Hybrid meetings - How to contribute more?

This is such a relevant question! I myself have experienced this on days when I had to work from home due to being sick. During large group discussions, there's so many parallel ongoing threads in a room, and every person in the room then has to pause to hear me speak on video call. Back and forths take forever, as you need to build quorum on who speaks first. Remote work technology is far away from solving these problems, so we have to operate within the constraints.

There's some obvious ways people will tell you like raise your hand, leave written comments to give opinions, be confident about interrupting the flow since what you say is valuable, and so on.

But these are also some more practical ways of operating within these constraints

1. Build personal relationships and a strong network in 1:1s. Have those discussions in advance with your tech lead and other engineers. That way your opinions are recognized, even if not in one large forum.
2. Make the conversation efficient: if you're driving the discussion, document design options in a document, share in advance and ask for offline reviews. If someone else is doing the same, you can provide your opinions in comments.
3. Organize smaller meetings, if possible. Everyone gets to participate and conversation is more efficient.

Hopefully this helps, and good luck!