Product Review: Fellow
Fellow is meeting management software on a mission to make meetings more productive. As a PM, I’m usually in control of scheduling and facilitating the myriad of meetings that populate my calendar. When I’m not the meeting owner, however, sometimes I want to tear my hair out. Since I’m kind of a professional “meeter”—is that a word?—I have high standards for when you should have a meeting in the first place and how to run meetings effectively. I love Fellow’s mission to disseminate this knowledge to your colleagues by making it easy to create meeting agendas in a collaborative manner, record decisions, and track action items. Yay for making good meeting hyigene a group exercise—and for making it habit forming!
Meeting Agendas
When you first log into Fellow, you have the option to sync with your existing calendar application. Doing so summons a list of upcoming appointments.
Clicking on one of the appointments reveals the details of that meeting and allows you to choose from a series of meeting templates to help you prepare for the meeting and get the most out of your time together. I navigated to the section on 1:1 meeting templates and saw a plethora of options catered to this meeting type alone. The suite of 1:1 meeting templates included options for a full check-in, a quick check-in for when you’re pressed for time, a remote check-in, a performance review, an exit interview, and many more. If none of the templates meets your needs, you can build your own.
When you select one of the meeting template options, Fellow presents a list of sections with room for you to enter talking points or agenda items. I navigated away from the 1:1 meeting options and selected the project kickoff template. The kickoff template included sections for meeting background, purpose, scope, timeline, and roles (among other sections.) The templates are customizable, so you can add content if you feel that the template is lacking. You can then choose to apply any changes you make that are specific to this meeting to the global template. If you do so, future kickoff meeting templates will include these extra sections.
Other cool meeting agenda features included:
You can @mention people to request that they populate talking points or agenda items ahead of the meeting. You can also @mention people to assign them action items following the meeting.
The right panel includes a section for you to make private notes that are only visible to you. This is incredibly useful to accommodate shorthand notes that you can then translate for public consumption at client meetings or to give constructive feedback in 1:1 meetings.
You can invite up to 5 guests outside of your domain to join Fellow. Again, this is super useful for collaborating with clients. Access issues are often a roadblock for many a product that I’d like to use.
Perhaps my favorite feature is the ability to scroll to the bottom of the feed of recurring meetings to see the details (notes, talking points, action items) of every prior meeting instance. YES. Why doesn’t this exist everywhere?? I can’t tell you how many times I wish I had access to notes from a previous meeting all in one place, directly from my calendar, without having to delve back into notekeeping software to find them. This is a game changer.
Meeting Notes and Action Items
In addition to meeting agendas, Fellow lets you keep meeting notes and record action items. In fact, there’s an action items tab associated with every meeting that summarizes assignments, assignees, and due dates in a single view. You can sort the action items view by due date or by assignee. If action items weren’t completed or talking points weren’t addressed from the prior meeting, you can choose to carry them over to the agenda for the next meeting in the series. You can also use the action items tab on the left navigation panel to schedule your day based on these assigned action items.
Fellow offers functionality outside of specific meetings through its private and shared streams options. For example, you may wish to construct a template based on a specific process your organization should follow, like an onboarding process. If you develop an onboarding guide for your new hire, you can make that guide a shared stream so that it is accessible to others within your organization.
Using Fellow
Another thing I love about Fellow is its accessibility. Running a meeting well looks easy; if you’re doing it right, meeting attendees shouldn’t see the effort behind it. Fellow takes its project management responsibilities seriously—its lightweight design prevents it from becoming just another application in your technology stack. It also integrates with Slack, Jira, and Zapier (among others) and, if for some reason your organization doesn’t use any of those products, you can always send the agendas, meeting notes, and/or action items to meeting attendees via email.
Lastly, the pricing is reasonable. IMO, $5/month per user seems like a small price to pay for the positive ripple effects that this product will create throughout your organization (if the appetite for change is there, of course, and leadership reinforces it.)
I get really excited about products like Fellow that have the power not only to make project managers’ lives more fun but also to coach others in the organization to adopt practices that free up time and strengthen community connections to foster innovation. Kudos to the team for their efforts to improve the future of work!
