A 200-word crib sheet before every one-on-one
A companion reads two weeks of your report’s tickets, their pull requests, anything they published and your last three sets of notes, then hands you three specific things to talk about with your own unkept commitments at the top.
Ten minutes before the meeting you get an agenda: OPEN THREADS from previous notes, two or three artifacts from their week, and questions rather than diagnoses about anything that looks stuck.
A manager with six reports runs this meeting six times a week and reads none of it in advance. A companion reads all of it every time. Linear, Jira, GitHub, Notion and Lattice are native integrations, so the artifact read is direct.
What is the exact prompt?
Ten minutes before the meeting, or scheduled an hour ahead of each recurring slot:
- "Prep my 1:1 with [name]. Read: their Linear issues that changed in the last two weeks (completed, stuck, reassigned); their GitHub PRs: merged, and especially anything open with long review back-and-forth; any doc or RFC they published in Notion; and my 1:1 notes doc with them, and pull every item we marked as open or 'next time' in the last three meetings."
- "Build the agenda: (1) OPEN THREADS from previous notes: anything I said I would do and haven't, listed first and bluntly. (2) THEIR WEEK: two or three notable artifacts: something finished worth acknowledging specifically, and anything that looks stuck or bounced between states. (3) QUESTIONS, not conclusions: for anything that looks stuck, phrase it as a question about obstacles, never a diagnosis ('the payments PR has been in review two weeks, worth asking what's blocking it', not 'they are slow on reviews')."
- "Rules: no productivity scoring, no comparison to anyone else, no tone analysis. Artifacts only: never summarize their private messages even where a tool would let you. Keep it under 200 words; it is a crib sheet, not a report."
Open threads go first
A report who watches their manager reopen last month's "I'll talk to the platform team about that", unprompted, learns the meeting has memory, and starts raising real things.
The blunt phrasing ("anything I said I would do and haven't") points the accountability up, which is also what keeps the document from reading as surveillance. It needs nothing but notes from last time, and a running Notion or Lattice doc is enough.
Where is the line between prep and surveillance?
The rules section draws it.
Reading public tickets, PRs and shipped docs is preparation. Scoring output, comparing reports, or summarizing private channels is monitoring. "Questions, not conclusions" applies the same boundary to interpretation: the artifacts show a PR stuck in review, and whether that is a rabbit hole, a review bottleneck or a struggling teammate is what the meeting exists to find out.
Be open about the practice. "I skim your tickets and PRs before our 1:1s so we don't spend the meeting on status" builds trust, and it frees the meeting for the things artifacts never contain: growth, friction, ambition.
What changes after a quarter of these
The meetings stop being status and start being different from each other, because each agenda comes from that person's actual week. The acknowledgment line lands harder than managers expect: "the migration RFC was genuinely clear" proves the work was seen.
The PR bouncing in review and the ticket reassigned twice get asked about while they are still one conversation. And because the agenda pulls open threads forward, the notes doc becomes a real running record, which makes the morning-briefing version of your own week easier to assemble.
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