Lean coffee

Once a month, we hold a «Lean Coffee» meeting.

The idea of the meeting is to get a fast paced feedback round, where there’s only time to discuss the “right stuff”, and focus on fast feedback. It works like this:

• 1. Writing

  Participants write topics on notes they want to discuss (approx. 5 minutes).
• 2. Promotion

  Participants promote each of their notes in 15-30 seconds.
• 3. Clustering

  All notes are clustered (same topics belong to the same cluster).
• 4. Voting

  Participants get 3 votes, to vote for specific topics, and show what’s important to them.
• 5. Ordering

  Notes, resp. topics are ordereed by the number of votes.
• 6. Discussion

  The top-voted note is discussed (approx. 5 minutes).
• 7. Decision

  A decision for the note will be made:

  👎🏻 Needs more time.

  ✊🏻 Not sure.

  👍🏻 All fine, move on.
• 8. Repeat

  Repeat the process from step 6 until the time has elapsed.

Hint

The meeting is scheduled via Calendar subscriptions.

Important

It’s important that the Discussion dictator is in charge of the meeting, which means:

• Control the conversation flow

• Document the topics, decisions & follow-ups (see Lean coffee follow-ups)

Lean coffee follow-ups

During the meeting, the discussion dictator documents every topic in a work item in the strategy repository, called Lean coffee {date} (e.g. Lean coffee 2026-10-22).

Every topic gets one of the following decisions:

• ✅ Done: Nothing to do, the topic is closed

• 🔁 Follow-up required: The topic needs a follow-up

A follow-up can be one, or both of the following:

• Story: A simple story, which the discussion dictator creates in GitLab after the meeting

• Strategy topic: A topic for the next strategy workshop, which is noted in its Strategy workshop {date} work item in the same repository, and ideally linked to the Lean coffee {date} work item