Indie studios get a 60-minute weekly meeting fix from FIRM framework

Business coach Martijn van Zwieten, creator of the FIRM studio management method, prescribes exactly three recurring management meetings — one full-day yearly, one half-day quarterly, and one 60-minute weekly — as the final building block of a functioning indie studio operating system.

The guidance closes his five-part series on running an indie game studio. Van Zwieten, who says he has coached over 150 CEOs, founders and leaders across studios ranging from Rusty Lake and Twirlbound to Bethesda Game Studios and MachineGames, argues most management meetings fail because they devolve into status updates "that could have been an email" and circular discussions that leave an hour gone with nothing decided.

What does this change for a small studio team? It replaces ad hoc gatherings with a fixed cadence where every meeting segment drives either alignment, issue-solving or decisions.

The three-meeting cadence

Each meeting operates at a different zoom level:

• Yearly (full day): Honest review of hits, misses and learnings; set annual goals; revisit the BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal, the long-term ambition); define rocks — the term van Zwieten uses for quarterly priority goals — for Q1.
• Quarterly (half a day with practice): Review the just-ended quarter's rocks, check progress against yearly goals, set rocks for the next 90 days.
• Weekly (60 minutes): Where goals translate into traction, and the meeting most likely to derail without a clear agenda.

The yearly meeting, he writes, "ensures that you've set the foundation for the entire year."

Inside the 60-minute weekly meeting

The weekly agenda serves three goals: full alignment on where things stand, surfacing what's most pressing, and leaving with clear next steps. It runs on a strict clock.

• Check-in, 5 minutes. Everyone shares two pieces of good news from the past week, one professional, one personal. Van Zwieten frames this as trust-building, not social time: keep it brief and keep it moving.
• To-do check, 5 minutes. A quick pass through last week's to-dos. His benchmark: roughly 80% of last week's to-dos should be completed to preserve momentum. Undone items either carry forward or get deprioritised — consciously, never quietly dropped.
• Rock status check, 5 minutes. Each rock's driver confirms only "on track" or "off track." No full status updates. Anything off track goes to the issues list.
• IDS, 40 minutes. The heart of the meeting. Using the identify, discuss, solve process from Part 3 of the series, the team works the quarter's most pressing problems, prioritising at-risk rocks over broader studio issues. Keep going until time or issues run out.
• Conclude, 5 minutes. Summarise what was discussed and decided, confirm next week's to-dos with owners, and decide what gets communicated to the wider studio — and by whom — before small misalignments grow into issues-list entries.

Why the structure holds

Van Zwieten credits the agenda with four consistent effects: everyone is up to speed before discussion starts; the agenda stays live rather than frozen from Monday morning; issues get resolved or assigned a next step instead of being discussed endlessly; and the right information reaches the right people after the meeting ends.

"It might take a while to get the hang of it, but before you know it you'll be blowing through them, solving issues and unblocking rocks as you go," he writes, adding that client feedback suggests teams may even start to look forward to the meetings.

With meetings in place, the FIRM framework is complete: a long-term vision and yearly goals, a central place for collecting and solving issues, rocks for quarterly traction, and management meetings focused on planning ahead. Van Zwieten offers a free step-by-step template at martijnvanzwieten.com/firm, and his homework is concrete: schedule the three meetings now — studios starting mid-year should begin with a quarterly meeting to set rocks — and run a first weekly meeting holding strictly to the time allocations, even if it feels rigid at first.