Meetings are forcing functions

IMO this is such a manager-brained take. If your long-term strategic goals aren't being advanced, you have to figure out why. Talk to your team and figure out what the deal is. Talk to other teams too, while you're at it. You might accidentally solve a problem.

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.

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've gone in the opposite direction: on projects I've led, I decided to have no recurring meetings at all, very much going against the flow of the broader organization. Instead, I would set up a time when we had something specific to talk about. I wrote a short but hopefully clear description of what we needed to cover on each event that I scheduled.

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.

Nah. A forcing function creates pressure toward an outcome...a standing meeting just creates pressure toward the meeting. Those aren't the same thing.

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.

"It’s easy for long-term strategic, high-impact work to sink to the bottom of everyone’s todo list."

"[...] 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.

As a developer I have absolutely no qualms with the weekly meetings and since we're fully remote, it's actually nice to be in touch with my team mates, even if they talk about the part they're doing right now for a while.

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.

Disagree to a degree.

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.

Meetings are one type of forcing function. Anything with concrete, time-bound deliverables is a forcing function, too. In a well-managed organization with trained & competent staff, it should not require meetings to ensure progress.

Engineers: All a meeting does is distract from work.

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.

This is what sprint planning is all about. It's ostensibly to accept the work. But my God how everyone's hidden assumptions come to the surface.

If a meeting doesn't have a focused agenda and expected outcome, it's usually a waste of time for most participants. Standing meetings are the worst offenders, unless you're in a crisis situation. If you're using meetings to get status updates, my condolences.

Almost every meeting could be an email

I had lunch with a project manager a couple weeks ago, and we chatted about meetings. She was pretty adamant: Without meetings, nothing gets done.

I'm willing to cut her some slack, since I tried her job for a while and hated it.

To get the mathematical analogy back off track, some meeting series are "off-resonance" and result in lower amplitude. I'd have titled this "Weekly Meetings are Motivational".

I’m so much more of a quick huddle/sync up rather than a meeting with 10 people who each speak (in the best case) 10% of the time. Having standing meetings for war and feasting (war being sprint planning, feasting being retro/demo) is essential. Standup/status meetings are largely a bane if they last more than 10m

What other forcing functions is everyone using? (externally-imposed like meetings, or self-imposed)

I don't use forcing functions enough, which may imply missed opportunities to trade slightly higher-stress and increased busywork for greater productivity.

sometimes. often they are therapy sessions and theater.

Meetings can be highly effective in getting things done if a clear and reasonable objective is set.

Meetings are too easy to game. I worked with a bunch of new managers from LEGACY_CORP and learned the extremes of how to BS.

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.

Put forcing function in the title, it will force them to click it.

Lost me at the start:

"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.

No way, this is terrible! There are so many great work tracking tools to use or more efficient ways to communicate that accomplish the same thing. Without making a bunch of people take time out of their day so you can ask them if they remembered to do part of their job. Good management creates systems so this kind of thing isn’t needed.

I work at a (ahem) war contractor and at least 50% of my calendar in any week is filled with meetings. As the week progresses, the incidental meetings that people throw at me the day before fill up at least another 25%. I am the chief architect for two major projects, but it does leave me wondering when I'm supposed to be doing any architecting.

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.