When you're alone you can cosplay urgency for weeks without actually shipping. A weekly check-in with literally anyone external is the only real deadline that bites.
Tried public commits as the substitute. "Shipping X by Friday" tweets, working in public, that whole genre. Doesn't work for me. You end up optimising for the post not the ship. Worse outcome than no deadline at all.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Only if you let them. We don't let management attend our weekly. They have nothing to contribute anyway. Just set boundaries.
Author here. You said it better than I did in the post.
It's really about creating space!
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).
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?
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.)
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.
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?
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.
‘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.
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.
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.
Release manager, or whoever manages incidents, will just schedule weekly meeting of their own.
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
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.
I found this worked really well in practice. We actually talked more as a team compared to the ones using a fixed process with recurring meetings or "ceremonies", but the discussions were consistently useful. There was a lot more time spent figuring things out together and developing a strong shared mental model for what we were doing—some non-trivial but not quite research-level machine learning work—and no energy wasted on glorified status updates that only one person on the team cared about, or "syncs" that became increasingly less useful week-over-week.
Most other teams I've been on had this seemingly contradictory dynamic where we had too many meetings but also did not talk nearly enough. It's amazing how a bunch of recurring meetings can take up a bunch of time and attention, but somehow not leave enough space to dive deeply into non-trivial technical or strategic questions, or meaningfully talk about "meta" team topics.
A real risk is that a recurring meeting can pull out the oxygen in the room to talk about a given topic. It's too easy to put off talking about something important until the next scheduled meeting—by which time you have less context and less time—and then, if the recurring meeting isn't long enough to go deeper, the discussion gets put off even further. A team I worked on recently had a quarterly "retro", never had enough time to cover anywhere near every "retro" topic we actually needed, but also didn't consistently talk about that kind of topic outside the retro. We'd just wait until the next one rolled around. (Worse yet, this still put this team ahead of a number of other teams I've seen...) In contrast, the best teams I worked with never had explicit retros because we just talked about things that needed talking about as part of our day-to-day.
So it's a bit of a tautology. Managers who manage time better are more effective. Who knew?
For coders and people with lives, knowing what their week looks like is critical to planning and stress management (ie in X work hours topic Y will be landed, I have X - 2 hours to have my facts in line; daily 9:15 meeting ends at 9:30, everything after 9:30 is a predictable block I manage).
Now, to the issues and whattabout’s that implies:
1) bruuuuutal meeting discipline: off topic gets killed, new topics insta-popped onto next agenda, scripts of expected responses prepared and shared (“we are green, need approval by X”). Stand if ya gotta, chess-clock if ya gotta, bring in a non-teammate for secretary duties as needed. Meetings are not gab sessions.
2) if that agenda isn’t lava hot with everyone actively getting something, W-O-W, end the meeting. Split off, 1-on-1, task-group it. Fixed project meetings are to make manager-me not have to chase anyone or anything, we are racing to get that done ASAP and the second we’re done it’s time to get the fu… <ahem> grab a coffee, and return to the activities everyone is being paid for. Gab sessions naturally follow, as needed, dynamically adapting to needs and pressures.
Managers who manage meetings manage to meet without meetings managing them. Manage time or time will manage you. The real MBA was the one inside you the entire time.
I really prefer this over recurring meetings. The gist of it is that you're communicating early and often when you can't solve things in isolation, avoiding putting things off or letting understandings of problems atrophy while you wait. Ironically, I do this most with my remote coworkers. They're amazing. The coworkers I have in office are much less keen to give up time for communication. They're great too, in other ways, but harder to communicate with.
Your point about shared mental models is huge. Ironing these things out with another person is invaluable, but having more than one person do it at once means it's multiplied across the team. So many people we work with are building this model in isolation with LLMs, and I'm certain it's harming our collective grasp on what it is that we're actually doing. Very strange times!
It has never seemed more important for humans to communicate with each other and have these shared mental models. To simplify rather than add complexity, to cultivate that meat-space context that gives software purpose in the first place, to understand that purpose, and so on. Interacting with each other fluidly and regularly is such a great way to make that a reality.
Communication larger died, except a smaller "friendship minigroup".
"[...] But one where the tasks to accomplish the project are not anyone’s full-time job."
Sounds like the organization's leadership are incapable of balancing short term and long term goals, and it's falling to people who are paid less to "step up" and try to swim against the current for the good of the company.
or
Whatever the author is talking about is some engineering pipe dream disconnected from actual business value, and someone is dragging a bunch of other people semi-willingly along trying to execute on it without a mandate/funding from leadership.
Impossible to say which from the outside. But I've known several instances of both cases.
The moment you put a recurring block on the calendar, the implicit contract shifts from "we make progress on this work" to "we show up on Tues at 2". The meeting becomes the deliverable. And it always stays long after the original need has passed because nobody wants to be the one who kills it.
What you want is to call a meeting when you need one. When there's a decision to make, a blocker to clear, or a plan to align on... get the right people together and do that thing. A meeting you call as needed stays honest, or at least has a higher chance of staying honest. A standing meeting just becomes calendar furniture and most of the people in it know it.
If nobody in the meeting actually cares that the feature isn't getting finished, then the meetings value is rather small.
The number of managers who've successfully convinced themselves that knowing things and making decisions aren't part of their job, and just fill their days with arm-twisting and event-planning, is literally unbelievable to me. I've never met a founder with the attitude "yes I'll just put the stakeholders in an alignment meeting and my company will build itself," but somehow half the of the rest of leadership thinks that's a job.
> Everyone has other obligations, fires to put out, and emails to answer. It’s easy for long-term strategic, high-impact work to sink to the bottom of everyone’s todo list...this creates pressure on everyone to make progress.
One experience among many: I spent a very painful six months as a new grad, in a particularly dysfunctional corner of a mildly dysfunctional organization, in hours of daily back-to-back arm-twisty status meetings with team after team who wanted something from me and were sure this would get it (after which I would stay up all night working, since that was the only time I had left for that).
You know how it ended? The tech lead on my team cornered me in a conference room to find out why nothing was getting done, and I fully lost it with the guy. Like just started shouting that the actual consequences of ignoring the things people wanted ignored were transparently not acceptable, and I was barely sleeping trying to hold everything together. He got very quiet, said "ok," and we started going to meetings together and saying no to stuff. The amount that was collectively being demanded from me/us exceeded what could be delivered, but no one was on triage duty.
I've learned quite a bit since then (including spending a few years in management), so I've gotten better at understanding what's happening and asking for what I need. I've just also decided that "it's not my role to figure it out" managers (and PMs) are like rocks in the bowels of an organization. They’re in the way, subtly, quietly making everything bloated and painful as long as they’re there.
What I had issues with in the past is forced daily meeting (on top of other meetings) that just created stress and fatigue for me. Starting my day with a standup was literally the worst way to start it ever.
Ah yes, because sending meeting invites is such a burden you need another meeting to do it in, wasting the time of everyone else involved.
These types of meetings only work if the person who organized it has organizational power over the other participants. In my experience, these types of meetings always get deferred or cancelled if all participants are of the same level or worse, the organizer has less organizational power than the participants.
A progress meeting by a junior PM with a bunch of senior+ engineer is _guaranteed_ to get cancelled or gutted very quickly.
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In the vein of other comments though: agree. The necessity of these types of meetings is an organizational stink and the problem lies with priorities and amount of work to be done.
If something really needs to be done, time and resources will be found for it.
As an aside, whether you're a PM or not, this is a good way to get promoted. On more than one occasion in my career, I've effectively led a project whose participants were on my boss's boss's staff. All I did was identify something that was strategic and important to the organization but that nobody at the next level currently had time to lead. I'd present the idea to my boss, then we'd present together to their boss, and I was in.
There are the status updates that it's often good for people to know about even if only in a half-listening and simultaneously replying to emails sense. They're at least aware in a way that they wouldn't if they didn't read the memo.
There are decisions that really just need to be made, even if not critical, so they don't get strung out.
And there are meetings that don't require a decision today but do have a timeline and need at least a plan for a plan.
There are no planning meetings, no stand up meetings, no product management, etc. There is a yearly conference; but that seems to be mainly a social event. Meetings don't really factor into the process. There simply are none. They've completely removed meetings. Many other OSS projects likewise have no meeting structures.
Meetings are synchronization bottlenecks. Everybody stops what they are doing to wait for a meeting where some kind of decision process takes place. Anything blocked on that decision has to wait until then. And then work progresses. The more meetings you have, the more bottlenecks you create. The larger your team, the less practical this gets. OSS projects are huge and cannot afford to drop everything they are doing to have a meeting. Meetings are way too expensive at scale.
What the OSS world does is resolve decisions asynchronously so they don't end up blocking anything important. Individual contributors and stakeholders might have side meetings of course but having meetings is not part of the overall development process. They do their thing and then changes get submitted.
The interesting thing is that most large scale OSS development is dominated by corporate contributors. Most full time contributors are employed and their employers have a big stake in these projects. But it seems they skip all the meetings when doing OSS. And then they switch back to having lots of them for all internal development.
The results don't lie. Many OSS projects have been around for decades, maintain a high pace of development, and seem to do a good job of staying on top of technical debt and quality issues. Without having meetings.
While meetings have their place, they're not how you convince people to work on your project. Meetings are purely a reporting and sharing method and don't work as a shame-based incentive to get work done.
After a while, people simply don't care about you or your project because they have other projects that their manager values more, and they have no problem telling you so, even during the meeting.
Recurring meetings, especially at the developer level, are a waste of developer time.
I always found it easier to walk around, get personal updates one on one and integrate the information.
That way I wasted only a few minutes of each developer's time, instead of boring them all for an hour per week.
I've been in companies where a standup with 6 people takes 45 minutes.
The company I'm in finishes standup with 8 people usually within 10 minutes and often enough within just 5 minutes.
The companies have very different approaches to information sharing. The first wants in-depth information and for everyone to have opportunities to speak up to offer help. A true team effort is what they want. The second wants everything to be as brief as possible, so you can get back to doing what you're paid to do.
I saw a lot more "progress" at the second company. I also saw a lot less collaboration and more "oops we need to fix this now" happening too -- even into production.
The first company definitely did things a bit slower. But that slower generally translated to better quality software: software that generally worked correctly on the first try, or problems were at least caught before reaching production. When an issue did arise in production, it could be safely and quickly handled and rarely with downtime, because rolling back was part of the extensive test suite.
Coming to truly understand the differences between approaches has been eye-opening, and has seriously changed my biases about "how" to go about writing software on a day-to-day and week-to-week basis. Collaboration is good, but you have to have buy-in from the developers for it to work well. That was key and it took a lot of convincing each developer of the benefits.
Every leader ever: if we could do the right work, we could have less meetings.
I agree with the sentiment. And also understand the rage you’ll get.
> Every leader ever: if we could do the right work, we could have less meetings.
Guess who defined “work” in the first place? I wonder if it’s some kind of manager schizophrenia where they define shitty requirements and outcomes and then act surprised when they get subpar result, which they try to promptly mitigate with more meetings.
You're waiting a whole week for an update or to push people.
I'm a huge proponent of "async over sync" and "sync as soon as necessary". Don't wait to the next meeting in 3 days to escalate.
People whose calendar looks like meetings only and are always willing and able to throw complexity to others won't feel the pain of not having a meeting budget [1] but other roles will want to avoid eating up all their time on this type of admin.
I encourage people to explore how extremely simple Agent Skills workflows can already do a lot of the admin legwork than an executive assistant would and free their time from admin bureocracy and red tape, as much as possible. If there's no programmatic endpoint or MCP, use something like playwright. A little goes a long way.
I'm willing to cut her some slack, since I tried her job for a while and hated it.
Deadlines don't make things more efficient by definition, unless it's a case of "within-task" inefficiency (i.e. "laziness"). But while this is almost always assumed to be the case by managers, it almost never is the case on the ground. And then you get into this hare-brained vicious cycle of "oh we're falling behind despite the deadlines (read "context-switching interruptions with non-trivial overhead enforcing suboptimal task selection"), we should probably add more!" [facepalm]
I too thought the math analogy was quite interesting. Add some recursion and we can have GEB for meetings. Ha!
I don't use forcing functions enough, which may imply missed opportunities to trade slightly higher-stress and increased busywork for greater productivity.
As an example, if you think there might be any sort of pushback, just never stop talking. Once a manager talked for 35 straight minutes to answer a question on an unpopular decision. By the end there were no follow-ups because everyone was too confused and checked out to care.
"A recurring meeting serves as a powerful forcing function for long-running projects."
No it doesn't. It serves as a burden ball that gets kicked around on the calendar field once the value of the series has been tapped out but no one wants to cancel it.
Oh, and half the company leadership expects me to also stand up a professional "agile software development capability" in the rest of my time while the other half parrots a sentiment from before we grew from 500 to 3000 people that "we aren't a software development company." Well, neither is a bank, but banks employ armies of software developers and they don't tend to underfund them. When exactly I'm supposed to perform my supervisor functions and annual trainings is left as an exercise to the unpaid overtimers.
Sigh I need a new job. I never wanted to be a defense contractor in the first place.
The trick is to block your calendar with 30min slots to approx. 80% of capacity. If your calendar is private, these won't be challenged. This leaves you some space to do the work, some other space to get random meetings in and if you're lucky, everyone is happy.
I think this is the price to pay for a high-profile role.