The first thing to understand about a meeting-heavy culture is that the meetings aren't the problem.
They're the symptom. Something underneath is missing, and the meetings are the team's way of compensating for it. You can audit calendars, kill recurring syncs, write policies about async-first - and if you haven't touched the underlying thing, the coordination finds another way in. Slightly different shape, same weight.
So what are they compensating for?
The most common one is direction. When people don't have a clear picture of where things are going - not just the roadmap, but the why behind it, the bets being made, the problems being treated as solved - they fill the gap with conversation. Not laziness, not dysfunction. A rational response to ambiguity. If nobody's told you what good looks like, you schedule a meeting to find out.
Closely related: nobody knows who decides. Meetings become the default decision-making mechanism when ownership is unclear - when it's not obvious whether a call sits with the PM, the lead, the founder, or the group. So the group convenes. And if the ownership is still unclear when the meeting ends, another one gets scheduled.
There's a subtler version of this too, which took me longer to name. Teams that don't have a clear picture of what they're not doing are constantly relitigating scope. Everything feels like fair game. Every new problem that surfaces gets a discussion, because nobody's confident enough in the edges to say "that's not ours right now" and keep moving. Strategy is as much about what you're explicitly setting aside as what you're pursuing - and when that's absent, it shows up in the calendar.
And then there's the one nobody likes to say out loud: meetings are cover. A decision made in a room, with six people present, is a decision nobody made alone. That feels safer - especially in orgs where being wrong carries a cost, where mistakes get owned by individuals rather than absorbed by teams. The meeting isn't creating clarity. It's distributing responsibility. And in that environment, you can't just tell people to send a Slack instead - because the meeting was never really about efficiency.
A 30-minute meeting with five people isn't half an hour. It's 2.5 hours of product time, fragments of focus pulled from writing, building, designing, thinking. That cost is real and worth naming. But the reason to fix the underlying conditions isn't just to get the calendar back - it's because those conditions are what's actually slowing the team down. The meetings are just where you see it.
When direction is clear, people move without asking. When ownership is explicit, decisions get made without a room. When scope has edges, the team knows what to ignore. When mistakes are treated as information rather than liability, individuals stop hedging and start moving.
Fix those things and the meetings mostly take care of themselves.
