A few weeks ago, one of my direct reports, who works on another product pod, asked me in a 1:1

Should I start coming to your pod’s meetings? I feel like I haven’t done department maintenance tasks in a few weeks, and I realized that this other person had just been doing them for the last few months.

Initially I was onboard with bringing my direct report to my pod’s backlog refinement meeting, but I took a pause to think. We already have a weekly department meeting and a weekly cross-pod meeting where we could align on priorities. Instead I asked,

what’s a smaller step that we could take?

My report suggested we bring it up in the weekly department meeting. There are ICs across multiple pods, we could even see if the people on the other pods share this feeling of losing context.

In the next week’s meeting, we discussed this feeling of lacking context. There was some agreement among team members that worked on the other pods. The first step we took was to adjust the format for how pods give updates in the department weekly meeting. Now, aside from just saying what we’re all working on, we also make sure we highlight any potential need for cross-pod support. This allows us to assign department-level responsibilities (like certain data maintenance tasks) to individuals on different pods, while keeping people in the loop.