At some point, someone decided that a half-hour meeting was the safest way to move forward. It wasn't wrong. But it became the default. And that's where things get dangerous.
Not sure what the next step is? Schedule a sync.
Need a decision? Quick call.
Want to share an update? Drop 6 people into a 45-minute calendar block.
The problem isn't that meetings exist - it's that we've made them our first move instead of our last resort. It's that we've forgotten what they cost.
A 30-minute meeting with 5 people isn't half an hour. It's 2.5 hours of product time. It's a fragment of focus pulled away from writing, building, designing, thinking, learning. And those fragments add up.
And I get it. In product work, ambiguity is everywhere. We crave certainty. And meetings promise certainty. A sense that if we can just talk it through, we'll feel clearer.
But here's what I've learned (the hard way): Meetings don't fix ambiguity. They just wrap it in nice slides and hope someone else decides.
You know that quiet sigh when a meeting pops up on your calendar? The creeping sense your day is slipping away into blocks of "alignment," "sync," and "quick catch-up."
I've seen it across every product org I've worked with. A stand-up turns into a stand-still. A planning session becomes a therapy session. A sync call somehow ends with more uncertainty than it started with.
We're not bad at meetings. We're just overusing them as a substitute for clarity.
This is especially brutal in product teams, where our greatest edge is speed of learning. When we burn cycles waiting for everyone to be in the same (virtual) room, we don't just slow down - we miss the moment entirely. And when impact isn't the currency, momentum is all we've got..
In an AI-accelerated world - where iteration cycles are collapsing and feedback loops are tightening - the winners won't be the ones with the best meeting culture. They'll be the ones who make confident decisions, ship fast, and reduce coordination drag at every opportunity.
So what do we do?
- Default to async. Clarity scales better than calls. Write things down. Share context. Invite feedback. Let people engage on their own time.
- Decide who decides. Not every decision needs a group hug. Give someone the mandate and the trust to move.
- Kill zombie meetings. If a recurring meeting no longer serves a purpose, don't keep it around out of habit.
- Protect focus time like it's your job. Because it is. If you're a PM, engineer, or designer - your calendar should reflect your craft, not just coordination.
None of this means "no more meetings." Some things are better face-to-face (even if it's over Zoom). Nuance. Tension. Trust. Relationship-building. As I wrote about in "On Teams and Flow," the magic happens when people really connect and move as one.
But those moments should be deliberate, not automatic.
So next time you're about to schedule a sync, pause and ask:
Is this actually the fastest path to the outcome we need?
Or are we defaulting to a meeting because it feels familiar?
Meetings should accelerate product momentum - not replace it.
