A Fellow’s Workflow: Meetings, Streams, and Action Items

Hi, I’m Mikaela – one of the Customer Success Fellows here at Fellow. You might recognize my name from the in-app chat or product announcements. I also write articles for our blog (like the Management Heroes series), keep our help center updated, and pass on customer feedback and feature requests back to the team. 

Everyday is a bit of a mixed bag of things that I need to get done. 

While other people on the team can use their calendar to block off and schedule deep work time, I can’t plan my day down to the minute or hour because I don’t really know what the day is going to hold. Sometimes, my entire day is overwhelmed by support. Other days are super slow and I have time to write (like today). 

Because of the inconsistency and level of disruption, I’ve really come to appreciate using Fellow to keep everything in one place. These are some of the ways that I use Fellow to stay productive and organized: 

• Private Streams
• Collaboration Between Teams
• Editorial Calendar
• Weekly Meetings
• What to Focus On
• Snack Preferences

1 Private Streams

I’m a bit scatter-brained at times and can’t always maintain a train of thought or remember the idea that I came up with the day before.

So to help my workflow, I use a lot of Private Streams. There are the basics like a Daily Planner and an Ongoing Projects stream, but I also have Streams from Brainstorms, ideas for help center content, and notes on how processes are going (like Support Duty).

For streams like Ongoing Projects, I write down my ideas and notes as well as any action items that I need to complete. And if there is another project, I create a new note in the same stream. 

I’ve colour-coded my streams for aesthetics. I might alphabetize them as well, but that is for another day.

2 Collaboration Between Teams

Like a lot of Customer Success teams, we spend a lot of time working cross-functionally with other teams. But there may not be meetings set up for this in our calendars. 

We use shared streams as a shared working doc of sorts. 

This might be for a specific project (like a Webinar) or just for shared information and goal setting. We add and assign action items, document processes, and notes. 

3 Editorial Calendar

As I previously mentioned, I write content for the Fellow Blog. The Marketing team and I use Fellow to keep an editorial calendar for upcoming content and when it is to be published. What is great about this is that each future blog post is given a due date. 

And I can see this due date in my main action item section, which sometimes motivates me to get something done a little quicker! There is also a lot of satisfaction that comes from checking off a complete blog post after all that hard work. 

4 Weekly Meetings

The Customer Success team at Fellow has a weekly team meeting. We’ve created a custom template with the headers being:

• Talking Points
• Health of Current Accounts
• Recurring Bugs/Issues
• Current Projects/Initiatives
• For Next Week

This hasn’t always been the template – we’ve edited a few times. If we feel like something is missing or is unnecessary, we edit the template and try another variation. And if that didn’t work, we keep on iterating.  

It’s an opportunity to communicate what is going on in the department and discuss how we can further support our customers. Now that we are remote, it’s especially important to communicate the projects that we are working on and any challenges that we are experiencing. It’s easy to think that you have to solve everything yourself while working alone in a home-office, but that’s not always the case. 

And there is an option to open the video call directly from the Fellow note. To do this, I hover over the meeting card in the meeting section and click on the ‘i’ icon. It’s a lot easier than navigating to my calendar. 

5 What to Focus On

Sometimes, there are transition moments in the day where I’m not sure what to do next. That’s when the “What to focus on” section on the homepage and the Action Items page are great resources. I can quickly see what I need to do and prioritize outstanding tasks. 

These are not my actual action items, but instead action items in my test account/alternate reality. (You might notice some Buffy the Vampire Slayer references). 

6Bonus! Snack Preferences

While we were all in the office, we used to have some snacks. And I was curious to hear what snacks people liked and what they didn’t. I had noticed that some people were drawn to the healthy options, while I have a bit of a sweet tooth. 

So, I decided to send out a feedback request for definitive results. I created a form in Fellow using the “Ask about something else” option and requested feedback from the team. 

In the end, the final form was a mix of multiple choice and long answers. Curious about the results? Unfortunately they are top secret!

Those are some things I use Fellow for on a day to day basis.

If you’re interested in learning more, I wrote an article describing 6 ideas to optimize your workflow using Fellow’s Private Streams!