[jedberg]

> For OP, it's a twice monthly 4 hour meeting with ALL product and engineering sr. mgrs and directors - FML

This sounds pretty dysfunctional. Is that a productive meeting?

I was involved in an "all leadership" type meeting that was heading in that direction, and then we switched to a memo based meeting.

Everyone wrote their update in a Google Doc, each team had a section. The expectation was that you read the memo before coming to the meeting.

Then we had an agenda with specific time blocks for each topic, and the expectation was that you came for the topics that were relevant to you, and it was totally acceptable to come and go in the middle.

The meeting was scheduled for three hours, but almost no one came for the entire three hours, and usually we didn't have enough topics to fill it all anyway.

[jcims]

OPs meeting sounds like one of those fixes where shit really got out of whack because of real or perceived communication issues, so now there's a global interlock and no excuses. It will fizzle eventually.

[stackdestroyer]

Not fizzling yet...more than 1 year in...

/me NEEDS MORE FIZZLE

[codingdave]

That sounds even more dysfunctional. Sure, you save meeting time, but why not just go one step further and put a discussion thread on each topic, and skip the meeting entirely. Because if it works as you describe, people are voluntarily siloing themselves off by skipping other meeting blocks, and you lose the one benefit such meetings have, which is to make sure the entire leadership team knows what is going on and can share their differing perspectives with each other.

[jedberg]

Because the whole leadership doesn’t need to discuss everything. The memo informs everyone and then if you have an opinion you come in for the real-time discussion.

If you don’t have an opinion then you find out what happened with the follow up email/memo.