Vampire Meetings Are Sucking the Life Out of Your Day (With Christoph Steinlehner)

Product Agility

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In this episode of the Product Agility Podcast, Ben welcomes product coach and consultant Christoph Steinlehner to discuss a universal pain point: unproductive meetings. If your calendar is flooded with time-sucking, pointless meetings, you're not alone. Christoph dives into the root cause of this meeting epidemic and offers practical tools to reclaim your time, energy, and focus.

Key Takeaways:

Multiplying Meetings: Why they lead to more and when to intervene.
Vampire Meetings: Use the “wooden stake” of visual mapping to end life-sucking gatherings.
Power of Visual Mapping: Even rough sketches bring clarity, alignment, and actionable outcomes.
Keep it Scrappy: Stay humble and simple to encourage collaboration and avoid over-preparation.
Avoiding Tangents: Use visual tools to spot and address off-track discussions.
Psychological Safety: Create a safe space for collaboration and better decision-making.

Practical Tools & Methods:

Customer Journey Mapping, Impact Maps, and more: Christoph shares some of the key methods that product teams can use to map out their meetings, systems, and processes visually.
Mapping doesn’t need to be complex: You don’t need fancy software! Sticky notes on a wall or a whiteboard can work wonders for getting on the same page.
Tools of the trade: Learn about some digital tools for remote mapping, including Miro, Mural, and Figma, and how to get started with them.

Quotable Moments:

“Meetings are like vampires, sucking the life out of us. But mapping is the wooden stake we need to slay them.”
“Start visualising! You don’t need expensive tools. Just a few sticky notes and arrows can transform how your team collaborates.”
“When people can see what’s in your head, they can point out what’s wrong. That’s when real collaboration happens.”

Links and Resources:

Connect with Christoph on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/csteinlehner/
Want to learn more about visual mapping and how it can help your team? Reach out to Christoph on LinkedIn for his free guide to the Mapper Method.
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Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.
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Ben Maynard

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Product Agility Podcast

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Chapters

1. Vampire Meetings Are Sucking the Life Out of Your Day (With Christoph Steinlehner) (00:00:00)

2. Visualising Ideas for Collaboration (00:17:21)

3. The Power of Visuals in Communication (00:25:59)

4. Mapping Mistakes: Arrogance and Collaboration (00:36:38)

270 episodes

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