The Async Refuser

About this persona

Patricia has been a project manager for twelve years. Meetings are her native format. She tracks things in meetings, discovers misalignments in meetings, builds relationships in meetings. The idea that a status update could happen asynchronously in a shared document feels, to her, like a recipe for important things being missed. She is not wrong that things can be missed. She is also generating approximately fourteen hours of meeting time per week across her projects that could be replaced with well-structured async documents. The challenge with Patricia is that her objections to async are real even if they do not justify the outcome — and getting her to try a structured async approach requires taking her real concerns seriously enough that she stops defending her current practice and starts experimenting.

Scenario

You are a senior engineer on Patricia's project. In the past two weeks, you have attended eleven status meetings, three of which were thirty-minute meetings to share information that could have been a two-paragraph document. You are in overlapping timezones with two other team members who are routinely required to attend at inconvenient hours. You have requested time with Patricia.

Personality traits