The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a swift increase in remote work, with 26% of US employees now operating from home. This shift has led to an uptick in virtual meetings via Zoom and similar platforms. Although convenient, these digital gatherings can prove lacking in effectiveness, with participants exhibiting decreased attention, a blending of content, and dreary note-taking.

Fortunately, AI has made remarkable progress and offers a solution to enhance remote meetings. With the aid of AI, preparation for meetings can be effortless, engagement of participants consistent, and follow-up actions more impactful. By investing minimal effort, product managers and marketers can extract greater value from the central form of their work, leading their teams to adopt similar, productive practices.

Pre-Meeting

Successful meetings are a hallmark of top-notch meeting leaders, and preparation is a crucial factor in this regard. A modicum of forethought prior to a call sends a clear signal to attendees that their participation is valued, and elicits a comparable level of engagement. This in turn, leads to more fruitful discussions and decisions. Thanks to AI, the preparation stage has become easier than ever, enabling you to set the stage for success even before logging in to the call.

Drafting Invites

One of the most important factors that determines a meeting’s effectiveness is the attendee list. If the right contributors and decision-makers don’t attend, it’s unlikely to produce results that move projects forward. Using ChatGPT, we can easily draft invites that will indicate useful and well run meetings that are worth attending.

[Context: You are an experienced product manager at a technology company.]

Write a meeting invite to review a product roadmap, and make final decisions on what to prioritize for the next quarter. Use a professional writing style

You can enhance this prompt by providing more specific context to ChatGPT. However, I have found it more useful to give general context in the initial prompt, then briefly edit the content to include more specifics. It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole trying to get ChatGPT to write content through prompts rather than just directly editing yourself.

There have been some discussions that have popped up online about using ChatGPT to easily convert times in various time zones. While this can work, it’s not reliable enough for me to recommend here.

Creating Presentations

Crafting captivating presentations can be a laborious and time-consuming task, especially for PMs and PMMs who are constantly straddling individual contributions and management duties. The pressure is especially high when managing multiple projects or initiatives, often resulting in uninspiring, dull presentations or simply regurgitated blocks of text.

Fortunately, AI has arrived to revolutionize the scene. PMs and PMMs can now effortlessly create engaging presentations, even for minor gatherings, thanks to AI tools such as ChatGPT and Canva's cutting-edge AI features. Content generation has never been easier, enabling PMs and PMMs to elevate their presentations to new heights. This starts with a ChatGPT prompt.

[context: you are a product manager at a tech company. You need to create a presentation for other members of your product team.]

[Writing style: Short sentences with a slight amount of humor, use simple vocabulary]

Summarize the following text into an outline for a presentation. Organize the outline into three main headings and three subheadings for topics within the summary, include a brief sentence of detail under each heading and subheading.

{pasted text}

This will create an outline for a presentation. At this stage, take a moment to review the output and make modifications if needed. ChatGPT may struggle with creating a cohesive narrative if one doesn’t already exist in your pasted content. Now for the fun part, turning your outline into an actual presentation.

For this portion we’ll be using Canva. Canva is a popular Australian graphic design tool that has been making beautiful design more accessible for millions of people. They’ve worked extensively with OpenAI and Stable Diffusion on productizing GPT3 and image generation, and it’s resulted in some fantastic features being added to the Canva platform. Sign up for Canva, navigate to the Canva Docs feature, and paste in your content from ChatGPT. You can also use this opportunity to add in any other images, videos, or other design elements.

Once you have all your content in Canva Docs, click the “convert” button in the upper right corner. A modal will appear where you can select a presentation template. There aren’t a ton of templates available currently, but Canva is actively working on adding more, so be sure to check back later as well. If you don’t like the default styling, you can also change the style and font on the slides themselves. You may also add additional photos at this point, choosing from Canva’s library, uploading your own, or by using Canva’s AI image generation.

Make all the edits you need at this point, Canva’s presentation UI is surprisingly capable. Once you’re ready to move forward and export, press the share button. Here you can specify a number of different formats to share your deck as, including traditional presentation formats like .ppt.

And there we have it. An engaging presentation created in just minutes using AI tools.

Creating Agendas

An effective meeting must not only be engaging, but also yield the desired results within the allotted time. Agendas play a crucial role in driving discussions and communicating the significance of attendees' time. However, the process of creating agendas can be tedious. Thanks to ChatGPT, this task is now effortlessly manageable, making it a simple exercise to achieve your objectives.

To start, ask ChatGPT to create an agenda for a meeting based on your context.

[context: you are a product manager at a tech company who is leading a meeting about OKRs with your direct reports]

Create an agenda for a meeting with five product managers to go over their OKRs for the upcoming quarters. The product managers are named Bob, Jim, Jane, Frank, and Cathy. The meeting length is 60 minutes.

This should create a decent agenda, but we can make it better. ChatGPT tends to specify agenda item times as time allotted (ie: 6 minutes), which can be tough to track while conducting a meeting and easy to derail if one section is a bit off. Instead, we’ll ask ChatGPT to convert these time allotments to start times for each section.

Append the start time for each agenda item. The meeting should begin at 3:00PM PT.

There we have it, an easy agenda for our meeting that will be simple to follow and adhere to.

Mid Meeting

Preparation is only half the battle for PMs and PMMs in their role as meeting leaders. Effective leadership requires an investment of effort in both guiding discussions and recording proceedings. Without these, the quality of meetings deteriorates and the effectiveness of PMs and PMMs is diminished. Fortunately, recent advancements in AI have made this process effortless. We will explore how AI tools can automate note-taking and enhance multitasking during meetings with an established product and a new release from NVidia.

Taking Notes

Note taking in meetings is an incredibly useful investment of attention. It allows team members that weren’t able to attend the meeting to still benefit from the discussion, as well as creating a reference point for attendees. Unfortunately, it’s difficult take notes and engage in a meeting at the same time, much less lead it. Thankfully, advancements in transcription technology has created a generation of meeting note tools that have matured into excellent products. Some of these products include Otter, Fireflies, Colibri, MeetGeek, Noty, Gong, and more.

My personal favorite of these is Otter. Otter has a very mature product that offers a large variety of features, integrations, and pricing options. The UI is well thought out, and overall it’s easy to setup and use. There are a number of different ways to include Otter in meetings, including uploading meeting recordings to their platform for transcription, using their mobile app, integrations with popular video conferencing software like Zoom, or by including the Otter assistant on your calls. Once you’ve recorded a call, it’s stored in your call log where you can easily browse and search for specific keywords.

Eye Contact

Eye contact is a crucial, yet often overlooked aspect of participating in meetings. It conveys one's focus and establishes a level of engagement for others to follow, fostering a personal connection that is otherwise impossible in a digital format. Historically, achieving good eye contact required awkward camera placements or makeshift teleprompter setups. This is now a thing of the past with NVidia's release of NVidia Broadcast 1.4, which adjusts your eyes in real-time during your live video feed to simulate eye contact. This feature is an essential tool for professionals who need to operate slides, reference notes, and interact with others on the screen while maintaining eye contact. Integration with popular video conferencing software like Zoom, Google Meet, Slack, and MS Teams is simple, as the virtual camera can be easily selected as an option in the software.

Post-Meeting

Meeting Summary

One of the main points of many meetings is to ensure that everyone is on the same page regarding decisions and developments. This can be hard to maintain, as feelings and understandings at the end of a call can dissipate after the fifth call of the day, and even more by the end of the week. Taking notes can certainly help this, but a transcript from a one hour call can end up being quite unwieldy and unlikely to have anyone actually read through it. Thankfully, AI is here to save the day. Something you will no doubt, be shocked to read at this point in this post. Another complete unsurprise should be that the tool we’ll be using is ChatGPT. When combined with Otter or another meeting notes platform, we get an additional superpower for our meetings– summaries.

Simply copy + paste the meeting notes from Otter into ChatGPT and ask it to create a summary.

[context: you are a product manager at a tech company. You just concluded a meeting with Bob, John, Cathy, and Mike.]

[Writing style: Short sentences, use simple vocabulary]

Create a one paragraph summary of the following meeting notes:

{pasted meeting notes}

In conclusion, remote work has become a norm due to the COVID-19 pandemic and virtual meetings via Zoom and similar platforms have become the central form of work communication. Despite their convenience, they are often lacking in effectiveness. However, AI offers a solution to enhance remote meetings by making preparation effortless, engagement consistent, and follow-up actions more impactful. By embracing AI, PMs and PMMs can extract greater value from remote meetings, leading their teams to adopt similar, productive practices, and improving the prospects of the companies they work for.