Who is who
Meeting People Without a Reason
A new person can ask almost anybody for twenty minutes and be granted it, and the permission expires after about two months.
What the people on this page had to find out, and where from
Who signs off a schema change
you asked4Three people were asked before the right one
That two people on the team do not speak to each other
worked out11Worked out from who was never on the same call
two things you had to know · nobody told you any of them · the median arrived in week 11 · all two you went and got
Two facts about the shape of a team, neither of which appears on any chart and neither of which anybody would have said out loud.
Before adding another mandatory check-in, it helps to view its reporting features and see whether the real issue is unclear ownership, missing access, or an overloaded first-week schedule.
A useful independent source for this stage of work is Acas.
Eight twenty-minute conversations asked for in the first month, and what came of each
Introduced, and never needed · 2
- A product manager on another team — met in week 3
- Somebody in finance — met in week 3
Introduced, and needed · 4
- The person who showed you the system — met in before you started; needed in week 2
- A colleague two years in — met in week 1; needed in week 2. Noticed from who answered in the channel
- The designer on the adjacent product — met in week 2; needed in week 6
- Somebody who joined four months earlier — met in week 1; needed in week 4. You asked your manager whether there was a recent joiner
Needed, and never introduced · 2
- The person who runs the release — needed in week 2. Found by reading the channel history
- The engineer who built the import pipeline — needed in week 5. Found by reading the commit log
eight people · six you were introduced to · six you actually needed · two you had to find yourself
Eight conversations, six of which produced something and two of which did not. Twenty minutes each. The two that produced nothing cost forty minutes and could not have been predicted. One person's own first month.
For roughly eight weeks you can write to almost anybody in the organisation, say you have just joined, and ask for twenty minutes. Almost nobody refuses.
After that it requires a reason. This is the most valuable thing a new person has and it is the one almost nobody spends.
Why it works
Being new is a licence. Everybody understands what it is for, everybody has been new, and a request from a new joiner carries no agenda and therefore costs the recipient nothing to accept.
The same message in month five is a meeting request from a colleague, and it needs a purpose.
The message
I joined three weeks ago and I am working on the pricing side. Could I have twenty minutes some time in the next couple of weeks to understand what your team does? Nothing to prepare — I would just like to be less ignorant.
Four elements doing the work: when you joined, what you work on, a specific and small ask, and an explicit statement that no preparation is needed. The last one is what converts a maybe into a yes.
What to ask in the twenty minutes
Three questions, and the same three every time, because consistency is what lets you compare the answers.
What do you actually work on? Not their title. What occupies their week.
What do you wish people in my part of the organisation understood about it? This is the question that earns the meeting. It is flattering without being flattery, it invites something they have wanted to say, and it is frequently the most useful thing you will hear all month.
Who else should I talk to? Produces the next names. After five or six conversations the names start repeating, which is how you know you have covered the ground.
What to do afterwards
Five minutes of notes while it is fresh: what they work on, what they said they wished people understood, who they named, and anything you did not understand.
Then one line back to them the same day. Not a long thank-you — a sentence naming one thing that was useful.
Thanks — the bit about the pricing table being two systems rather than one explains something I had been confused by all week.
That takes fifteen seconds and it is the difference between a conversation and a contact.
The ones that come to nothing
Two of the eight in the panel above produced nothing at all.
That is the expected rate and it is not a failure of selection. You cannot tell in advance which conversations will matter, because you do not yet know what you will be working on in month three. Forty minutes is the entire cost of being wrong twice.
What you can do is bias towards people whose names you have seen in the history of the things you touch. Those have a much better hit rate than people picked off a chart.
How many
Five to eight in the first month is about right.
Fewer and you have not used the licence. Many more and you are spending your first month in meetings, which looks like activity and produces nothing you can point to — and the section on first work is about why having something to point to matters by week four.
What to do with the ones that go nowhere
Nothing, and the temptation to do something is worth resisting.
A pleasant twenty minutes with somebody whose work turns out to have no connection to yours is not a failure and does not need following up. Sending them articles, inviting them to things, or checking in a month later in order to maintain the contact is effort spent on a relationship that has no content.
What is worth doing is the thirty seconds of notes: what they do, in your words, and who they named. In month seven you will have a question about their area, and the note is what makes the connection available again.
That is the whole value of a conversation that went nowhere, and it is enough to justify having had it.
Asking for the first one
The hardest is the first, and it is easier if it is somebody adjacent rather than somebody senior.
A person on the team next to yours, whose name you have seen in the channel, is an easy first request and the practice makes the next four straightforward. Starting with a director three levels up makes the whole exercise feel like something that requires courage, which it does not.
Order them roughly: one adjacent colleague, then the two or three people whose names appear in the history of your own work, then anybody senior you are curious about. By the time you reach the last category you will have had the conversation four times and will know exactly what you are asking for.