There’s a lot of meeting hate here and as a developer, I used to feel the same.
But after bootstrapping a SaaS company and at times struggling through cross-team execution, I’ve come around. A short weekly standing meeting, like the one described in the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution, is actually a powerful tool.
Without it, maintenance, admin, and firefighting will expand to fill the entire week. The meeting forces space for focus, clear commitments, and basic accountability.
It’s not obvious early in your career, but once you’ve got some scars, it starts to make a lot more sense.
I have a theory that these short meetings are not the root cause, assuming a trustworthy team.
Having these standups... weekly, daily, whatever-y... it forces the PM to track deliverables. Which means you have to DEFINE the deliverables. And it sort of trickles from there.
The actual hard part is doing the PM Work. Defining deliverables, making tasks in jira (or excel :p), estimating work, and assigning reasonable due-dates.
Thats what these status meetings really do. Once you have that, and you track to it regularly, I would wager you could work asynchronously with a well disciplined team.
> A short weekly standing meeting
The problem is that management will see that it's useful, and embrace this meeting. It doesn't take long until the meeting is no longer short, switches up to daily, isn't standing because there's too many people and/or everyone is WFH.
I think one of the biggest problems in management is that managers are super focused on making their management tasks easier at the expense of their reports actually doing the work. In general, they prefer a meeting with 20+ or 50+ engineers in one place, each giving 1 minute or longer feedback, because they can do that every day and in an hour, they know what everybody is doing. But they seem completely oblivious to the fact that now every engineer has an hour less time to do actual work, they've been taken out of their flow state to attend an hour long meeting of which maybe 2 or 3 minutes is relevant to them, and they've tuned out of everyone else's progress reports because it doesn't impact them at all. Management simply don't see that 16% of the productive day for the entire team is wasted, because it's made their job marginally more efficient.
I've worked in exactly one place were the standups literally were a small group of engineers and one PM, and it was literally "I'm working on this, no problems" or "I hit this issue, I'd like to chat to X about it after the meeting" and the entire thing was over in 2-3 minutes - nobody sat down because there was literally no point. In that company, the manager would just catch up with each personal individually to find out what everyone was up to, taking maybe a minute or 2 each day AND after checking whether they were in the zone or happy to be distracted. In that place, once every 2 weeks we'd also have an hour scheduled 1-to-1 about anything the manager or report wanted to discuss about non-project things, but that could end early if nobody had anything else they wanted to discuss.
I manage teams and a standup with 20+ attendees sounds like hell to me. We keep standups to team scope and 10 minutes long (20 minutes in the case of our largest team, but it almost never goes the full time).
We have some larger meetings that are closer to what you are describing, but they are for higher-level management, not line engineers.
In general, they prefer a meeting with 20+ or 50+ engineers in one place, each giving 1 minute or longer feedback, because they can do that every day and in an hour, they know what everybody is doing. But they seem completely oblivious to the fact that now every engineer has an hour less time to do actual work, they've been taken out of their flow state to attend an hour long meeting of which maybe 2 or 3 minutes is relevant to them, and they've tuned out of everyone else's progress reports because it doesn't impact them at all. Management simply don't see that 16% of the productive day for the entire team is wasted, because it's made their job marginally more efficient.
Uh, I'm a manager and that meeting format gives me a visceral negative reaction.
I have a team of 15 directs (+ 2-3 on loan at any given time) and I would never require all of them to attend a single meeting with individual report-outs. What a waste of time for all.
Currently, the group is split in two. Out standup are are you describe in the last paragraph - what you did, are doing, and blockers. If there's need for deeper discussion, we table that to the end (or schedule a separate meeting), so anybody not required can get back to "real" work. On a good day, the meeting takes ~10 minutes (and that involves some chit-chat) and maybe once/week it take the full 30 minute block.
Maybe relevant - 4 of the 15 are right out of college, still learning the job, the daily meeting gives them an opportunity to discuss work without feeling like they're pestering anybody. If the team was more mature, I could see going to 3x/week stand-ups or similar.
The small standup you describe works because it is basically an interrupt router: say what you're doing, surface blockers, then move the real discussion to the relevant people
> In general, [managers] prefer a meeting with 20+ or 50+ engineers in one place, each giving 1 minute or longer feedback, because they can do that every day and in an hour, they know what everybody is doing.
Most of the time they don’t even know what everybody is doing, or why, or how. But they like to fool themselves into thinking that, because ??? it given them the warm fuzzies, I guess.
Then they just wasted everybody’s time for absolutely no reason at all.
> management will see that it's useful, and embrace this meeting.
Only if you let them. We don't let management attend our weekly. They have nothing to contribute anyway. Just set boundaries.
In a lot (most?) companies, management serves as the bosses over engineers. So good luck telling your boss they’re not allowed in your meeting.
You don't tell them they're not allowed. You ask them what they need from the meeting and how so you can free up the time from their calendar, or what they need to comfortably delegate the responsibility to you.
Managers don't do this stuff for funsies they do it because they don't trust that their team won't go off track because of something they don't know.
A lot of people are talking past each other in this comment section. A good boss definitely doesn't want you spend their time making you do performative work. A bad boss gleefully engages with this as it shows they are big and important.
A good boss will see the inefficiency and work with you to try and manage it so you are not doing a bunch of PM work (wasting your time) while the important stuff happens and clear communication continues.
A bad boss will see that you are not catering to their emotional needs which implies you are a very bad worker and thus you will be keel hauled into every meeting they can invite you to because obviously the more time you've spent talking to them the more efficient you've been during the day, you are a finger on a hand and you should not flex unless the mind controlling you wants to.
I had a bad boss move me across the country as the most important thing so we could have face to face comms, and then would only come into the office once a month or so to talk - but to him that once a month in person conversation was worth upending my entire life so it was marginally easier than a zoom call for him. There's a lot of rich assholes who operate like this.
This is the way! I run a remote only company, and when the game is on, one meeting per week, 30-60 minutes (at most!) is essential!
However... there has to be an agenda, the agenda needs to be followed, and meeting monopolizers need to be cut short. (americans are very good at expanding meeting participation and to take up all the time, care needs to be taken with them. This is cultural, they love to talk.)
That's about all that is necessary. Then individual syncs can be done per email the rest of the week, or phone in case of emergencies.
I also run an online company but I dont like meetings it is always re hashing things already shared and written before. But it seems like a lot of humans absolutely need meeting to properly collaborate. Why ?
Among other factors, lots of people don't read "things already shared and written before". Like, ever.
I agree (except about Americans) but would add that the agenda should be published up front, e.g. in the meeting invitation.
I strongly agree that the agenda must be published upfront.
Moreover, when something more substantial must be discussed, e.g. the accomplishment of some project milestone, or a work plan or a proposal for new features or for a new project, a document should be prepared and sent in advance to the participants with the description of the obtained results or of a plan or of a proposal, enabling them to prepare suggestions for improvements or for alternatives, or criticism.
Nonetheless, I may agree with what the previous poster said about Americans and conciseness in meetings (i.e. the lack of thereof).
Many times, across companies, sometime between the day and half an hour before a meeting, I see a flurry of actions—including responses, decisions, deliverables/drafts, etc. In that sense, I think a meeting works because people don't want to show up empty handed, so it adds psychological urgency.
I think small teams can be an exception here, but across most teams (particularly quickly growing ones) and across functions, a weekly sync is irritating but obvious, proven, solution to getting things done.
And I think a lot of "meeting hate" is really "bad meeting hate" which is completely fair
> Without it, maintenance, admin, and firefighting will expand to fill the entire week. The meeting forces space for focus, clear commitments, and basic accountability.
Author here. You said it better than I did in the post.
It's really about creating space!
No, your claims are too broad, generalizing from specific instance (apparently a small company, high accountability, no diagonal lines or conflicting organizational incentives). A standup meeting to try to ensure visibility and accountability are necessary but by no means sufficient; you only get as much of those as the underlying company culture, plus the seniority of the person running the meeting. People can still turn the thing into a talking shop, filibuster, perpetually roll deadlines, specs that are never fully nailed down, "hidden dependencies" that no-one is held responsible for not spotting, cross-department issues that don't have a single owner. I've been in situations multiple times where I had to call a meeting to diplomatically shine a light on different branches of an org not working well together, or sometimes even actively undercutting each other (or working on a cost-plus/time-and-materials basis).
So your claim "One effective solution is to schedule a standing meeting... works across organizational boundaries too." is way overly strong. Just because you've had an instance or two where it did work, doesn't mean that works in general, for other orgs.
Meetings may or may not be forcing functions, depending on the organization. Sometimes they are. Oftentimes they aren't.
The better mantra to ask is "Who in this organization is actually incentivized to make this project succeed... where specifically is there accountability?" Sometimes, believe it or not, the org doesn't have much of that.
Instead of your claim, I'll tell you the key organizational symptom that I found actually determines accountability, or lack of: (discreetly) find out what happened to the careers of CXOs/VPs/directors/execs/managers on projects that failed: were they promoted/ given bonuses/ retained/ demoted/ reassigned/ fired? (sometimes they get a token punishment/demotion, leave, go found a startup/sit on the beach, then get reacquired at a higher level than what they left).
Author here. I wrote about context being important for any advice you read years ago: https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2020/01/13/context-is-kin... I could put such a disclaimer into any post I write, but I think that'd be a bit tedious.
I will say I've seen this work across organizations as small as 2 person startups and as large as 100k organizations (though, to be honest, I was embedded in a team as a contractor in that org).
I'm sure there are orgs where it doesn't work, which is why I said "One effective solution is to schedule a standing meeting".
I like your perspective--accountability is the basis; the meeting is one method, but I'm sure there are others. Do you have other solutions that you've seen work?
But you posted here under the overly broad headline (not "Meetings can be forcing functions", or "How to make meetings forcing functions") with its overly broad claims.
Also you asserted "One effective solution is to schedule a standing meeting" not "... can be a solution, under some conditions".
> I've seen this work across across organizations as small as 2 person startups and as large as 100k organizations*
and I've seen it fail across orgs as small as 15-person startups and as large as ~100k organizations; and sometimes work. How large was your sample size N?
> Do you have other solutions that you've seen work?
As I emphasized above, the mantra to ask is "Who in this organization is actually incentivized to make this project succeed... where specifically is there accountability?" If there isn't any such person running/chairing the meeting/ or at absolute minimum reading its minutes, you just get a meaningless talking shop, which as other people here are saying is negatively productive and intensely annoys engineers, rightly so. a) A meeting is only as productive as the subset of people invited (or, equally, excluded). b) You can only enforce or appeal to as much accountability as the management chain intrinsically has (unless you or the senior mgmt or shareholders get them replaced, which is usually major power politics. As a consultant in particular, beware of fighting other people's battles, especially executives.).
(and to help answer the conundrum about who's actually incentivized to make a project succeed, I said you have to do some archaeology on what happened on their previous projects in that org (or previous orgs); the pathological case is if they failed repeatedly but kept getting rewarded, or developed an old-boy network around them.)
Sometimes, although not always, it might be (but certainly could never be) wise to hedge, maybe.
In others, clarity comes from making the point and assuming above average intelligence of the readers to know that context is always relevant.
We can be assured that assumption incorrect, in this case.
You don’t make a confident statement and then dismiss critique with “te-he, I could be wrong, Baka”.
The criticism is just "you dared to be confident in expressing your view". It's metacriticism, not criticism of the view itself. That makes a metacriticism level response legitimate.
> In others, clarity comes from making the point and assuming above average intelligence of the readers to know that context is always relevant.
It's not cool to insult the readers' intelligence when someone makes a shaky overly broad claim. Better to retract or modify the claim. The headline "Meetings are forcing functions" is borderline clickbait. Most of us here have been in companies that meeting'd themselves to death, or at minimum, underachieved. And those companies had scheduled meetings too, so beware success bias and survivorship bias. My key positive message to OP is to emphasize cultural signs of accountability (or lack of), without which everything else (like standups and progress reports) is out the window. For example, how many of you have ever seen someone organizationally punished for accurately reporting status in a meeting?
Perhaps it’s worth considering you both have valid experiences that are context dependent and not mutually exclusive.
In either case I think you might be coming in a bit hot. OP is just sharing their perspective. No one wants to get into internet fights.
“Water is critical to life”
‘Well, achshully, too much water can drown someone, so it’s not a universally true statement that it’s critical to life’
Meetings are forcing functions. They force me to sit in stupid recurring nightmares that are wastes of time, in many cases.
In the right context, as the author has called out, they offer a rhythm to work that drives behaviors.
You are tying meetings to all the woes of the modern white collar job, and raising ill-constructed arguments that don’t pass muster.
“Meetings are forcing functions” - Clickbait?! “The Secret to Driving 10x Better Work” is clickbait. The title is as succinct a summary of the work as one might endeavor toward.
You are acting the fool, my man.
> A standup meeting to try to ensure visibility and accountability are necessary but by no means sufficient; you only get as much of those as the underlying company culture, plus the seniority of the person running the meeting.
Not to mention that having a standup doesn't actually solve the need for 'maintenance, admin, and firefighting'. If your team needs to do a lot of maintenance and firefighting, that work will eat up the whole week until you pay off the technical debt that's accruing it. A meeting won't solve that on its own. If the owners don't prioritize investing your time in paying debt down, you'll be firefighting until the end of time.
Weekly meetings and weekly activity reports are typically fine and useful.
What is bad is that there are plenty of companies that want daily meetings and/or daily activity reports, which always greatly reduce the productivity of developers/designers for no benefits.
This sounds like something straight from LinkedIn...
> Without it, maintenance, admin, and firefighting will expand to fill the entire week. The meeting forces space for focus, clear commitments, and basic accountability.
Release manager, or whoever manages incidents, will just schedule weekly meeting of their own.
> A short weekly standing meeting […] is actually a powerful tool.
The problem is they never stay short, they never stay on topic, they always expand beyond one a week.
Then managers want everybody to say something, so they feel in the know and in control, even when most of the time they are not. So it devolves into everybody just saying something useless to make the manager happy, and nobody listening anymore, because they know that 90% of what is said is just noise.
meetings are a tool, and when used properly, an indispensible one at that. meetings bloody meetings by John Cleese is an absolute must-watch for conducting great meetings.
however, if all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail: it's when meetings are used inappropriately or to solve the wrong problem that it becomes an issue, and many people make this mistake, which is why meetings end up so universally despised and get such a bad rep
> There’s a lot of meeting hate here
meetings have their role, but the hate at least in my case is when they become a distraction and/or a waste of time. They are susceptible to the organizer and to the highest ranking person in the room and many managers are not up to the task of doing it correctly.