Meeting scheduling within Parabol

[garethaledavies]

Tension

There's currently no way for a team lead to schedule meetings easily. It's a manual process of setting up a Parabol meeting on the spot during the team's meeting time, or setting up a meeting and pasting the link into the calendar invitation.

If a team runs retrospectives every 2 weeks, a team lead must go into the platform and set up another meeting manually. There's a lot of friction in that process.

Potential solution

I noticed that Google Meet has this nice little modal that pops up when you try to start a meeting. Could we design something similar for Parabol?

In an ideal world, when clicking "schedule for later" a team lead would be able to:

• Set a date when their meeting takes place
• Then set recurrence (as a first step)
• Be prompted to integrate Parabol with their GCal or Outlook calendar to set up a recurring meeting with meeting links there (as a second step)

Most people organise their meetings through their calendar. That's the cultural norm in our societies.

Parabol is a meeting tool, but we don't integrate with any calendar tools.

I believe setting recurrence for meetings and building them into peoples' calendars (where their meeting schedule lives) would make Parabol more user-friendly and more sticky.

It would certainly reduce a lot of the busy work of calendar management for Scrum Masters, which is a tangible benefit we can speak to.

Note: There is already a Gcal integration issue here: #3345

[jordanh]

A user 🔒 writes:

I want to run our retros completely async (due to time zones) and I'd like to set up the meeting in advance. For example, I want to configure the meeting to run monthly on the first week of the month. I'd like to be able to set the following in advance (and recurring if possible)

• Start date and time
• Due date/time for icebreakers and reflections
• Due date/time for reflections (perhaps use AI to do this for me, or allow the meeting host to do this step to save time?)
• Due date/time for voting
• Due date/time for discussion
  • For this, it might be nice to have Phase 1 and Phase 2.
  • Phase 1 is to write your initial thoughts, and phase 2 is to respond to what others have written.

[jordanh]

Now that recurrence is implemented for Stand-Ups, this should be a bit lower lift for us to implement if demand is high enough

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