I want to share a very useful meeting scheduling tool with you today. It is called MeetingBird and I absolutely love it.
This startup was acquired by the Front company in 2018 and it is now called MeetingBird by Front.
We all know that good notes are essential for productive meetings, and organizing notes by the meeting they’re related to makes much more sense than letting them pile up in a disorganized folder. That was a premise for creating this great app and I am excited to share its unique features with you.
This post will discuss how product managers and their teams streamline their meetings with Meetingbird and how you can make the most of this powerful scheduling tool.
How to Insert Meeting Availability into your Email
Customizable scheduling links are one of Meetingbird’s most powerful features. Simply by dragging on your calendar, you can mark available meeting times and generate a scheduling link.
And now the Custom Meet Links are getting even more powerful since you can now insert available times directly into an email.
How does it work:
Install the Meetingbird Chrome Extension (go to chrome://extensions/ and find and then install the “Meetingbird” extension).
With the extension installed, you will see a new Meetingbird icon when you compose an email in your Gmail inbox.
Click the Meetingbird icon to open a dropdown menu. From here, you can choose to insert available times from a scheduling link you’ve already created or pick new meeting times to insert.
After you choose your available times, Meetingbird will generate a scheduling block and insert it into your email.
Note: All users can customize the colors of their scheduling block, while Meetingbird Pro users can also insert their own logo.
When someone receives your email, they’ll be able to pick a time to meet with a single click.
It is a wonderful experience that is effortless for you and the person you’re trying to meet with.
How to prevent no-shows with the Meeting Reminder Emails
We’ve all scheduled a meeting with someone only to have it canceled or rescheduled at the very last moment.
That’s why I was so excited to find Meetingbirds that has Meeting Reminder Emails. These reminders allow you to set up and schedule a friendly reminder email that will be sent to all attendees a few hours or days before the meeting’s start time.
Now, let’s discuss how to use the Meeting Reminder Emails in various situations:
How to Use Email Reminders in Google Calendar
Install the Meetingbird Chrome extension (go to chrome://extensions/ and find and install the “Meetingbird” extension).
When viewing the details of an event in Google Calendar, you’ll see a new section to set up reminder emails. Simply click the checkbox to schedule the reminder email:
How to Use Reminder Emails for your personal Meet Link
To enable Reminder Emails for your personal Meet link, go to the “Other Settings” tab of your Meet preferences.
There, you’ll see an option to enable email reminders and to add a custom logo to the reminder emails.
How to Use Reminder Emails for Custom Meet Links
Create a new custom Meet Link by clicking “Share Availability” in Meetingbird or from the Chrome Extension
Use the Reminder Email dropdown menu to set a reminder
Once you enable a reminder email for a meeting, Meetingbird will ensure that it’s sent at the perfect time. Even if the meeting is rescheduled to a later date, Meetingbird will automatically adjust to the new meeting start time. Any replies to a reminder email (for example, an attendee letting you know they can no longer make the meeting), will be sent to your email inbox.
Meetingbird Projects
Meetingbird Projects is another super-useful feature for a team of professionals that helps to promote transparency and communication across your team.
What makes Meetingbird Projects so great, you may ask. Meetingbird Projects organize notes from related meetings into a single organized chronological list.
I am excited to show you how to make the most of the Meetingbird Projects’ unique features.
First of all, we all create notes for each meeting we attend, but that isolates the information discussed in each meeting. That causes recurring meetings to waste so much time recapping things that were previously discussed. With this feature, it’s easy to see what was discussed in previous meetings, so the next meetings naturally build on the progress from the previous ones.
Secondly, Projects allows everyone to stay on the same page
Meetings are where important topics are discussed and significant decisions are made. Unfortunately, information discussed in a meeting doesn’t usually spread beyond the actual attendees of the meeting. MB Projects helps promote information sharing across all of your team by making meeting notes easily accessible to all team members and notifying them about important meetings that they might have missed.
If you’re a product manager, you might have projects like “Content Strategy meetings”, “iOS app meetings”, etc. Take a look at the recurring or related meetings on your calendar to figure out the projects that you should create.
When you create a new project, you’ll be able to make team members followers of that project. As followers of the project, they’ll get notified about any activity within this project.
For example, if you’re creating a project called “Monthly marketing strategy meetings”, you might want to add members of the marketing and SEO teams as followers of the project. Adding followers is a great way to keep everyone on the same page on important meetings.
By default, newly created projects are shared with your entire team on Meetingbird. But what if some projects need to stay private and only for a number of members? Luckily, Meetingbird has a “Followers Only” privacy mode that will make a project visible only to the followers (it is a subset of members you have chosen).
Summary
Meetingbird with its three core features (a calendar with built-in collaborative notes, Projects, and Meet) provide powerful tools to streamline a product manager’s meetings.
