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msteffen 7 minutes ago [-]
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 while you're at it.
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.
tikhonj 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
steve_adams_86 16 minutes ago [-]
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.
katzgrau 2 hours ago [-]
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.
mooreds 2 hours ago [-]
> 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!
smcin 56 minutes ago [-]
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, 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?
smcin 8 minutes ago [-]
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?
> 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 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).
(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.)
stdatomic 40 minutes ago [-]
This sounds like something straight from LinkedIn...
majorbugger 1 hours ago [-]
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.
thenewwazoo 26 minutes ago [-]
In contrast, I always advocated for my teams to stand up in the morning as a way to set the agenda for the day and make sure everyone was clear about what they were going to work on, as well as have an opportunity to schedule meetings with each other if needed. After that, we were done and the rest of the day was yours.
atomicnumber3 3 hours ago [-]
"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.
0x696C6961 2 hours ago [-]
From my experience the first scenario is the norm
madamelic 2 hours ago [-]
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.
---
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.
nilkn 1 hours ago [-]
Organizational power comes in various forms. If an executive cares about the project and believes the junior PM is capable of running it, then that can be all the "power" that the PM needs to herd more senior engineers. If the engineers really have that much of a problem with it, they can go complain and be promptly told to stop complaining and get back to doing their job, i.e., contributing to the project.
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.
ghaff 1 hours ago [-]
There are multiple kinds of meetings.
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.
hank2000 3 hours ago [-]
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.
eitally 3 hours ago [-]
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.
1 hours ago [-]
SanjayMehta 3 hours ago [-]
Some meetings, especially one on one, can be useful. It's very hard to say no to someone you've met, especially when your only other interaction is over the phone, email or chat.
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.
inetknght 46 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
saltyoldman 8 minutes ago [-]
Put forcing function in the title, it will force them to click it.
sumanep 20 minutes ago [-]
Almost every meeting could be an email
hyperadvanced 2 hours ago [-]
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
axus 3 hours ago [-]
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".
mooreds 2 hours ago [-]
100% agree that there are more and less valuable meetings. Agendas and todo checkins are signals of worthwhile meetings. And having a meeting end or change is a good sign too.
nomilk 2 hours ago [-]
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.
greenhat76 2 hours ago [-]
Meetings can be highly effective in getting things done if a clear and reasonable objective is set.
boron1006 1 hours ago [-]
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.
moron4hire 27 minutes ago [-]
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.
homeonthemtn 3 hours ago [-]
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.
cattown 3 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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?
> 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 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).
(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.)
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.
"[...] 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.
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.
---
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.