Flagon: We build software in the open.

A 1:1 is a standing block of time that belongs to you. Not to your manager, not to the company's need for a status update, to you. That framing sets what the meeting is for, so we'll start there and then talk about what growing at Flagon actually looks like, because the two are connected.

Your agenda, mostly

You own the agenda. Keep a running doc, add to it during the week when something comes up, and bring it. Your manager can add items too, but the default weight is yours. If you show up with nothing, that's information: either things are genuinely fine, or you haven't been paying attention to what's bugging you, and the meeting's a good place to find out which.

We flip it this way for a reason. If the manager owns the agenda, the meeting drifts toward what the manager wants to know, which is usually status. Status is the one thing a 1:1 should almost never be about.

What it's for (and what it isn't)

A 1:1 is for the stuff that doesn't fit in a comment thread:

Unblocking. Something's stuck, and it's political, ambiguous, or awkward enough that you'd rather say it out loud than write it in a channel. Bring it here.
Feedback, both directions. You should be giving your manager feedback as much as receiving it. If something about how you're being managed isn't working, this is the room. See feedback for how we do this well.
Growth. Where you want to go, what you want to get better at, what's boring you, what's scaring you in a good way. This is the conversation that never happens if you don't make room for it.

What it isn't: a status meeting. We already know what you're working on; it's in the open, in writing, where how we work says it should be. Reciting your week back to your manager is a waste of the one slot designed for everything the written record can't hold.

If it's on fire, don't wait

1:1s are a rhythm, not a queue. If something's urgent, raise it now through the normal channels. The 1:1 is for the things that are important but not loud enough to interrupt the week on their own.

Cadence

Weekly to biweekly, thirty minutes, actually protected. A 1:1 that gets bumped every time something busier comes up isn't a 1:1, it's a calendar decoration. If you're both slammed, keep it short, but keep it. The value is in the reliability: you always know the slot is coming, so the awkward thing has somewhere to land instead of festering.

What growing here looks like

Growth here isn't awarded in a meeting or timed to a calendar. You take on bigger, fuzzier, more consequential work, and your level and pay follow the scope. In the 1:1 itself, that progress usually shows up along two lines.

Craft. Are you getting better at the actual work? Early on, you do solid work on well-defined problems. Further along, you take ambiguous problems and make them well-defined, you raise the quality bar of the people around you, and your judgment becomes something others rely on. The tell is simple: handing you something vague and hard becomes a relief.

Coordination. Can you move work through other people, not just do it yourself? That starts with communicating so clearly that nobody's blocked on you, and grows into shaping how a whole slice of the work gets done: setting direction, unblocking others, making decisions that hold up without you in the room.

Most people grow along both lines, in their own mix. Neither is "more senior" than the other; a company made entirely of coordinators ships nothing. Your 1:1 is where you and your manager stay honest about where you are on both and what the next stretch looks like. How that maps to levels and pay lives in growing here and compensation.