How to Hold One-on-One Meetings For Software Development Team

One-on-one meetings are a great way to build relationships with your engineering team, boost team morale, and understand their thoughts, accomplishments, and challenges. However, many engineering managers still struggle with how to prepare for one-on-one meetings with their teams.

In this blog post, we will provide you with tips on how to effectively hold one-on-one meetings and hack one-on-ones with the help of Ace AI.

What is one-on-one meeting?

In tech companies, one-on-one meetings are usually held between an engineering manager and developers. The main objective of one-on-one meetings is to update developers on the global situation of the project, identify blockers, prioritize tasks, and help engineers develop professionally.

Regular one-on-one meetings between team members and their managers or mentors offer a range of benefits that are critical for ensuring the success of the team and the project.

Here is the list of benefits of one-on-one meetings for an engineering team:

• Opportunity for personalized feedback and mentoring
• Increased productivity and efficiency
• Improved communication and collaboration
• Retention and employee satisfaction

Read: One-on-one Meetings in Software Development Teams: Amazing Benefits

How to prepare for one-on-one meeting?

In a software development team, one-on-one meetings are an essential part of ensuring that each team member is performing at their best and that the project is progressing as planned.

In order to hold an effective one-on-one meeting with developers, a manager should have an agenda. Depending on the type of meeting, a manager can have different topics for discussion during a one-on-one.

There are several types of one-on-one meetings:.

Performance one-on-one meetings

Performance one-on-one meetings are held between a manager and a team member to discuss their individual performance. These meetings are usually scheduled quarterly or bi-annually and are designed to evaluate the employee's progress towards their goals, provide feedback, and identify areas for improvement.

Ace AI identifies improved performance based on Git data and recommends to hold a one-on-one meeting with a personalized agenda. See how it works in practice:

Career development one-on-one meetings

Career development one-on-one meetings are designed to help employees identify and work towards their long-term career goals. These meetings focus on identifying the employee's strengths and interests and creating a plan for how to develop those skills and advance their career.

Ace AI automatically identifies skill gaps of developers after you connect Git and creates a development goal that you can discuss with an employee during a one-on-one on career development:

Mentorship one-on-one meetings

Mentorship one-on-one meetings are designed to help employees improve specific skills or overcome specific challenges. These meetings are often more frequent than performance or career development meetings and focus on providing feedback, identifying areas for improvement, and creating a plan to address those areas.

Save time on writing feedback with Ace AI. It generates automatic feedback for specific skills based on working activity in Git which you can use during mentorship one-on-one with a developer:

Check-in one-on-one meetings

Check-in one-on-one meetings are usually held weekly or bi-weekly and are designed to keep managers and team members up-to-date on each other's work. These meetings are more informal and focus on discussing any challenges or roadblocks that the employee is facing and identifying ways to overcome them.

Ace AI catches the potential problems in developer productivity based on their work in Git, Jira, an other tools and recommends holding a one-on-one:

Feedback one-on-one meetings

Feedback one-on-one meetings are designed to provide regular feedback on the employee's performance, usually on a monthly or quarterly basis. These meetings are focused on providing constructive criticism and identifying areas for improvement, rather than evaluating performance or career development.

Ace AI writes different types of feedback for every team member based on their activity in Git, Jira, Slack, and other tools to save time.

Key ideas

• One-on-one meetings offer a range of benefits that are critical for ensuring the success of the team and the project, including personalized feedback and mentoring, increased productivity and efficiency, improved communication and collaboration, and retention and employee satisfaction.
• There are several types of one-on-one meetings in a software development team, including performance, career development, mentorship, check-in, and feedback one-on-one meetings.
• Ace AI can help engineering managers prepare for one-on-one meetings with its automatic agenda, which identifies improved performance based on Git data, automatically generates feedback for specific skills, identifies skill gaps of developers, and catches potential problems in developer productivity.