I’ve been running deal reviews for my SE team for about three months now. I want to be upfront about that: I’m not a veteran facilitator, and I don’t think of myself as having this figured out. What I do have is early, genuinely positive feedback from the team and a few real patterns worth writing down while they’re still fresh, before “three months in” turns into “this is just how I’ve always done it” and I stop noticing what’s actually working.
The order you say things in matters more than what you say
The single biggest shift for me has been sequencing: opening the room to the team first, letting them talk through the deal, the obstacles, their read on where it’s stuck — before I offer my own take at all.
This is harder than it sounds, especially as the senior person in the room. There’s a real pull to jump in early to demonstrate expertise, to move things along, to fill a silence. But jumping in early has a cost that isn’t obvious until you stop doing it: it quietly signals what the “right” answer looks like before anyone else has had a chance to find it themselves. Once that happens, you’re not hearing what the team actually sees — you’re hearing what they think you want to hear.
Active listening, in this context, isn’t a soft skill exercise. It’s a structural choice about when you speak, not just how attentively you sit there while others do.
What listening first actually surfaces
The payoff isn’t just “the team feels heard,” though that matters too. It’s that people raise obstacles and scenarios I wouldn’t have thought to ask about.. not because I’m not experienced enough to think of them, but because I’m not in that specific deal’s day-to-day the way the SE running it is. They have context I don’t have. Listening first is how that context actually makes it into the room, instead of getting steamrolled by whatever I happened to open with.
It’s also, I think, changing how the team approaches problems even outside the review itself. When “what obstacles haven’t we considered yet” becomes a real, expected question in reviews — asked of them, not answered for them — people seem to start running that question themselves earlier in a deal, before it ever reaches a review at all. That’s the outcome I actually want: not me catching more things, but the team catching more things without needing me in the room to prompt it.
What I chime in on, and when
None of this means staying silent. Once the team’s had a real chance to talk through a deal, I’ll add what I’m seeing, for example, a pattern from another account, a risk nobody raised, a question I think is worth pushing on harder. But by that point, it’s additive to a conversation that’s already happened, not the frame the conversation gets built inside of from the first minute.
Where I actually am with this
Three months isn’t long enough to claim this is a fully-formed philosophy. It’s long enough to notice that sequencing — listen, then add — produces a genuinely different room than the reverse order does, and that the team’s feedback so far backs that up. I expect this to keep changing as I keep doing it. That feels like the right amount of confidence to have at three months in: enough to write it down, not enough to call it settled.