About

Why I built MeetFika

I’ve spent fifteen years in people management, 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.

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. 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 one 1:1 at a time.

— Romeo

A shared language, and a culture that keeps it

The part I didn’t expect when I started building this was how much a team needs a shared language. When everyone runs check-ins the same way — the same shared agenda, the same quick read on workload and stress, the same words for what “stuck” or “growing” actually looks like — people stop talking past each other. A manager and their teammate walk in describing the same thing, and so do two managers comparing notes about how their teams are really doing.

The other thing I care about is that managers get supported too, not just the people they manage. Developing talent shouldn’t be a heroic solo effort every manager reinvents on their own. When a leadership team works from the same record — career goals in the open, follow-ups that carry forward, the same honest read on how people are doing — supporting someone’s growth becomes something the whole group does together. That’s how you build a culture where good management is the norm rather than the exception, and where the next layer of managers learns it by seeing it done.

A handful of the people I managed went on to lead teams of their own. The thing I’m proudest of isn’t a tool — it’s that the way we talked about work and growth became shared, and it traveled with them. That’s what I want MeetFika to make easier for any team: a common language for the conversations that develop people, and a culture that keeps having them.

Try it for your own 1:1s

If any of that sounds like your job, try MeetFika with one of your own check-ins. A shared agenda, follow-ups that carry forward, and a record that’s still useful at review time.

Free to start.

Start Free — your first check-in is 2 minutes away