alt Hacker NewsI'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.
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I've had the same experience with picking specific things to discuss over recurring meetings. A few coworkers and I have frequent, short, high-signal conversations over Slack huddles almost daily, and sometimes we need to converge with others to tackle bigger problems so we set up meetings around those topics.
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.
This is the way
I have no doubt that this approach works better than recurring meetings, but I do want to point out the trade-off, which is that this approach requires much more management attention and energy to keep their finger on the pulse and ensure all concerns are handled, compared to their time management being on autopilot with recurring meetings.
So it's a bit of a tautology. Managers who manage time better are more effective. Who knew?