I have been a Product Manager for Mekari for a year and I mostly spend my time on Google Workspace. The company uses the tool for cloud collaboration and Google Meet for online discussions.

On August 2022, I noticed that Google Meet had a small update on the attendees’ list. It now divides the attendance list into two sections: those who are already in the meeting room and those who have been invited but have not joined yet.

When I lead meetings, it’s common for me to have a lot of attendees so this update is great! It makes it much easier to keep up with who has shown up and who hasn’t.

One thing we want to do at the meeting is shortened it. To do this, we want to kick off the meeting as soon as possible. Before this, I had to go back to the calendar invitation and compare it against my list of participants. It was a lot of work going back and forth. This update will make it easy for meeting hosts to know whether or not they should wait for other attendees to join.

Normally, I will wait for another 5 minutes to start the meeting, In the meantime, I will reach out to the also invited list to remind them to join the meeting. It would be better if there was a way to nudge them automatically, perhaps a simple button on the also invited list that sends email reminders or Slack alerts.

Another good idea to have would be an alert button for participants at the start of their turn, not unmute button (zoom has this feature). People like to multitask during online meetings, which may make the meeting go out of its turn. This alert button will help the host to pull the attention back to them when it’s their turn.

Other wish lists that I would like to have :

1. Easy access to Google Docs minutes of the meeting while we’re in the meeting room
2. Rejection reason details on the also-invited list
3. Automatically accept regular meetings based on past behavior

I am eagerly looking forward to Google Meet’s next update, hoping that my wish list will come true. I believe they go through a lot of discovery to decide what is the most impactful feature update.