Phrasebank: ready-to-use meeting phrases

Just a heads-up, the deployment might be delayed.

Warn people early.

I'm blocked on the staging environment.

Name what is stopping your progress.

I'll need some help from the DevOps team on this.

Ask a specific team for support.

No blockers on my side.

Say briefly that nothing is blocking you.

We're on track for the release on Friday.

Confirm a deadline will be met.

Just a quick update on the migration.

Introduce a short status update.

It's still in progress, but I should have a PR up by end of day.

Report unfinished work and when it will be ready.

Today I'm going to finish the API integration.

Say what you plan to do today.

It took longer than expected because of some edge cases.

Explain a delay without sounding defensive.

Yesterday I worked on the payment retry logic.

Open your standup update with what you did yesterday.

Could you elaborate on that a little?

Politely ask for more detail.

Sorry, could you repeat the last part?

Ask someone to repeat only the part you missed.

Could you slow down a bit? I want to take notes.

Ask the speaker to talk more slowly, with a reason.

Did I get that right?

Check after you paraphrase.

Could you give me an example?

Ask for a concrete example to understand an idea.

Just to make sure I understand, you want us to drop the old endpoint?

Check your understanding by restating the request.

Sorry, I lost you for a second. Could you go back to the diagram?

Admit you lost track and ask to go back to a point.

So you're saying the cache is the bottleneck?

Paraphrase the speaker to confirm the main point.

What do you mean by "eventually consistent" here?

Ask what a specific term means in this context.

Which service do you mean, the order service or the inventory service?

Clarify which of two things the speaker means.

That makes sense.

Show you understand and accept a point.

That works for me.

Accept a plan or time quickly.

I'll follow up by email with the details.

Promise to send details after the meeting.

Let me confirm the deadline. Is it Thursday or Friday?

Double-check a key detail such as a date.

When do you need this by?

Ask for the deadline.

I'm not sure yet. Let me check and get back to you.

Buy time when you cannot answer yet.

Let me share my screen so you can see the demo.

Start a screen share.

It's been a busy week, but a good one.

A friendly answer to "How are you?"

Can you hear me okay?

Check your audio at the start of a call.

Sorry, my connection is a bit unstable today.

Explain audio or video problems.

Let's give it a minute for others to join.

Wait for others before starting the meeting.

Good to see you all. How's everyone doing?

A warm greeting at the start of a call.

How was your weekend?

A common Monday small-talk opener.

Any plans for the weekend?

Friday small talk.

Sorry I'm late. My previous meeting ran over.

Apologize for joining late.

Thanks, everyone. Have a good rest of your day.

Close a meeting politely.

What time is it over there?

Small talk with colleagues in other time zones.

I think you're on mute.

Tell someone their microphone is muted.

My rough estimate is three to four days.

Give an estimate as a range.

Is this a blocker for the release, or a nice-to-have?

Separate must-haves from nice-to-haves.

What's the priority between these two?

Clarify priorities.

Who is the main user of this feature?

Clarify requirements by asking about the user.

From my experience, this kind of migration usually takes longer.

Support your opinion with past experience.

I think we should keep it simple for now.

Give a recommendation in a soft, direct way.

I'd lean towards option B.

Say which option you prefer without being absolute.

In my opinion, a queue would be more reliable here.

Share a clear personal opinion.

My concern is that this won't scale past a few thousand users.

Raise a risk without sounding negative.

To be honest, I'm not a big fan of adding another dependency.

Express mild dislike informally.

I'm not 100% sure, but I think it's a timeout issue.

Share a guess while showing some uncertainty.

One thing to consider is the cost of running this on Kubernetes.

Add a factor the group may have missed.

Personally, I'd prefer a simpler solution we can ship this month.

Share a personal preference.

The way I see it, the real problem is the data model.

Reframe the problem from your point of view.

I think it's worth the extra effort.

Support spending more effort.

I agree to a point, but I'm worried about the timeline.

Agree partly, then add a concern.

I couldn't agree more.

Show strong agreement.

Fair enough.

Accept a point, even if you are not fully happy with it.

Good point. I hadn't thought about that.

Praise an idea you had not considered.

I'm happy to go with your approach.

Accept someone else's plan.

I agree with Linh on this.

Agree with a specific colleague by name.

I think we're on the same page.

Confirm a shared view.

Have we considered what happens if the service goes down?

Raise a risk as a question rather than a criticism.

I see your point, but I'm not sure it solves the latency problem.

Acknowledge the other view, then disagree.

Let me push back a little on that.

Signal politely that you are about to disagree.

I'm not sure that's the best approach here.

Disagree softly.

That sounds a bit risky to me, especially this close to the release.

Flag a risk tied to timing.

I see it a bit differently.

A soft way to start disagreeing.

Could we try a quick spike before we commit?

Propose a small experiment before deciding.

How about adding a feature flag first?

Make a light, informal suggestion.

This is just a nit, but there's a typo in the log message.

Mark a minor code review comment.

It might be worth adding some monitoring first.

Make a gentle suggestion.

One option would be to cache the results for five minutes.

Offer one possible solution without pushing it.

Small suggestion: could we rename this function to make it clearer?

Give soft feedback in a code review.

I'd suggest we start with the read path.

Recommend where to begin.

What if we split this into two smaller services?

Suggest an alternative as an open question.

Why don't we pair on this tomorrow morning?

Suggest working together, informally.

Are we all aligned on this?

Check that everyone agrees before moving on.

I'll own the migration and Huy will handle testing. Is that correct?

Confirm who owns each task.

So the next steps are: I'll update the ticket and Nam will review the PR.

List who does what after the meeting.

Any open questions before we close?

A last check before ending.

Could you put that in the ticket so we don't lose it?

Ask for a written record.

I'll send out the meeting notes later today.

Promise a written summary.

So we agreed to roll out to ten percent of users first.

Restate a decision.

To summarize, we'll ship the fix today and refactor next sprint.

Wrap up the decision in one sentence.

What does done look like for this ticket?

Clarify the acceptance criteria.

Who's going to own this?

Ask who is responsible for a task.

I can't take that on this week, but I can help next Monday.

Decline and offer another time.

I don't have the bandwidth this sprint, but I can pick it up next sprint.

Decline extra work now and offer a later time.

I'd need more time to give you a proper estimate.

Avoid giving a rushed estimate.

I think that's out of scope for this release.

Say a request belongs outside the current release.

I'm not the right person for that, but Hoa knows the billing system well.

Redirect a question to a better person.

Can we push this to the next sprint?

Ask to postpone work.

We've found the root cause. It was a bad config change.

Report the root cause.

The issue is mitigated, but we're still monitoring.

Give a careful incident status.

I'll post the next update in fifteen minutes.

Set a time for the next incident update.

We're seeing a spike in errors on the checkout service.

Report what is happening during an incident.

I think the biggest risk is the data migration.

Name the top risk.

It makes more sense to fix the root cause than add another workaround.

Compare two approaches.

If we skip the tests now, it'll cost us more later.

Argue using long-term cost.

Do we have any data to support that?

Ask for evidence politely.

Just to play devil's advocate, what if traffic doubles next year?

Test an idea by arguing the opposite on purpose.

I'm not fully convinced yet. Can we look at the numbers?

Ask for evidence before you agree.

Honestly, I don't think two weeks is realistic for this scope.

Push back on an unrealistic deadline.

The trade-off here is speed versus consistency.

Name what you gain and what you give up.

What worries me is the impact on existing customers.

Focus the disagreement on impact.

Instead of a full rewrite, we could refactor one module at a time.

Offer a smaller alternative.

We could do a phased rollout to reduce the risk.

Suggest a safer release plan.

Should we take this offline and come back with a proposal?

Move a long discussion out of the meeting.

Let me make sure everyone is on the same page.

Check shared understanding.

I can't commit to that date without checking with the team.

Avoid promising a date before checking.

I'm happy to help, but I'll need someone to cover my code reviews.

Accept with a condition.

Unfortunately, it's not a quick fix. It needs a schema change.

Explain why a request is bigger than it looks.

I'd rather not promise a date until we finish the investigation.

Refuse to commit too early.

If I take this on, the API work will slip. Which one is more important?

Ask your manager to choose the priority.

As you can see, the error rate dropped after the fix.

Point the audience to evidence on screen.

Does that make sense so far?

Check the audience is following.

Let me give you a high-level overview first.

Start a presentation with the big picture.

If we zoom in on the payment service, you'll see three main components.

Move from the overview to the details.

In other words, we only process each event once.

Rephrase a technical point more simply.

Let's move on to the deployment part.

Transition to the next section.

I don't know that off the top of my head, but I'll find out.

Answer honestly when you don't know.

On the left you can see the client, and on the right is the API gateway.

Guide people through a diagram.

That's a good question. The short answer is yes.

Take a second, then answer directly.

Let me start with why we need this change.

Open with the motivation.

I know that was a lot. Any questions before I continue?

Pause after dense content.

The context is that our checkout is getting slower every month.

Set the background before the problem.

The downside is that we'll have to maintain two versions for a while.

Admit a weakness of your own proposal.

The key point here is that the data never leaves the region.

Highlight the most important idea.

The main reason is that we need to support offline mode.

Give the core reason for a decision.

The problem is that every request hits the database directly.

State the core problem clearly.

This feature lets you export reports without asking the support team.

Describe a feature by its benefit to the user.

To give you an example, a checkout request takes about two seconds today.

Make an abstract point concrete.

Under the hood, it's just a scheduled job that reads from the queue.

Explain how something works internally.

Let me walk you through the request flow.

Offer to explain a process step by step.

In the end, we decided to go with Postgres because the team already knows it.

Explain the final decision and why.

We looked at three options.

Introduce the options you compared.

Does anyone else have something to add?

Open the floor before closing a topic.

I have to respectfully disagree on this one.

Disagree firmly but politely.

Can we step back for a second and look at the bigger picture?

Redirect a debate that is stuck in details.

I think where we differ is on the priority, not the solution.

Name the real disagreement so you can move forward.

I think we're getting a bit off track.

Bring the discussion back to the agenda.

Before we go, let's quickly go over the action items.

Review action items at the end.

The goal of this meeting is to agree on the rollout plan.

State the purpose at the start.

Let's hear both sides before we decide.

Keep a debate fair.

I'd like to hear from Lan. What do you think?

Invite a quiet person to speak.

Let's get started. We have a lot to cover today.

Open a meeting and set the tone.

Let's wrap up. Thanks for a great discussion.

Close the meeting.

Sorry, let's go one at a time. Minh, you first.

Handle people talking over each other.

Let's park that for now and come back to it at the end.

Postpone a side topic without ignoring it.

We're running short on time, so let's move on.

Keep the meeting on schedule.

We have three items on the agenda.

Preview the agenda.