Product Analytics/Contingency Carousel

Product Analytics has a "team sharing" meeting every week where our team and analysts in other departments (Comms, Fundraising, GD&I, etc.) can share their work and get feedback or brainstorm on projects (e.g. solutions to problems, interesting questions to investigate).

At the start of the pandemic we dedicated a few of those meetings on contingency planning. We do a round of those every 2 quarters (i.e. 6 months) as a way to institutionalize the knowledge within our team. Meeting time allows only for 3-4 people so it takes us 3-4 weeks to go through all the (very informal) presentations.

Each person gets 10-15 minutes to walk the team through continuity notes they put together ahead of time. Those notes cover:

• the product team's goals for year, priorities for upcoming quarter
• who they work with (PM, eng) and their working style, any 1:1s
• where communication takes place (all relevant mailing lists, Slack channels)
• which team meetings to attend
• typical processes
• for current & upcoming projects:
  • measurement plans
  • instrumentation specs
  • repositories for code & queries
  • associated Phab tasks
  • data sources and other important details
• any dashboards being maintained

The prompt everyone gets is "if you got very sick or won the lottery and we had to continue supporting that team from where you left off, what do we need to know?"