If you’ve been in enough meetings, you’ve probably seen how quickly meetings can go sideways. Sometimes even within the first thirty seconds.
Here’s a scene revolving around an incident:
Team A’s Engineer: “Your service is failing our checkout APIs and now customers are calling non-stop. It’s your service’s fault and you need to fix it now.”
Engineer from Team B blinks. “What? What’s going on? Why do you think it’s our fault?”
At that moment, everyone in the room can feel it. The air gets heavy. Tension rises quickly, and people start defending themselves. Before either of them knows it, voices are raised and accusations are thrown at each other. No one, especially Engineer A, knows how they even got here.
What’s missing here isn’t good intent. In fact, Engineer A probably had good intentions.
What’s missing is good framing. Framing and setting up this conversation clearly from the start would have turned this from a defensive debate into a productive discussion.
Why framing matters
There are many ways one could approach a topic. And unsurprisingly, each framing creates a different outcome.
Using the above example again, if our checkout system goes down, I could frame it as a combination of the following:
Your system is broken. I’m pretty sure it’s your system’s fault
Customers can’t check out. Could you help us take a look at it?
Our APIs that call your team’s service have been failing since 10:01 am this morning. We suspect it’s a root cause of customer concerns.
Framing is how you start a conversation. It’s how you approach a singular topic. Do you take a defensive tone? A collaborative one? Do you use facts, emotions, or stories to start the conversation?
The job of framing is important. Framing aligns everyone in the room on the problem at hand and how we got here, and what the discussion is trying to achieve.
When you take the time to frame discussions properly, it shows that you can think clearly. It shows that you want to help the group make decisions. It also saves everyone time and mental bandwidth.
How do you know you’ve framed a discussion correctly? From what I’ve experienced, framing is most appreciated post-discussion, when folks walk out of a meeting room realizing that they have a clear path forward. It’s the thought of: “Wow, that was a productive meeting.“
Five key tips to frame discussions
So how do you frame discussions? I’ll share five key tips:
Reset context and share the current situation
Be clear on your ask
Focus on one point
Do your homework
Position it as an opportunity
1. Reset context and share the current situation
Before diving into the problem, slow down and reset the context for everyone.
This is where you leverage all the facts of the situation. Start by explaining how we got here. This includes:
What has happened so far
Why are you involved
Why is the other party involved
For instance, you could say something like:
“Starting at 10:01 am yesterday, we’ve seen 80 customer reports of checkout failures. We looked into it and saw that the issue seems to come from the order service, which depends on your API.”
See the difference this time? You’re not pointing fingers anymore. You’re sharing your story of how and what you saw, and this builds much more understanding.
2. Be clear on your ask
Most discussions fail because people walk in without an ask. Remember, you should be thinking about what you want from the other party.
Are you just informing them? Are you asking them to help debug something? Are you requesting resources or ownership?
If they don’t know what you’re asking for, they’ll default to either (1) ignoring both you and the topic, or (2) defending themselves. And you definitely do not want the second situation to unfold. Once people start defending, you lose momentum.
In this case, it can be as simple as one of the following:
“We’d like your team’s help checking your logs for the same time window.”
“We want to align on who owns this alert.”
“We just want to keep you informed, no action needed.”
And of course, be mindful of their workload. If they’re in the middle of their busy season, you want to see if you can do some work ahead of time (e.g. you’ve already checked some of their logs but struggled to make sense of them.)
3. Focus on one point
If you try to discuss too many topics at one go, it’s hard to understand what’s going on. Focus on one point to help your audience narrow talking points.
This means that, instead of saying:
Sounds like your checkout APIs are both down. Last week we also saw elevated latency errors. And a month ago, when we switched from V1 to V2 of your checkout APIs, things were really shaky. Can we please fix them all?
Focus on what’s most important at hand:
Your checkout APIs seem not to be responding. Can we get some help?
This way, if there’s something urgent at hand, the other team has a better sense of what to fix.
If the issues are easy to group together, you can bring them up and label them as one topic. For instance, you could frame these issues as “Improving the Reliability of Team B’s Checkout APIs”.
4. Do your homework
In order to even frame discussions properly, you need to do your research. What are the gaps that your audience will have? How can you fill them in ahead of time?
Doing your homework helps the discussion move much faster.
For instance, if Team B doesn’t even know that you call their APIs, you might want to say:
Since 2022, we’ve been leveraging V2 of your APIs, and drive about 8% of your traffic.
You could even go one step further if you’ve already started your investigation:
I took a look at your service’s code, and I strongly suspect that in lines 319-321 where this expand() method is called, it’s running really slowly and crashes 80% of the time. This is backed up by what I see here in this data. Could I get your help verifying this?
The easier you make it for the other party to comprehend, the easier it will be to get their help. And the smoother your discussions will be.
5. Position as an opportunity
When the situation is messy, look for an opportunity to move forward together. You want to steer away from blame and toward collaboration.
You could say any of these:
“If we can add a test for this edge case, it’ll help both teams catch issues earlier.”
“Would you mind if I put out a PR to attempt to fix it together? We can focus on fixing it before doing a retrospective later.”
“Given that we drive 30% of your API’s traffic, we would love to work with you on how to set some SLIs.”
You want to treat issues as a shared problem. As you do so, you’ll see that the other party shifts to a more cooperative stance. You’ll be surprised, but even small phrasing changes like this make a huge difference.
Putting it all together
Let’s go back to that first scene. I’ll show you how we can apply these tips, and I’ll break each line up to reference the tip I used.
Before:
Team A’s Engineer: “Your service is failing our checkout APIs and now customers are calling non-stop. It’s your service’s fault, and you need to fix it now.”
After:
Team A’s Engineer: “Yesterday between 2-4pm, about 30% of our customers couldn’t check out.” [#1. Reset context and share the current situation, #3 Focus on one point.]
We traced it to timeouts from the order service, which calls your API. This is backed up by the data we see here. [#4. Do your homework]
Could you help confirm if there were any changes around that time? [#2. Be clear on your ask.]
And if we do fix this eventually, would love to add a joint regression test so this doesn’t happen again.” [#5. Position as an opportunity]
This is the same story, but presented with a completely different tone. And I’m pretty sure this time, Team B’s engineer is going to be collaborative. They’re also not going to walk out of a meeting thinking it was entirely unproductive – your sign that you framed it well.
TL;DR
At the end of the day, when you frame discussions clearly, you’re making it easier for people to think and act.
My five tips for framing correctly are:
Reset context and share what’s going on.
Be clear on what you’re asking for.
Keep it focused and simple.
Ask questions and involve people.
Frame it as a shared opportunity, not a blame.
What about you? What has / hasn’t worked well for you? How was your experience framing a discussion?
Fully agree on the fact that driving a discussion (more over when it's a difficult one) is an art, and your framework here definitely helps.
The right approach, optimized for each kind of person, it's key for having a useful and productive discussion and resolution.
Thanks for sharing!