#65 – Memos over Meetings (Tom Griffin & Ben Grynol)

Memo are living documents that can evolve over time, thanks to feedback and changing circumstances. As an asynchronous remote company, Levels is a culture deeply anchored in the power of memos. In this episode, Levels Head of Growth, Ben Grynol, sat down with Head of Partnerships, Tom Griffin, to chat about why Levels is a memo culture and how the way we think about memos deviates from the norm.

04:23 – The role of documentation

Documentation is a critical practice for a remote team. Tom explains why Levels is not just memo-driven, but a documentation-centric culture overall.

Number one, for me personally, is that writing in general forces you to think more clearly and more deeply. So this is what I first noticed immediately when starting at Levels, and my first project really was to write a long-form document about our affiliate marketing strategy. And when I started reading through all of the existing documentation at Levels, I was so struck by how clearly and thoroughly, and in such a structured fashion that arguments and strategies were laid out at Levels. And I went into that particular document, my first project at Levels, thinking that I understood what we were going to do and why. And in the process of writing that document, I honestly got maybe 100 times more clear on what we were doing it, why we were doing it, and how we should go about executing it just through the process of writing.

07:33 – Use writing to crystallize your thoughts

Drafting a memo or meeting notes can help you to organize your thoughts, so that everything is crystal clear once you are ready to share your views with others.

I think there’s absolutely a role for getting in a group of two or three or four people and workshopping and transforming thoughts, but it’s almost always more helpful to first concretize your own thoughts and figure out what your own thoughts and beliefs are and why you have them. And then come to the table and have a discussion with other people to hear their thoughts. Typically, what happens is people just show up to a conversation and they expect to figure out what their point of view is throughout the conversation, which you can do that a bit in my experience, it’s just an ineffective way to do it. You’re going to get way clearer on what you think by spending three hours of deep focused time, forcing yourself to actually communicate these thoughts via writing than you are going to be showing up to a meeting unprepared and then just reacting in real time to what other people are saying.

08:36 – Respect how people communicate

Some people can speak and perform on the spot, but many others appreciate the chance to let their words marinate.

Everyone learns and ultimately thinks in different ways. And there are some people who thrive in that environment where it’s all real time and they’re transforming thoughts and coming up with new ones in real time on the spot. But I would argue there are more people and the majority of people think better when they have a lot of time on their own. And giving everyone that time, accommodates everyone, because the people who function better in those faster, real time environments, like a meeting, they’re not going to do worse by also spending a few hours first thinking through their thoughts prior to coming to that meeting.

12:49 – The benefits of memos

Tom said that using memos will turn your ideas from fuzzy to high-resolution and help team members understand the roadmap of your views and decisions.

Number one, people will understand your ideas thoroughly. So they’re really high resolution. I mean, the comparison, I think in pop startup culture, this idea of memos, one of the origins of this was Amazon, where they didn’t want to do presentations, PowerPoint presentations, and instead wanted to lean into memos. And I think that’s a great example because and they were like PowerPoint presentation, I could present to the team and quickly throw some random charts and stats and a few bullet points and everyone can be nodding along, but I’d argue it’s really easy to, as a teammate, who’s looking to provide feedback, not fully understand what my actual stance, argument, rationale reasons are. And I think in a memo, number one, people will definitely understand where you’re coming from, especially if it’s a longer memo because you’re writing in long form narrative form. And then number two, it’s way easier for them to write out their thoughts, reply to certain sections. The memo itself is really structured and organized, but then also in the long-term, building upon a memo, I think this is a really important point that you made where you can revisit prior thinking, and then very clearly decide or understand if your thinking has changed or if it ought to change based on where the company now is or any new information that you have.

19:05 – Documentation aids external communication

The better your documentation, the better you can work with outsiders (like investors) as well as insiders (like employees).

I think it’s probably more intuitive to people, the benefits of documentation for internal purposes, everything we’ve already touched on, including new hires. We haven’t really talked about that, but just getting up to speed and having a trace of strategy, of tactics, of experiments that we’ve run, of thinking and how it’s evolved over time. But I think it’s really interest and unique, the benefits that you receive from having a memo culture for the purposes of sharing it externally. We have seen just innumerable benefits, the top ones that come to mind, I mean, early on it was around investors. I mean, we fundraised as well as any startup ever has. And many of those early investors cited specifically having visibility into the business. I mean, such a simple concept, but most investors don’t have visibility into a business. And you’re just making a bet on an idea and often a team, but you don’t have much data.

32:49 – Make space for collaboration

Memos are typically not static, and can be structured so that they are inclusive of feedback, allowing everyone to contribute.

For me, the most important point there is just that this helps facilitate a meritocracy of ideas where you’re not beholden to all of the bias that’s going to come in a meeting setting. I mean, it’s obvious, but the person who speaks the most, the most loudly, who’s most charismatic, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Those ideas are always going to be weighted more, or the only ones that are heard relative to someone who is not as comfortable speaking up, maybe even English isn’t their first language. And I do think that when it’s in writing, you’re not eliminating all of that bias, but you’re eliminating a ton of it. And it’s really cool to see in our memos that anybody can jump in.

39:40 – Memo pitfalls While the benefits of memos outweigh the cons, the main pitfall is the length of time that they take, compared to hopping on a quick phone call.

Number one for me is speed. It’s slower to write memos and to exchange and align on ideas through memos. So number one, they often just take while. And I know for a fact that many of us will punt projects or even just punt strategic thinking, because we will think to ourselves, “This probably requires a memo and that is a number of hours of work.” Whereas if we didn’t have a culture of memos, I might say, and there are a lot of downsides to saying this, but I might say, “Hey, Ben, want to talk through CrossFit strategy. Can you hop on in a couple of hours today and we’ll figure it out.” That would be the opposite approach. And that approach would have its downsides, but it would be much faster than me saying, “In a month from now, I’m going to carve out 10 hours one week to write that particular strategy document.” So they take much longer, number one.

47:29 – Don’t neglect formatting

Ben said that the way a memo is present visually can also help determine the impact it makes.

There’s a way of painting a picture where a memo can look better than it is just through formatting. So that’s obvious, just we’re visual beings and you look at something that’s formatted and it can look better than it actually is. Or there could be something that’s really strong thinking and not formatted well, and the brain goes, “This is a bunch of jumbled information.” And so sometimes memos can look really thorough and it can actually take 15 minutes. I mean, there have been times where I think like a debrief doc. And we’ll write it, I’ll send it to you or something and you’re like, “Oh, man. This looks good.” And I’m like, “I literally spent seven minutes on this. It’s just that all it is, is form adding, but that’s shortcuts and whatever.”

Tom Griffin (00:06):

It’s almost always more helpful to first concretize your own thoughts and figure out what your own thoughts and beliefs are and why you have them. And then come to the table and have a discussion with other people to hear their thoughts. Typically, what happens is people just show up to a conversation and they expect to figure out what their point of view is throughout the conversation, which you can do that a bit in my experience, it’s just an ineffective way to do it. You’re going to get way clearer on what you think by spending three hours of deep focus time, forcing yourself to actually communicate these thoughts via writing than you are going to be showing up to a meeting unprepared and then just reacting in real time.

Ben Grynol (01:01):

I’m Ben Grinnell, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health. And this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is a whole new level.

Ben Grynol (01:16):

You hear more about companies being meeting heavy, people feeling that they’ve got meeting fatigue, too many meetings, too much synchronous time, lots of conversation without lots getting done. This is a very thematic. It’s a common thread that you hear and why people end up getting burned out in companies, just too much information, too much coordination, not enough follow through and action items getting done. So what’s the alternative to having a meeting? Well, it’s likely this concept of memos, documentation. Why do people need to meet synchronously just to things done? There are a lot of benefits to writing a memo instead of having a meeting. Meetings are very expensive, a lot of people come together. They don’t get the opportunity to voice their opinion or put their feedback in. And even if they do have this chance, once the meeting’s over, it’s over, that’s the problem with it.

Ben Grynol (02:22):

When it comes to my memos, well, a memo is a living document. It’s something that can evolve over time. People can leave their feedback in it. They can change their mind. They can add to it after. And so as an asynchronous and a remote company, we anchor deeply on memos. Why are they very important? And how do they allow everybody to voice their feedback, voice their opinion on some of the initiatives we undertake. So Tom Griffin, head of partnerships, he and I sat down and we discussed this concept of memos over meetings. Why are we so bullish on this concept? Well, there’s a lot of benefit to it. And it’s really been a valuable resource, a valuable heuristic for our team to take on. And so here’s where we kick things off.

Ben Grynol (03:08):

Okay. So we have this thing at Levels, memos over meetings. We’re very much a memo driven culture, for many reasons. There are lots of reasons why a company would want to document things in a deep and thoughtful way. Documentation is probably an underserved practice at many companies, whether you are in-person, hybrid or fully remote. As a remote team, it is extremely important to be a memo or not just a memo driven, but a documentation centric culture, we’ll call it that. And so there are lots of reasons why we write memos. Now, with that said, you could say, “Hey, we document everything, but we still are very much synchronous and we have meetings.” That’s not the way we work. We’ve got lots of different videos. We’ve got podcasts, we’ve got probably blog posts about why we are asynchronous and some of the benefits of it. So we have this, I guess we’ll call it this mantra that is memos over meetings. So let’s dive into it, why do we write so many memos? What are some of the benefits, I guess, doing this? Why do we document things all the time?

Tom Griffin (04:18):

Yeah. I mean, there are a couple of main reasons that come to mind for me. I think number one, for me personally, is that writing in general forces you to think more clearly and more deeply. So this is what I first noticed immediately when starting at Levels, and my first project really was to write a long form document about our affiliate marketing strategy. And when I started reading through all of the existing documentation at Levels, I was so struck by how clearly and thoroughly, and in such a structured fashion that arguments and strategies were laid out at Levels. And I went into that particular document, my first project at Levels, thinking that I understood what we were going to do and why. And in the process of writing that document, I honestly got maybe 100 times more clear on what we were doing it, why we were doing it and how we should go about executing it just through the process of writing.

Ben Grynol (05:28):

Yeah, memos are a byproduct. One can argue, and I know we’ve discussed this before, you can write a memo, a very short, a brief, brief memo that might be an overview of something, some initiative. And it actually takes 15 minutes to do. But that is an anomaly or an anomalous situation where you are not doing really deep, thoughtful work. It’s more of a transactional thing for documentation. So it’s still a memo, but it’s less of a strategy doc or a reference doc. It is just a, we’ll call it a project doc that you’re documenting things. The thing about memos is they are a byproduct of deep work, something that we value where you can’t… It is not possible to write a 200 page novel. And I’m not saying that our memos are 200 pages, but you can’t write a 200 page memo without doing deep work.

Ben Grynol (06:20):

I mean, maybe you could, let’s riff on that for a sec. You could technically write 14 words a day for however many years and you’ll get to 200 pages, I’m sure. Whatever the math actually works out to, but you have to sit down and think for blocks of time. And so memos are this way of, it’s something you touched on where you’re concretizing your thoughts. You’re really codifying all of these unrelated things and tying them together. And those, as you work through them, they build upon each other.

Ben Grynol (06:50):

When you have a meeting, meetings are a way of moving freeform thoughts. So even if you’re trying to transform information between two or more parties, there are two or more people and you’re transforming the information, that’s a point of a meeting. You’re not there to just transmit, say, “Tom, should we meet again tomorrow at 5:30?” And you’re just transmitting this stuff that could be an email, different conversation. But meetings are very much this idea of transforming freeformed thoughts and memos allow you to concretize or codify all of these thoughts and put them into a single place where you say, “Hey, you can keep building upon your own thoughts as you write.” It’s just a very different way of thinking.

Tom Griffin (07:33):

Yeah. And I think there’s absolutely a role for getting in a group of two or three or four people and workshopping and transforming thoughts, but it’s almost always more helpful to first concretize your own thoughts and figure out what your own thoughts and beliefs are and why you have them. And then come to the table and have a discussion with other people to hear their thoughts. Typically, what happens is people just show up to a conversation and they expect to figure out what their point of view is throughout the conversation, which you can do that a bit in my experience, it’s just an ineffective way to do it. You’re going to get way clearer on what you think by spending three hours of deep focused time, forcing yourself to actually communicate these thoughts via writing than you are going to be showing up to a meeting unprepared and then just reacting in real time to what other people are saying.

Tom Griffin (08:36):

And I think everyone learns and ultimately thinks in different ways. And there are some people who thrive in that environment where it’s all real time and they’re transforming thoughts and coming up with new ones in real time on the spot. But I would argue there are more people and the majority of people think better when they have a lot of time on their own. And giving everyone that time, accommodates everyone, because the people who function better in those faster, real time environments, like a meeting, they’re not going to do worse by also spending a few hours first thinking through their thoughts prior to coming to that meeting.

Ben Grynol (09:17):

Yeah. Sam and I riffed on that in the, we did a video on when to meet versus when to be asynchronous in communication. What’s the point of meeting? Not saying, what’s the point as in like, there isn’t ever a point, it’s like, if you choose to do it, why would you do it? And one of the things is, come prepared, do thinking independently, do independent thinking, come prepared to a meeting if you need that synchronous session, as opposed to just saying, “Hey, let’s brainstorm. Let’s come up with this new idea together.” And you come without any thoughts about what you’re going to work on.

Ben Grynol (09:55):

And the analogy that we used was music. It’s very rare that you just show up and you start jamming. You don’t have a single riff. It doesn’t mean you can’t write a song from that, but starting to play, everyone just starts to play. Well, that’s like this thing called jazz, which is freeform music that you just make up on this spot. That’s the point of jazz. Some people like it, some people don’t like it, that’s a different conversation. But when you are writing songs, when you are having meetings, the idea is you come with a few ideas that you’ve been working on, a few things that you have independently thought through, and then you work them out together with other people. And that allows you to transform that information.

Ben Grynol (10:36):

So one thing with memos is memos can be built upon, meetings can’t. Meaning you can write a memo, and one day, one hour, one month, one year later, provided it’s still a relevant memo, you can just keep updating it. It’s like basing and updating for a memo, as opposed to the brain. It’s like you have new information, maybe your prior thoughts about what, let’s use, the affiliate strategy, your prior thoughts about go-to market or the way to approach them or whatever it is, were X. And there’s been enough qualitative feedback that it’s allowed you to do Y.

Ben Grynol (11:17):

And so part of that is that you can update the memo and you can say, “As of today, this is the way we’re thinking about this thing.” So memos, you can constantly update or other people can contribute something that might change your perspective. A meeting is ephemeral. You do this thing, it’s synchronous and it is impossible to build upon it. You can have other forms of communication outside of that. Meaning you can build upon the takeaways, meaning when we talked in that meeting, there was this. But it is physically impossible to build upon a meeting. You can’t just go back in time and be like, “Let’s extend that meeting 15 more minutes.” That’s not the way they work. So one of the great benefits of memos is that they’re unbounded in time. Memos go on in perpetuity of being able to update them. Really.

Tom Griffin (12:09):

Yeah, absolutely. One, just the reality that we all forget 90% of everything that happens to us, including what is said during a meeting. And we all love to leave a meeting and imagine that we’re going to be able to accommodate that information forever. But for most of us, we forget it immediately and it’s lost forever. In terms of building upon memos, I think they can be built upon effectively in the short-term and in the long-term. And you mentioned this. But in the short-term, it’s often the best way to get feedback from a wide variety of teammates on your ideas.

Tom Griffin (12:49):

Number one, people will understand your ideas thoroughly. So they’re really high resolution. I mean, the comparison, I think in pop startup culture, this idea of memos, one of the origins of this was Amazon, where they didn’t want to do presentations, PowerPoint presentations, and instead wanted to lean into memos. And I think that’s a great example because and they were like PowerPoint presentation, I could present to the team and quickly throw some random charts and stats and a few bullet points and everyone can be nodding along, but I’d argue it’s really easy to, as a teammate, who’s looking to provide feedback, not fully understand what my actual stance, argument, rationale reasons are. And I think in a memo, number one, people will definitely understand where you’re coming from, especially if it’s a longer memo because you’re writing in long form narrative form.

Tom Griffin (13:43):

And then number two, it’s way easier for them to write out their thoughts, reply to certain sections. The memo itself is really structured and organized, but then also in the long-term, building upon a memo, I think this is a really important point that you made where you can revisit prior thinking, and then very clearly decide or understand if your thinking has changed or if it ought to change based on where the company now is or any new information that you have.

Tom Griffin (14:13):

A great example of this is right now, I have on my list of things to write a short memo on whether or not we should more formally pursue the crossfit market, some point in 2022. And I have a memo from maybe six to nine months ago on how we’re thinking about the professional sports market broadly. And that is going to be such a useful reference to go back to when starting to think about crossfit, in order to first just say, our recommendation, six months ago was X for these reasons, have our reasons and rationale, has it changed? And if yes, why? And if no, then that answers the question in this particular case in terms around what our strategy should be. So it’s super useful longitudinally to have a record of prior thinking, particularly when it comes to strategy.

Ben Grynol (15:11):

Yeah. They can be linked. So they’re a foundation. That’s very much a foundation for thinking and they can be linked in other memos to say, this is what we used to do. The way we used to think about something, maybe it is similar. Maybe it has drastically changed and that’s not a bad, it’s more a matter of if you’re reading this memo and you read a sentence that says, our thinking has drastically changed. Read this other thing if you want to see what we used to think. We now think this. And you don’t need to go into all of the reasons why you think a certain way.

Ben Grynol (15:51):

And so good example is we did that with the growth… We’ve got this growth manifesto. And it’s some bullet points of boat or headings, we’ll call it. We execute with integrity. We don’t hack attention, compete for three seconds of attention and it provides a foundation for some of the other thoughts where we could strip that out of this main strategy doc, that it’s more philosophical thinking, but you can just link that and you can summarize it. And you can say, here are the bullet points of the headings. Here’s why we work a certain way. When people ask questions about, “Why do you not pursue performance marketing at this stage?” That being like hacking attention for digital ads, you can just send them this memo, or it’s linked in a section of a doc where you say, “Here’s this section that talks about this.” It makes it so much easier to have those references.

Ben Grynol (16:41):

One of the things about memos that’s really interesting is that they can be shared publicly. And it sounds absurd to say it, it sounds ridiculous, but if you record a meeting, you can share that. Let’s assume most meetings, maybe with Zoom they are, but let’s assume in-person, as an example, there’s not a video camera recording or there’s not some mechanism that is recording that meeting. There’s a very low probability that meeting’s synchronous time are shared publicly with people. Because it just happens and it evaporates. And that’s a huge issue. Because we can share memos, let’s use the affiliate strategy, the new one, the 2.0 that Jackie worked on, not only can that be shared publicly with potential hires, new hires or different team members across the business, partners, people in our cap table, it can be shared with anybody. And it allows anyone to get up to speed on the way we think about a topic. You can’t just share this one synchronous, even if it was a recorded Zoom call, you can, but it’s not going to have the same deep thought.

Ben Grynol (17:55):

So that’s one of the benefits, is by having this reference point to say, “Here is this thing.” It has unlimited upside as far as value, how it can be linked across different memos, shared across different channels, like email externally. And it can be searched for years later if it’s relevant. You can’t search a meeting, even if it’s recorded, unless you have some unique identifier, which means a transcript associated with a meeting located in a database that allows you to actually command F for certain key words. And that’s such a ridiculous way of saying it, but it’s basically saying you can’t search audio and video, unless you have a transcript. The likelihood of all of these factors going right for synchronous and in-person meetings is that thin, and then is it even valuable information because meetings tend to be… It doesn’t mean they’re hand wavy, they can have an agenda. But they tend to weave around in conversation. They’re not as sequential as a memo will be because of the way it’s meant to be structured.

Tom Griffin (19:04):

Definitely. Yeah. I think it’s probably more intuitive to people, the benefits of documentation for internal purposes, everything we’ve already touched on, including new hires. We haven’t really talked about that, but just getting up to speed and having a trace of strategy, of tactics, of experiments that we’ve run, of thinking and how it’s evolved over time. But I think it’s really interest and unique, the benefits that you receive from having a memo culture for the purposes of sharing it externally. We have seen just innumerable benefits, the top ones that come to mind… I mean, early on it was around investors. I mean, we fundraised as well as any startup ever has. And many of those early investors cited specifically having visibility into the business. I mean, such a simple concept, but most investors don’t have visibility into a business. And you’re just making a bet on an idea and often a team, but you don’t have much data.

Tom Griffin (20:15):

And the investors who invested in Levels had a ton of data. I mean, if they’re willing to look at it all, it’s like just immediate view into how we operate and all of our thinking, which is super rare. And so that was huge benefit, huge upside to us. And then similarly with new hires, I mean that it’s been cited over and over again as a top reason that people have joined Levels because they’ve been able to actually see how it looks and what it means to work at Levels.

Ben Grynol (20:42):

Totally. Yeah. There are a lot of reasons around this idea of why we encourage memos over meetings, not just because of being asynchronous, but be because of all the value, all these things that we’ve cited. Some of the other thoughts are, and we touched on it a little bit before, but meetings tend to weave around whereas memos don’t. There is a sequence to a memo. Meetings aren’t sequential, even if you try to be agenda driven. What happens is a good memo will have sections. So it’s going to have a start, a middle and an end, meaning here’s the overview of this thing. Here’s a bunch of stuff we think about this thing. Here’s the conclusion, next steps, action items, takeaways. It’s very structured.

Ben Grynol (21:28):

And a meeting, there can be action items that keep coming up. And unless you are diligent about revisiting, a meeting, doesn’t go start, middle, end. You get these action items coming up and these freeform thoughts, and some things might get lost. You forget about a thing. So you have to be diligent in a synchronous meeting to say, “Okay, yes, we’re all nodding our heads. The action item is 1, 2, 3,” and everyone documents it, goes away. And those are the action items. Very often things will get discussed, and unless they come out as conclusion action items, they just don’t get followed through or have the loop closed on them, whether it is a big initiative or not. It doesn’t matter how big the action item is, how important it could be. Something as small as action item, I will email Tom to let him know we don’t need an affiliate strategy. But it doesn’t matter what it is, but there’s no documentation often.

Ben Grynol (22:25):

And then people go, “Oh, did Tom ever end up emailing?” “Oh, no, he didn’t. And then he forgot to close the loop.” And then it just becomes this thing of, well, yeah, that’s how information gets lost. But it’s really easy to reference action items when they’re documented to be like, “Hey, was this thing… It doesn’t look like the loop was closed on this thing that we agreed on January 9th. Four months have passed. Is this still relevant? Or do we not care about this thing anymore? Is it past?” But that’s one of the points of memos too, is there are always takeaways, next steps, action items. And that is not as pertinent in meetings. It’s just not.

Tom Griffin (23:06):

Yeah. I love that there’s a required section in memos at Levels, which is the last section, which is next steps. I think forcing yourself to get really clear on what needs to happen immediately next, not just in theory over the next year, but what are the very literal next steps? And I was just having a conversation with Jackie about this that I want to keep each are really accountable to revisiting that section of every memo that we do every three to six months, where we set a reminder and we go back to it and it’s like, “Did we do these things or not?” And again, some of this can be accomplished in meetings and I don’t think this conversation is an argument that meeting should never happen. But even if you’re having a meeting, you should write a memo prior or use it as an input point prior to the memo. But a memo should come before or after meeting. And meetings should never replace a memo, and that’s when things get really dangerous. And I think what’s still, frankly, most companies do, meetings are replacing memos.

Ben Grynol (24:06):

Yeah. One of the things that is beautiful about memos, if you want to call it that, is that they can be formatted, they should be formatted and they are formatted, a good memo. You don’t just dump a bunch of words on a page and say, “Here’s the memo.” Because that’s not the way memos work. But the brain is really good at understanding information when it’s chunked out. So beginning, middle, end, overview, let’s just call these categories overview, strategy, conclusion. Those are going to be our buckets. Your brain goes, “Great, overview. I know I’m like reading about a bunch of background stuff. That should be what’s in this section. Strategy. Okay. This is how we’re going to go to market. This is how we’re going to do this thing.” Whatever the memo is about, affiliate, engineering, product, name it. It’s just, I know I’m reading about background. I know I’m reading about strategy and I know this thing called conclusion. That makes sense in our brain, we can scrub it really quickly with our eyes. We can digest it. We can think about it.

Ben Grynol (25:11):

But what happens in a meeting is you are trying to digest information as it’s coming in and you can’t ever stop the talking to think about what’s being said, you have to follow along. And so that’s one of the challenges, back to why you should transform information in meetings versus just transmit.

Ben Grynol (25:30):

But it would be really weird to have a formatted meeting. Meaning you should have an agenda, you should have some actionable outcomes unless you’re just having a conversation. That’s the caveat to all this, a conversation where it’s like two people being friendly with each other and drinking coffee and talking about walking their dogs in Central Park is a different… It’s not to say, never meet. It’s like that serves a purpose, but it’s like, that’s not related to business. That’s just personal living, life stuff. So do tons of that. But different outcome.

Ben Grynol (26:03):

It would be really weird to have a formatted meeting, meaning we walk in and I go, heading one bold background, color, gray overview. So in your head you’re like, “What is this person saying? This is completely absurd.” You don’t go overview. And I start rambling bullet points. You’d be like, “This is a robot. We’re human.” So then I don’t go strategy, conclusion. That is not the point of the meeting. It’s like, so we did this thing in this past and you’re trying to… A meeting, you’re always trying to narrate a bit of a story to get through what you’re trying to get through. It’s just meetings cannot be formatted is the takeaway, whereas memos can. And if you could format meetings, that would be cool. But it just doesn’t make sense. Maybe we should try that next time. [inaudible 00:26:51].

Tom Griffin (26:51):

Well, you would need to think of ways that essentially call out or highlight or emphasize information in an in-person setting effectively. So I don’t think it would be like takeaways or over… You can just say the words, but you’d have to scream them or elicit emotion somehow. So someone walked away being like, “Ah, yes, I remember those three key takeaways in the middle of the meeting when Ben stood up and just screamed, “Levels shows you how food affects your health.””

Ben Grynol (27:19):

Yeah.

Tom Griffin (27:19):

I’m thinking of last night I was reading through our product strategy memos and whether it’s a very long product strategy document or it’s our clinical strategy document, these documents are very thorough and there’s no way I’m going to retain all of the information. But just thinking back last night on one of our product strategy memos, my brain literally right now is remembering a few things. So bolded green text, upfront in the document. I know that we’re focused largely on answering that initial question of Levels shows you how food affects your health. Levels helps you see how food affects your health. Other words that are coming to mind right now are education and accountability because those were bolded and in green. I’m seeing the two call out boxes in notion of the health concerned persona and the discouraged dieter.

Tom Griffin (28:10):

I mean, these are all things that are takeaways in my mind because they’ve been visually mapped out and represented. Whereas if I sat in on an hour and a half long product strategy meeting, who’s to say what I will take away? But it will be way more random than the author of the product strategy document who wanted me to take away the thing, so they bolded it and put a light bulb next to it.

Ben Grynol (28:32):

Yeah, I think I’m going to start doing that in meetings, call out, emoji, icon, light bulb, italicized words. And then I’ll say it, and then you’ll remember. I’ll be like, “Now Tom is visualizing this being a call out with an emoji and it’s italicized. So that is important stuff.” But yeah, you’re-

Tom Griffin (28:51):

We’ll see how that works.

Ben Grynol (28:53):

… because you can’t visualize what’s happening in the meeting, the retention might be different on it. One thing we’ve touched on you can’t just go back, unless you’ve got a recording, you can’t go back and just be like, “What was that thing in the meeting?” You need to always document it.

Ben Grinnell (29:09):

One of the things is a meeting can be recorded and included in a memo, hugely beneficial. Maybe it’s an hour long meeting where it was deep conversation about something. Let’s use bio observability, Sam and Josh have a conversation out bio observability, it’s very deep, it helps us to understand traces, logs, metrics. You can understand the thought process because there is something great about hearing the way people communicate ideas and think about them, very, very beneficial.

Ben Grynol (29:41):

But assume that a meeting’s recorded, but it’s only distributed to two or three people. That’s not that beneficial. A memo or a meeting, anything that’s distributed widely just benefits so many more people. And so that’s one of the things is, memos slash meeting slash anything, documentation is only as valuable as its distribution. Meaning if you do something and only two people see it, that doesn’t help. You want to make sure that there’s wide distribution on this, we’ll call it content, but this information so that more people can contribute to it, more people can learn from it and can change their perspective on thinking.

Ben Grynol (30:22):

One of the things you touched on, which we’ll go back to is this idea of contribution. Big, big challenge in meetings. Aside from the size, but we’re going to use Zoom or in-person, it doesn’t matter. There are probably lots of corporate meetings, big company meetings where there are six people in them or more, sometimes 10. There might be 10 people, which, it’s expensive, we’re not going to get into all that.

Ben Grynol(30:50):

But the larger the meeting size and even a meeting that has more than two people, because you need to have two people to have a conversation. Three, there is a, probability it’s lower, but a probability that the third person might not contribute as much. Because the conversation’s driven by two people. The probability of everybody being able to contribute is directly correlated to the end, meaning the larger the end, the lower the probability that every person will get to contribute because meetings are time boxed. So a nerdy academic way of saying, “Hey, the more people that are in a meeting, the less likelihood there is that everyone will have air time or feel inclined to share their ideas.” One of the challenges.

Ben Grynol (31:38):

Memos allow everybody to contribute their ideas at any time for as long as they want. Meaning if you had an hour worth of information to add to a thing, you couldn’t physically add that hour of information in an hour meeting that had 10 people in it. That just wouldn’t be possible. Memos, you can do that. And then what can have happen is you might have more ideas like this product strategy that you read, let’s assume you put some comments in it yesterday and you’ve been thinking about it. It’s been stewing and brewing in your brain. And in four days you come back and you’re like, “Yeah, I think this now.” You can just go and just add more feedback. You can’t re-add to a meeting that happened in the past. You can’t be like, “Hey, let’s get in the time machine with Doc Brown and Marty McFly and go back to that meeting that happened way back. This is what I actually want to say.” You can go and contribute. So that’s one of the beautiful things about memos, is ongoing, inclusive feedback. It is the most inclusive way of allowing everyone to contribute.

Tom Griffin (32:49):

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. And I think for me the most important point there is just that this helps facilitate a meritocracy of ideas where you’re not beholden to all of the bias that’s going to come in a meeting setting. I mean, it’s obvious, but the person who speaks the most, the most loudly, who’s most charismatic, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Those ideas are always going to be weighted more, or the only ones that are heard relative to someone who is not as comfortable speaking up, maybe even English isn’t their first language. And I do think that when it’s in writing, you’re not eliminating all of that bias, but you’re eliminating a ton of it.

Tom Griffin (33:31):

And it’s really cool to see in our memos that anybody can jump in. And let’s say, Sam, the CEO writes a memo. Sam is reviewing and commenting and replying back to any and every comment that anyone, no matter where you are in the organization writes, which is just not happening for a variety of reasons in the meeting setting. And certainly if you’re looking at a recording of a meeting, just very literally your ability to comment on a particular line in that meeting and surface an idea is nowhere near as readily available as it is when it’s in a written document.

Ben Grynol (34:10):

Yeah. Compound that with organizational structure and politics. There are going to be certain things. We’re very lucky that we’re small, we’re a startup, we’re scrappy, we don’t have any of that baggage that we have to worry about. But there’s this weird thing that happens from an optic standpoint. And there’s a bit of peacocking, positioning that people feel this sense of… And maybe it has to do with not having this idea of short toes where people feel like they’re always having their ground trampled on, but let’s make an assumption, there are 20 people and the larger the meeting, the more likelihood that this might happen. If you have this political baggage, there is a new person that comes on board, that new person might be in a mid-level role, a senior role or whatever it is.

Ben Grynol (35:02):

Now, let’s make the assumption that somebody is early in their career, one or two years out of school, they’re new to the organization, one to two months in, but they got invited to this product strategy… Let’s riff on the product strategy thing. They got invited to this product strategy meeting and maybe their role is product, so they actually should be privy to this information. There’s a reason why they are there. And so he or she refrains from saying something, but decides to just say one thing. And it’s a one minute question or probing line that is very, very valuable. And you get this looking over the shoulder and you’re like, “What’s Billy doing talking in this meeting? This is with the CEO. It’s with all the execs and Billy’s talking now.” You might get that.

Ben Grynol (35:50):

There is none of that thinking if Billy is new in the organization and comments on memo that, let’s go back to Sam writes memo and Billy is new in the organization. You’re like, “Sweet Billy, thanks for contributing these comments. They’re super helpful.” That’s the thought process is, you remove these weird biases that might happen. And again, we’re very lucky we don’t have any of this, but that just doesn’t seem like it could exist in a memo culture, because the idea is to contribute comments, to contribute to the conversation, to give feedback on it. Even if it was putting a thumbs up that’s not actually a comment, it’s just like, I agree with this thing. It’s like, what do you do in a meeting? Billy’s like… You can’t actually emoji reaction as a person saying something, but that would be pretty good. Can you imagine? Everyone like, you’re in a meeting and all these thumbs start just popping. People are doing this, holding up signs. 100. But-

Tom Griffin (36:47):

I’m sure that’ll be-

Ben Grynol (36:48):

… how hilarious though, that that happens. It doesn’t happen with meetings. It’s a nice thing about them.

Tom Griffin (36:55):

Yeah. The word coming to mind when you were talking is performance and it’s having a role and a character that you are playing based on how you perceive yourself relative to people in the room who are more junior, more senior, based on some persona that you hold that you’re trying to uphold in front of the group so you know, “I need to get my comment in at some point and I need to say it in a declarative and confident fashion.” And we are all susceptible to these biases, just because we’re human beings and we’re social creatures.

Tom Griffin (37:25):

And you remove so much of that, not all of it, but you really do remove so much of it when you compare that setting of six people in a conference room with the CEO and then also the junior person and then some people in the middle, compare that environment, which I’ve been in tons of times to a literal Google doc or Notion doc where people are commenting on writing. I mean they’re night and day. And there are pros and cons or trade offs. I mean, again, we’re not say there’s never a right time for a meeting, but in terms of this specific concern, memos are so much better.

Ben Grynol (38:01):

Yeah. There’s no business voice in a memo. Like now Tom is writing in his business voice. Well, what I really think is… I mean, that’s also the weird theatrics that happen in these environments where it’s like, you walk in and it’s like, “Hey Tom, how is your day?” That’s not the way you talk. But that happens. “How are things?” “Oh, they’re so good.” Everyone’s got this like weird, you’re acting and those stripped away as far as maybe people don’t do that as much as they used to. I don’t know. But I would assume it still happens where people are sort of like they’re walking a certain way and they’re talking a certain way. And they’re like, “I’m here working.” They got this radio voice that they do. It’s absurd. But you don’t get radio voice in a memo. Maybe you should have asterisks, Tom’s radio voice writing. So then people take it more seriously. They’re like, “Oh, Tom really means this comment.” Let’s go into pitfalls. So we’ve painted this great picture for memos. There are pitfalls that we would be naive not to steel man this bad boy. So we have-

Tom Griffin (39:16):

I’ll steel man some pitfalls.

Ben Grynol (39:17):

Steel man it. There are pitfalls of memos. It’s not, “Okay, we’ve made this great case of why you should have memos.” There are pitfalls. Run with it. Because there are overall, I think the benefit is greater than the pitfalls, but we would be naive not to identify some of them.

Tom Griffin (39:40):

Number one for me is speed. It’s slower to write memos and to exchange and align on ideas through memos. So number one, they often just take while. And I know for a fact that many of us will punt projects or even just punt strategic thinking, because we will think to ourselves, “This probably requires a memo and that is a number of hours of work.” Whereas if we didn’t have a culture of memos, I might say, and there are a lot of downsides to saying this, but I might say, “Hey, Ben, want to talk through crossfit strategy. Can you hop on in a couple of hours today and we’ll figure it out.” That would be the opposite approach. And that approach would have its downsides, but it would be much faster than me saying, “In a month from now, I’m going to carve out 10 hours one week to write that particular strategy document.” So they take much longer, number one.

Tom Griffin (40:44):

But number two, I do think often the feedback cycles and aligning team members and getting to a decision point can take much, much, much longer through writing and through memos. And I do think this is one of the best times to jump on a call, is when you need to quickly align on something, maybe a lot of thinking has already been done, get to people on the phone, give yourself a time budget of say 30 minutes. And then you know what the outcome is going in, you’re recording it. And you know that by the end of the call, you’re going to have a decision. That is often a much better path than trading notes by memo over the course of many weeks or even months.

Ben Grynol (41:26):

Yeah. I mean, that’s exactly it, is that if you have the mental model, if you have the mental model that a memo… And let’s break it down again, because we’ve touched on this, but there are different types of memos that being, let’s categorize them into three buckets. And it doesn’t mean that this is not mutually exclusive where it’s like, these are the only buckets that exist. It’s just on average, these are some buckets. Let’s add one more thing to it being, we document everything, including call notes from meetings or conversations with candidates, we document it all so that we’ve got that as a reference point. That still takes some set of time. But let’s remove that from this mental model of memos, like what is memo? Project doc, a reference doc, a strategy doc. And they all incrementally get greater in the amount of time that they take.

Ben Grynol (42:16):

So as long as you frame things, you chunk them into these things and you understand what you need to write, which one it is that you’re writing, it’s easier to understand, “Okay, I know this is going to take… It should take roughly this amount of time.” So once it come up, like a project doc provided and all projects have different amounts of complexity, but let’s assume that it’s an average project where you should be able to capture the starting point, the foundation for the project in relatively similar format, almost like a templated format, regardless of the function. You know that it’s like your going to do this, this, this, there are some costs. The timeline, this is a way of doing it. That can take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour. A reference doc, depending on complexity, again can take 15 minutes, can take four hours, could take more.

Ben Grynol (43:13):

A strategy doc that’s really deep and well thought out, it’s not too often that that’s going to take you an hour. Because the point is that you want deeper thinking and that’s where it gets overwhelming, where you keep, to your point of crossfit, you keep punting it. You punt, punt, punt, because you think, “Gosh, this is going to take me a really long time to do.” The hard thing is chunking out that amount of time. So you’re like, “Is this 15 hours? Is it 50 hours?” And I’m not suggesting that 50 is an appropriate amount of time to take for that, but memos are inherently hard to write and write quickly. And so it does delay getting thoughts out there sometimes. And that’s where prioritization comes in of going, “I know I’m punting this thing. It’s not existential,” but it is one of the downfalls or pitfalls of memo.

Tom Griffin (44:03):

I’ll just add that the memo culture at large creates a default of turning to a memo. And probably over time, we’ll get better at figuring out when a memo is needed and when one isn’t needed. So extending this crossfit example, which is not super high priority, but it might be the case that it doesn’t need a memo, it needs a one single thread with a five minute Loom with a few thoughts. And the fact that I think it needs a memo is part of what is causing me to punt it. So just another example of a potential risk.

Ben Grynol (44:43):

One thing I’ve been trying to get better at is writing short memos, meaning when something comes up, I go, “Oh, you’re allowed 15 minutes for this.” Because Parkinson’s law, it’s going to take as long as you give yourself the time to do it. Meaning if you don’t give yourself a timeline, it’s just like it’ll go on in perpetuity. Whereas if you give yourself a date and a time, you say you only have 15 minutes to do this, you’ll do your best you can do in 15 minutes. But if it’s unbounded, it could take you nine hours and maybe the difference between eight hours and 45 minutes of additional work is 3% better than just the 15 minutes because that capture. The Loom and like your thoughts written out is much worse than the eight hours and 45 minutes of additional work you put into fully structuring it. And what you needed was just the 15 minutes of work to be able to start to get the conversation going amongst the team.

Tom Griffin (45:45):

I just had an interesting idea, which is, over time, beginning to set norms for how long certain types of memos take. And then actually including at the top of the memo, amount of time that the memo took. And that way someone could say, “Sam could review it.” And say, “This is a great start. Looks like you put one hour into it. I think that this project or the strategy deserves significantly more time. You should put 10 hours into it.” Because I think partially what happens is no one knows what anyone is putting into any memo. So I might tell myself, “Hey, I’m going to block off one hour to do a crossfit memo.” But I feel because I’m a conscientious teammate that maybe it should be as thorough as Lauren’s clinical strategy document. And I don’t want people to think, “Man, Tom spent three months working on this crossfit document, but this isn’t that thorough.” And so transparency around amount of time that people spend on things actually might help clarify some of that.

Ben Grynol (46:53):

Yeah. It’s a very interesting thought. Very interesting thought. I think-

Tom Griffin (46:57):

There’s a crossfit memo, I spent one hour on it. Like, here it is.

Ben Grynol (47:01):

I think we need to remove that though and just say, “I don’t give a shit. These thoughts are out there. I’m putting these thoughts out there and not feeling like, “Oh, I’m going to get judged for this.”” It’s like nobody should judge anybody, full stop, period. The idea is, is this strong thinking? Is it well articulated? Is it well formatted? And that’s it.

Ben Grynol (47:27):

One of the downfalls, and I don’t want to get too deep into this is that there’s a way of painting a picture where a memo can look better than it is just through formatting. So that’s obvious, just we’re visual beings and you look at something that’s formatted and it can look better than it actually is. Or there could be something that’s really strong thinking and not formatted well, and the brain goes, “This is a bunch of jumbled information.” And so sometimes memos can look really thorough and it can actually take 15 minutes. I mean, there have been times where I think like a debrief doc. And we’ll write it, I’ll send it to you or something and you’re like, “Oh, man. This looks good.” And I’m like, “I literally spent seven minutes on this. It’s just that all it is, is form adding, but that’s shortcuts and whatever.” Different conversation of doing that formatting crap fast, but having a mental model of, “Here’s how to approach these docs.”

Ben Grynol (48:18):

One of the other pitfalls is memos can cause deep discussion and be really hard to follow if it’s a comment or a thread of comments. That can happen. Now, to mitigate that… So that’s a pitfall, meaning if you are in a meeting, assume there are a bunch of people meeting 10 people will keep using this, N equals 10, 10 people meet, provided everybody is paying attention, which you hope, if they’re investing their time to sit there and be synchronous, they’re privy to all of the comments, all of the things going on. Whereas in a memo, it’s harder to see all the comments that come up. You have to discover them. That is a mechanism of platform. Meaning there are better ways of commenting and giving feedback and that’s related to a platform.

Ben Grynol (49:07):

So one of the pitfalls is you can have really good conversations go on about a topic, but that can get really long if people start commenting in this long thread about one sentence in the doc, and then all of a sudden it’s like, if you miss that, there’s a lot of information in there. There could be decisions that are getting made and that’s something we try really hard to avoid saying, “We do not do this. We do not have long form conversation in comments. Have it in a different place.” So Notion is where we do all our documentation threads, happens to be… And some companies can use email, Slack, it doesn’t matter. That’s a channel through which you can distribute this information and have these conversations.

Ben Grynol (49:56):

We use threads because of some of the product features that it has around you can comment on other comments, you can have deeper conversation, you can mark them as decisions. And that helps to mitigate some of the other pitfalls of memos being, “Okay, well, great. There was a whole bunch of conversation happened. I missed it. I read the memo.” Whereas if you’re in a meeting, you get that information, you are there to say, “Okay, everyone, we’re making this decision now.” You absorb that information if you’re in a meeting. Harder to do in a memo, but we try really hard to make sure that there is a lot of visibility around feedback, comments and decisions that are made from memos when they’re written.

Tom Griffin (50:38):

Yeah, I think that’s right. I think the process of thinking and communicating the initial strategy is more organized in Notion and the discussion that ensues and feedback is more organized in a platform like ours.

Ben Grynol (51:00):

Dude, appreciate your time. We would’ve been an hour, but we chewed the fat on other crap and [crosstalk 00:51:06].

Tom Griffin (51:06):

Yeah, yeah, we were right on 60 minutes. No, no, no. All good man.

Ben Grynol (51:10):

Some of these things should almost be podcasts. Here I’m going to hit stop.