Why I built MeetFika

I’ve spent about fifteen years in people development, most of it at a large academic medical center where the teams are big and the work leaves little room for error. I’ve managed people and projects, run onboarding, and coached people both through rough patches and through promotions. A handful of them went on to become managers themselves. Along the way I built the programs, processes, and tools to make that work repeatable, including the career ladder and promotion path my department still uses. Today I lead a team of around twenty, with a hand in the growth of about twenty more.

Strip away the job titles and it’s mostly the same work: helping someone grow into a role, keeping a team steady when things get hard, and having the regular, honest conversations that move people forward. I started as an individual contributor and worked my way up, so I’ve been on both sides of the 1:1. I know what a good one feels like. I also know how often they turn into just another status update.

MeetFika started as a way to make my own life easier: keeping track of workloads, career growth, escalations, all of it. Doing that well for a team this size, week after week, became a chore, and that wasn’t fair to them. As a manager, 1:1s are where our real work happens. It’s where you spot that someone’s burning out, keep their growth from stalling, and build the trust everything else runs on. The problem was, I’d never been handed any tools for it. Sure, I knew what it took to do it well, but I had to build my own system to keep up. And in every tool I tried, the conversation itself was never the point.

So I built the thing I kept wishing I had. You and your teammate write the agenda together. Follow-ups carry over instead of slipping away. Someone’s goals stay in front of you week to week. And after a year, when it’s time to write their review, the record is already there. It doesn’t manage people for you. It makes the human part of the job easier to do well.

I use it every week now, with my own team and with other managers I work alongside. It’s also won over a few people I didn’t expect it to, including a former director from a well-known company. Ultimately, the only measure that really counts is how well it works for you and your team, and whether you find it as useful as I do.

Remember: Management is about relationships, and 1:1s are where those relationships actually live. MeetFika just makes sure you remember what happened last week as you prepare for the next one.

— Romeo