Facilitate more efficient, effective, and inclusive meetings. Take notes, record actions, and easily share via email or Slack; increasing transparency. Check-in async to flag items for discussion before the meeting or add actions to your daily plan.
Hi Product Hunt and thank you @chudson for the support today (as well as over the last few years!)
I'm Dan, one of the Range founders. I'm a self-professed meeting nerd and in past roles have considered meetings a core competency for my teams. With this launch we’re bringing you tools to help you facilitate more efficient, engaging, and inclusive meetings — so you don’t have to become a meeting nerd like me.
If you’re familiar with Range, this might seem a strange feature announcement — aren’t we all about async check-ins? Yes... but let’s be real, “in-person” synchronous time is often necessary, and if the past year of working remotely through a pandemic has shown us anything, it’s also super important if you want to keep feeling like a team.
Investing in async comms, doesn’t mean meetings aren’t important. Moving things async as much as possible creates more equitable access to information, while allowing you to focus in-person time on the things that really matter.
Furthermore, meetings don’t have to be painful. They should be efficient moments of collaboration and coordination, not a tax and a chore. Enriching meetings with information from outside the meeting can make extra space for deep and meaningful discussion, and provides a foundation that can help you feel more connected to the people you work with.
With this launch we want to help everyone run better meetings. We want to help you find the right balance between async and real-time communication.
Here are some of my favorite parts of this release:
👋 Icebreakers - start every meeting on the right foot with hundreds of icebreaker questions. Use our attendee spinner to randomly go around the “room”.
⏰ Topic timer - keeping the meeting on track doesn’t have to be one person’s job - with a visual timer, everyone can see when you’re up on time for a topic.
🚩 Flag review - mark items from your async Check-ins for review in a meeting. This makes it easy for everyone to bring topics to the table and ensures you cover the important stuff first.
📝 Notes & action items - if you have a meeting and don’t take any notes or action, did it even happen?? Range makes it easy to capture notes and action for each topic and sends them to all attendees after the meeting.
🖥 Meets you where you are - use your existing video chat software. Either cast to the call or follow along in real-time. Works great with Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams.
👥 Sharable meeting agendas - if you’re struggling to figure out the best way to run a meeting, start with a template from our library or copy one from another team at your company.
Run your next meeting with Range, and let us know what you think!
We've been using this for our stand-ups for the past month or so and it's great. It doesn't radically change our meetings, but it helps with all the little things that make a meeting more powerful that are easy to miss when things get busy.
It does feel a bit awkward at first (I'd never used a tool like this one before), but once it clicked, it makes running a meeting so much easier.
Thanks @bigethan, awkwardness is often a necessary step on the path to group performance. If there's anything you think we could do to ease the transition let us know!
Excellent team and excellent tool to manage your meetings and your time better. It's a great tool to provide better structure and best practices to something distributed and hard to change in your culture.
Meetings are an essential part of teamwork, but all too often feel boring and a waste of time. The Range team has put a lot of thought into how to balance async and sync communication, and with their updated meeting tool you can now have meetings that are both engaging and productive.
I'm a new design on the team, and I had the rare opportunity to experience my first meetings with Range and then immediately begin designing some of these new features. I’ve really enjoyed using the tool, and hope you’ll find as much value in it as I have.
I can't imagine a better time than now for this product. Sounds like you are addressing a problem I've had my entire career, only to have gotten worse with the changes to how we work since COVID.
Topic Time, Flag for Review, and Action Items are exactly what I want!
When we first started Range, we considered two starting places for the product: standup-like check-ins and meetings. If you've been following along, you'll know that we focused on check-ins for a long time—building out a solid asynchronous foundation for teams to communicate.
But we always knew live communication mattered too. And today, we're finally sharing our meeting tool—if you have to hav a meeting, let's make it a good one!
For meetings nerds, team leads, and anyone who just hates wasting time, the Range meeting tool is here to help. Run more effective, efficient, and inclusive meetings today!
Why didn't I know about this tool last year!!! This would have helped with ALL of the exhausting/repetitive Zoom/Google Hangout meetings. Sounds awesome, looking forward to using it!
Our internal meetings at Range have a lot of thought put into how they are run, and we frequently finish them before their allotted times. I'm most excited to expose teams to the same processes that work so well for us through our meeting tool.
I have actually enjoyed every meeting run in Range. Here are my top three game-changers that I'm excited to share with more teams!
(1) Team spinner takes the awkwardness out of “Who’s going next?” Especially in a virtual setting—no more “I… oh no sorry you go first!”
(2) Check-in rounds are invaluable for me to pause and acknowledge how I’m showing up to a meeting, and listen to how others are too.
(3) Round-robin agenda building (powered by spinner) gives me confidence to take up space in a meeting.
So excited to get this out in the world so that more teams can have more engaging, more inclusive, and more EFFICIENT meetings! Time spent together is so valuable, so let's make it worthwhile.
I'll be hosting four Effective Meetings sessions next week (you don't need to be a Range user to attend): https://www.range.co/project/eff...
It's been so helpful using Range to run our meetings. It's an incredibly thoughtful tool and ally when you're facilitating (leading) a meeting, especially on those days where things might not quite be going right. It's helped me build a habit of running better meetings, and it's become second nature.
All async doesn't work. All day meetings doesn't work. Range has the most thoughtful and realistic approach to balancing the right level of check ins, work time, and meetings I've seen.
Replies
Range
#MatchingVoices Podcast - Season 1
Range
Quip
Range
The Twenty Minute VC
Range
pennypost
UX Tools
The Twenty Minute VC
Range
Unlock
Range
UX Tools
Metrist
Range
Range
Sales & Marketing Stack Wiki
UX Tools
Range
Range
Range
Lancepilot
Table Stakes Study by Carta