If there’s one thing that can really suck the soul out of an already miserable Monday, it’s an unproductive meeting. A bad meeting can leave clients and employees feeling drained and uninspired. In an industry as fast moving as mobile app development, every team or client meeting needs to motivate, encourage and inspire.

Our mobile app designers and developers have whittled their meeting strategy down to a tee. Not a moment longer than necessary is spent in those sometimes awe-inspiring, sometimes soul-destroying, glass windowed meeting rooms at Launchbase HQ. Our team is here to share our strategies, tips and tricks, to ensure your company can come out of their client meetings feeling fresh faced and ready to tackle the day (and, more importantly – still liking each other).

Here’s our team’s top tips for making the most of your meetings:

Know the purpose

We’re big believers in writing down the purpose of our meeting before we even go in. Each morning, our app developers and designers hold a ‘scrum’, where we take it in turns to go through what we did the day before, and what we are planning to work on that day. The purpose is to make sure everyone is on the same page and we all know what everyone else is working on.

When it comes to client meetings, we will always clarify the purpose of the meeting beforehand. This ensures that no stone is left unturned and that all necessary questions can be asked. It also means we don’t go off track and start arguing about which overpriced London chain does the best Christmas sandwich (FYI, it’s Pret).

Be visual

Working in a creative industry means we need to do everything we can to make sure our team members come into work each day ready to design some beautiful products. We love using the walls and windows to add a little extra creativity to our meetings.

If it’s a branding meeting with a client, our team will spend some time beforehand preparing visuals to stick up on the wall. These may be pictures of various cars or celebrities which can be used to determine target user base, colourful mind maps or competitor logos and colour schemes. We love getting creative and it ensures our meetings are a bit more exciting than just sitting and talking after (or occasionally over) each other.

If all else fails, sweets

There’s nothing like some unidentifiable E-numbers to get our creative juices flowing. We recommend this for afternoon meetings only, that way your team will be safe at home with a cup of tea when the dreaded sugar comedown begins.

When we know our meetings are long ones, we make sure we have a supply of sweets or chocolate to give us all an extra boost. If the team members actually want to be there, you will get a lot more out of them, and if the only way to manage that is through bribery then so be it!

For meetings with clients we also provide snacks. Branding, marketing and tech talk can be exhausting so allow your clients to ingest their weekly sugar allowance in one sitting.