Popcorn for Remote Meetings

Remote meetings are different from meeting in person and require different affordances. One of the hardest is making turn-taking natural and low-friction because you lose the shared spatial awareness that you get in person.

bucket of popcorn

I’ve found that popcorning can be effective in remote meetings. After one person speaks they then call on the next person to speak. It is that simple.

For smaller teams, it is relatively straightforward for participants to keep track of who should go next. This breaks down as meetings get larger, usually around 10 attendees, as every person now needs to keep track of if every other person has gone. For that reason, I recommend reserving popcorning for more intimate meetings like daily standups or sprint retrospectives.

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