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.
"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.
"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.
> Engineers: All a meeting does is distract from work.
> 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.
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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Daily is a very different psychological load. Even when it's "only 15 minutes" it can dominate the start of the day and make every morning feel like a small performance review...
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.
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.
We had that and major part of communication just stopped. People stopped talking about issues or solving them, unless those were super large. The bar to "and now trigger meeting in a team where manager seems to dislike" was too high.
Communication larger died, except a smaller "friendship minigroup".
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.
Hello. For what it's worth, I'm in a similar role (Security Architecture) in a different sector. It's the same here.
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.
Yeah, I know that trick. It's... semi-effective. Less effective the closer we get to a deadline, which is exactly when I need it to be the most effective.
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.
You know what, I read it again and I don't even disagree with the concrete advice in the post—weekly meeting, starting with open tasks from last week—which I would characterize as a basic, ubiquitous, almost anodyne organizational coordination tool. My problem is this part:
> 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.
My point being, in case it’s still unclear, that “I’ll create pressure on everyone and then progress will happen,” is IMO bad management.
Sometimes the problem is not enough motivation, though I think that if you hire well, that’s rare—the best engineers are intrinsically creative and motivated. Often, lack of progress is due to some other organizational problem—too much toil, unclear priorities, conflict, etc—and just adding pressure until progress happens is the manager equivalent of whining until your sister does your chores for you.
Even if it works, either
1. the team is working around the problem (which the manager doesn’t know about or understand, and isn’t dealing with it) and will eventually get fed up and leave, or
2. someone pushes extra hard and solves the problem for everybody else. Now, that person the de-facto leader, though they’re not recognized, and in fact are often penalized for getting distracted from the paper priorities, since the managers who do this are rarely interested in the mechanics of how their problem was solved. Respect for management is lost, because they don’t understand what’s happening. Eventually everyone gets fed up and leaves.
Managers can’t solve every problem themselves, of course, but the manager needs to understand what the problems are, explicitly set the priority of solving them, and understand and celebrate the solutions when they’re found.
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.
Yeah. The real thing that creates pressure is the people applying that pressure if progress is not made. If people act that way the meeting is an effective way to do this on a weekly base instead of letting it languish over month(s).
If nobody in the meeting actually cares that the feature isn't getting finished, then the meetings value is rather small.
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.
I've been fascinated by the dynamic of large scale OSS projects operating without management vs. industrial scale software development since I was working on my PhD around 2000. Basically, something like the Linux kernel involves thousands of contributors and yet ships reliable as clockwork every 8-10 weeks. Their management structure is basically a simple hierarchy of lead engineers gate keeping their source trees with the ultimate authority in the form of Linus Torvalds who merges changes only if they meet his criteria. Anything that receives the thumbs up goes in. And thumbs down means the contributors get to work on their patch some more.
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.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 79.3 ms ] thread"[...] 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.
It reminds me of the guy who recommended structuring software tasks to provide small regular dopamine hits rather than one large hit.
"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.
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.
I too thought the math analogy was quite interesting. Add some recursion and we can have GEB for meetings. Ha!
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.
Release manager, or whoever manages incidents, will just schedule weekly meeting of their own.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't use forcing functions enough, which may imply missed opportunities to trade slightly higher-stress and increased busywork for greater productivity.
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.
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.
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.
Communication larger died, except a smaller "friendship minigroup".
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.
Depends on the bank, some certainly offshore and/or underfund their developers just as badly as any other industry can.
They may have all the money but stockholders demand a very high rate of return for that same reason.
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.
Sometimes the problem is not enough motivation, though I think that if you hire well, that’s rare—the best engineers are intrinsically creative and motivated. Often, lack of progress is due to some other organizational problem—too much toil, unclear priorities, conflict, etc—and just adding pressure until progress happens is the manager equivalent of whining until your sister does your chores for you.
Even if it works, either
1. the team is working around the problem (which the manager doesn’t know about or understand, and isn’t dealing with it) and will eventually get fed up and leave, or
2. someone pushes extra hard and solves the problem for everybody else. Now, that person the de-facto leader, though they’re not recognized, and in fact are often penalized for getting distracted from the paper priorities, since the managers who do this are rarely interested in the mechanics of how their problem was solved. Respect for management is lost, because they don’t understand what’s happening. Eventually everyone gets fed up and leaves.
Managers can’t solve every problem themselves, of course, but the manager needs to understand what the problems are, explicitly set the priority of solving them, and understand and celebrate the solutions when they’re found.
I'm willing to cut her some slack, since I tried her job for a while and hated it.
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.
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.