Flows (Smart Meetings)
Calendars are amongst the most commonly-used tools at work, but they’re dumb.
Topicflow is a new venture that I co-founded with some vets from 7Geese. We're on a mission to empower teams with the tools to make every meeting productive and meaningful.
The most novel feature of the app today is the ability to group and connect meeting notes and history together across time — even for completely independent calendar events. Flows gives order to calendar chaos, bringing relevant context to every meeting you run.
Context / Problem
After many years spent building an app to help teams run better performance reviews and feedback processes, it became clear that whether planning for 1-on-1s, discussing performance reviews, or building goals, even the most successful teams and leaders had very little support to actually run great meetings.
A big part of this problem, particularly for 1-on-1s, is that calendars are really bad at creating continuity from meeting to meeting — notes get chucked into Google Docs or Evernote, where content goes to die and where threads are left to dangle.
Solution
Flows is how we solved that problem. With the complete history of every meeting in a series (for example, your weekly 1-on-1 with a direct report) available, the app can augment your meeting by suggesting past topics that were never resolved, remind you of commitments you made last time, or create a focused review of past notes on a per-topic level.
Topicflow does all this for you automatically for events that repeat in your calendar, but Flows were designed to connect completely distinct calendar events together into a single thread, too. A single Flow could string together all your weekly 1-on-1s, monthly goal check-ins, quarterly career conversations, and annual review discussions, which creates the context necessary for unbelievably rich conversations.