At Dropbox, my greater 100-person team held a weekly meeting that required attendance: 1pm on Fridays, we had a Team Meeting where leadership made announcement, took hard questions, engineers demoed, and we reviewed our progress towards quarterly or annual goals.

This meeting was fun, lighthearted, and a way to meet people in the greater organization that you didn’t work with, but it was hard to understand it’s exact purpose, and it didn’t pass a lot of the tests for whether it should be a meeting.

Now, it’s important to understand this 100-person team started as a 5-person start up, and the leadership kept this meeting as the team was acquired by Dropbox and as it scaled. Having run a 5-person startup team, it makes complete sense to me why they had this meeting, at least back in the day.

One of our two most important meetings was our Monday kick-off meeting, where I reviewed what people were working on and what their goals were for that week. We reiterated the quarterly goal and ensured all high-priority tasks were focused on that goal, whether it was launching our beta or raising money.

Our other most important meeting was our Friday demo day – similar to the Dropbox meeting. It was a way for me to review people’s work for that week, and see if they accomplished the goals they set for themselves. It was a way to maintain accountability, and show off excited pieces of work for the team. The meeting where we demoed initial designs for our app was groundbreaking: all of our work thus far had suddenly become very tactile. Everyone was so excited and inspired by that demo.

At some point, when this Friday meeting exceeds a certain number of people and the demos are small shifts in a product’s design and major announcements are sent out via email and the team has All-Hands meetings anyway…perhaps it should be laid to rest. Tiny teams though can truly benefit from this Friday meeting format.