boring and a drain on employee engagement. In contrast, good meetings help keep team members aligned, energized and excited about work.