What if I told you the most critical battles in software engineering aren’t fought in code repositories, but in meetings? These are the arenas where time either dies a slow, agonizing death or emerges victorious with a clear decision in hand. Engineers love to hate meetings, but the truth is, meetings aren’t the enemy. But if your engineering team’s calendar looks like a Jira board after a production outage, overloaded, chaotic, and littered with unresolved dependencies—you’re not having meetings. You’re hosting a recurring funeral for productivity.
When “Just Send an Email” Isn’t Enough: Navigating Meeting Culture in Engineering
Ever notice how we engineers can spend hours optimizing database queries to save milliseconds but then sit through hour-long meetings where the only decision made is to schedule another meeting? The irony isn’t lost on us 😀. In a world where “this meeting could have been an email” has become a battle cry, we often miss the nuanced reality of when meetings actually create value versus when they’re just ceremonial time sinks.
The Meeting Spectrum: Time Vampires vs. Decision Accelerators
Engineering meetings exist on a spectrum. At one end, we have what I call “time vampires” – meetings that drain your productive energy without giving much back and suck up your time. At the other end are “decision accelerators” – gatherings that propel projects forward with clarity and purpose.
The real villain is how we design (or neglect) them. Let’s dissect common meeting types in software product engineering—and how they can morph from soul-sucking time vampires into decisive, momentum-building engines.
1. The Stand-Up Shuffle
The most notorious time vampire is the status update meeting, Daily stand-ups are the bread and butter of agile teams. These quick-fire sessions aim to sync up the team, address roadblocks, and set the stage for the day’s tasks.
Picture this: fifteen engineers sitting in a circle, each taking turns reciting what they’re working on while everyone else mentally writes code or checks Slack.
“I’m still working on the authentication service refactoring. No blockers.” “Still debugging that performance issue. No blockers.” “Finishing up documentation. No blockers.”
This meeting is like a group text where everyone must read their message aloud. The information could be asynchronously shared in a project management tool, yet there we sit, watching the clock tick away our finite focus time. This isn’t collaboration, it’s a ritual.
The Transformation:
Turn the stand-up into a pit stop.
In a Formula One race, pit crews don’t narrate their wrench-turning; they strategize, adapt, and solve immediate problems.
A stand-up should be a 15-minute tactical huddle: “We’re stuck on the payment gateway integration, who can pair with Dev A this morning?”
Time saved: 80 hours/year per team.2. The Decision-less Discussion
Another classic time-waster is what I call the “philosophical debate” – meetings where architectural or technical approaches are discussed extensively, but no decision framework exists. where passionate engineers gather to argue about tabs vs. spaces, edge cases no user will ever encounter, and whether Kubernetes is overkill (spoiler: it always is).
“We could use microservices.” “But what about a monolith with clear boundaries?” “Have you considered serverless?”
Three hours later, everyone leaves with their original opinion intact and no clear path forward.
The Transformation: Turn these into decision factories.
Require a “pre-mortem”: Before the meeting, document: “If this design fails, here’s why.”
Ban hypotheticals: If there’s no data, customer pain point, or PRD reference, it doesn’t get airtime.
Example: “We’re choosing GraphQL over REST because our mobile team needs nested data. Let’s prototype and revisit in 3 days—no bikeshedding.”A good design review leaves the room with code to write, not existential dread.
3. The Retrospective: Therapy Session or Action Plan?
Retrospectives are like team therapy – they can be transformative or just ceremonial venting sessions. An ineffective retrospective is like complaining about the weather – lots of discussion about problems no one can change. “The requirements keep changing.” “We don’t have enough time.” Nothing actionable emerges.
The Transformation: Turn retros into a Fix-It Lab.
Ban venting without vectors: No “QA is slow.” Instead “QA handoffs take 48 hours because we lack automated smoke tests. Let’s fix that.”
Assign a “Mad Scientist”: Someone who volunteers to hack an experimental solution before the next sprint, a spike.
Example: “Our PR review cycle is slower than the govt passing a bill the citizens benefit from. Let’s trial a ‘review hour’ every afternoon with a slack/zoom/teams backchannel.”An effective retrospective identifies specific, changeable patterns and creates experiments to address them.
4. The Sprint Planning: Investment Portfolio or Wishlist?
Sprint planning can either be like creating a strategic investment portfolio or writing a letter to Santa. Poor planning meetings are wish-fulfillment exercises: “Let’s pull in all these stories and hope we finish.” They ignore constraints and set teams up for failure.
The Transformation: Turn sprint planning into investments decisions.
Effective planning meetings are like investment decisions –
consciously allocating limited resources (developer time) to generate maximum value.
They acknowledge uncertainty and build in contingency.
For example: "These three items are must-haves. These next two are stretch goals if things go smoothly."Engineering leadership playbook
Here’s my two penny on how engineering leaders should handle meetings: The challenge isn’t eliminating meetings – it’s curating which ones deserve to exist and how they should function.
Put meetings in the same bracket as code:
Refactor mercilessly. If a meeting isn’t yielding value, delete it.
Optimize for performance. Shorter, smaller, sharper.
Document. A meeting without notes is technical debt.Your team’s time is the most finite resource you have. Treat it like you’d treat prod uptime: guard it fiercely, monitor it obsessively, and never stop iterating.
The Meeting-to-Value Metric
Perhaps we need a new metric in engineering: the Meeting-to-Value ratio. How many person-hours spent in meetings divided by the value created? This forces us to be intentional about when synchronous time is truly necessary.
The next time you schedule a meeting, ask yourself: Is this synchronous time creating value that couldn’t be created asynchronously? If not, maybe it really should have been an email after all.
Your turn: Audit one meeting this week. Ask: “Did this create momentum or malaise?” If it’s the latter, nuke it. 🔥