What it does

Generates a one-page pre-meeting brief so you walk in knowing what you want to walk out with. Gathers context, identifies decisions needed, and drafts your agenda before the meeting starts.

The pattern

Gather metadata. Who is attending? What is on the agenda? What meetings preceded this one? Pull calendar data, recent documents, and related threads.

Review recent context. For each agenda item, find the most recent decisions, open questions, and status updates. If the meeting is about a product launch, pull the latest metrics. If it is a project review, pull the current task status. The goal is to have the facts ready so the meeting does not waste time establishing shared context.

Draft the brief (5 sections):

1. Meeting objective. One sentence. What is the purpose? "Decide whether to ship feature X this week" not "discuss feature X."

2. Key decisions needed. List the specific decisions that should be made in this meeting. If no decisions are needed, question whether the meeting should happen at all.

3. Context per attendee. What does each person need to know that they might not? If the engineering lead has not seen the latest customer feedback, summarize it. If the product manager has not seen the performance data, include the numbers.

4. Open questions. What is unresolved? What information is missing? These become explicit agenda items rather than surprises mid-meeting.

5. Proposed follow-ups. What will likely need to happen after the meeting? Draft the follow-up actions in advance. This makes it easy to confirm them at the end of the meeting rather than reconstructing them from memory afterward.

The brief is for you, not for distribution. It is your preparation tool. You may share parts of it, but its primary purpose is to make you the most prepared person in the room.

Key decisions

Objective as a decision, not a topic. "Discuss roadmap" is a topic. "Decide Q2 priorities and assign owners" is an objective. Framing the meeting around decisions makes it productive.

Pre-draft follow-ups. Most meetings end with vague "let's follow up on that." Pre-drafting specific follow-up actions makes it trivial to close the meeting with clear next steps.

Keep it to one page. If the brief is longer than one page, it contains too much detail. Summarize aggressively. Link to source documents for anyone who wants to go deeper.

When to use it

Before any meeting where decisions will be made, where multiple stakeholders have different context levels, or where you need to drive the conversation toward specific outcomes. Skip it for informal check-ins and social meetings.