Hello, I’m Shay from Lead Honestly! The past few months we’ve been working on expanding the product at Lead Honestly and we couldn’t be more excited to share the 1-on-1 Meeting Assistant today! We designed and built the 1-on-1 Meeting Assistant based on how we’ve lead and managed our own teams for years. The way it works is simple enough: add your employees and we’ll send them curated questions, collect their responses, and get the conversation started for your next 1-on-1 meeting. As a manager you’ll continue to learn new insights about your employees without interruption as the questions are new each meeting and the workflows are all automated. As an employee you'll the ability to easily share thoughts and feelings with your manager that you may not have felt comfortable doing before without the prompt of a question. In all, we’re pretty excited about the product! Please let us know what you think by leaving a comment, we’d love to hear from you. Shay

One of the most challenging parts of 1:1s is they can often be unstructured with no real goal, for either a manager or an individual contributor. I love that Lead Honestly tracks conversations over time. My only gripe is that the automated messages may feel less personal; 1:1 meetings are meant to be extremely personal, and having an email come from "Lead Honestly" feels less genuine than a manager asking questions in a personal email.. As a result, the questions + prompts themselves can yield more generic answers.

I'm early adopter and huge fan! Congrats Shay and Darby!

I've had the pleasure of watching Shay and Darby build Lead Honestly firsthand and am happy to see them release the latest iteration with their 1-on-1 Meeting Assistant. These are proven leaders and the product works!

One of the exciting parts of the 1-on-1 Meeting Assistant for me is the integration with Slack. Many teams spend their day in Slack, so having Lead Honestly available right there makes it very easy to create new interactions between managers and employees, and increase engagement. This is a relatively new feature for us, but we've seen very encouraging feedback and we will be expanding the capabilities significantly in the coming months.

@shayhowe @darbyfrey1 Thanks for building a rock-solid product. Our managers have been diving into meaningful and insightful conversations that have produced a ton of unexpected benefits. This is a game changer. People always talk about wanting an amazing culture, but rarely do they put the effort into having the hard & deep conversations to get there. Congrats. And - seriously - thanks.

We've been using LeadHonestly for the better part of this year after moving from another service. We're a small tight-knit team of 10-ish people. That familiarity led to assumptions and the same two people getting together are going to quickly run out of new ideas of things to talk about.

LeadHonestly provides us the opportunity to explore those unspoken assumptions and makes for better relationships all around.

Pros:

Thoughtful questions that produce insightful conversation in our 1-on-1s. This is worth the price of admission for myself and my team.

Cons:

Nothing yet.

I use Lead Honestly at Threadless and I love it. It's a tool I have come to rely on when communicating with my team and truly understanding their needs.

Really awesome product! Great job Shay

My manager utilized this tool for over a dozen of our 1x1's, each of which have led to juicy discussions with no time wasted. Our 30 min 1x1's have all been straight to the point to really get the core of where I'm at in my role. Answering LeadHonestly's questions has been a very effective method to vocalize my thoughts to my manager and as a result strengthened our relationship.

Pros:

Fantastic questions that enabled a deeper relationship with my manager.

Cons:

None yet.

Love this idea. Would prefer the emails came from my address. Also, it would be better to be able to see the questions or even a preview of the email *before* being asked to put your team members’ details in. I was ready as soon as I’d seen the questions!

Congrats Shay & Darby! Definitely excited to use the Slack integration

I've used Lead Honestly to drive 1:1 meetings with my team for several months. The questions enable me to have rich conversations with my direct reports, harvesting employee engagement and development. By using Lead Honestly I have been able to identify areas of improvement for the business, and guide my team members to success.

Pros:

Thought-provoking questions curated for 1:1 meetings with your direct reports. Saves time and drives meaningful conversation.

Cons:

None

Love this idea! Excited to see what Darby and Shay have created.

Focused, high quality product. Highly recommended.

I really like purpose-specific products like this, but have to admit that integrating purpose-specific products into my team workflow is a real challenge. Yet-another-SaaS-app syndrome. Companies like to say it’s a low friction exercise but that just isn’t true, everything you do in a team has a price to pay in the form of time expended managing change. The Slack integration that is available for the product is welcome, but I want it to go beyond reminders in Slack to ‘go to your dashboard”. This is actually relevant for me becuase I use Slack for my 1:1 meetings. I have 34 people on my team, 7 direct reports that I do weekly 1:1s with. I have a private 1:1 channel in slack for each direct report and through the week we drop discussion items and questions into the channel, which then becomes the agenda for my 1:1 call/meeting. A leadhonestly bot that hosts the Q&A inside a private Slack channel, and then provides a query interface for stats would mean I could use your app entirely through Slack. The questions I reviewed in the product marketing material were interesting, but I have to question the utility of asking open-ended questions. I prefer specific and contextual questions over “what keeps you engaged?”. The reason is simple, open-ended questions produce open-ended answers. “What is the last professional development activity you did for yourself?” will provide a more interesting answer than “what are your professional development goals?”. Another example is “what is your largest frustration?”; a question that is looking for a scratch to whatever itch is most recent. Take a specific example of friction you, as a manager, observed and talk about that specific example. How do you curate and test the questions you are providing through the app?

guys, how this is working at PH? You were just features few hours ago, but you have comments already 2 days old? I am just curious

If you feel you lack personal communication with your team this is something worth a shot. I really like that this app has a built-in question templates suggesting you how you proceed with the one-on-one meetings with your employees. Might be really helpful if looking for ways to boost motivation in your team.

A really useful app if looking for ways to boost motivation and personal communication within your team.

Pros:

question suggestions, easy team adding

Cons:

quite expensive for a basic functionality it offers