Run Better Meetings with This Expert-Level Advice

Meetings are the biggest productivity leak in most tech orgs, and this piece offers a no-fluff playbook to stop the bleed. It pulls insights from leaders at Slack, Uber, and SoundCloud, showing why the default habit of endless recurring meetings is a problem and how to replace it with purpose-driven, time-boxed alternatives.

Peter Deng's rule is simple: cancel every recurring meeting until you can justify it. He treats meetings as impermanent, giving each a clear expiration date and forcing the team to ask what problem the gathering solves. By stripping back to the essentials and only rebuilding meetings that address a specific need-like a weekly status sync or a product review-teams regain clarity and avoid the ritual of round-robin updates.

Michael Lopp (Rands) drills down on one-on-ones, insisting on a fixed weekly slot of at least 30 minutes, preferably 45, with no rescheduling. The goal isn't status; it's a conversation about ideas, career goals, and feedback. He recommends preparing three discussion topics in advance to keep the dialogue flowing, turning a potential vent session into a constructive exchange that fuels growth.

David Noël's overhaul of SoundCloud all-hands shows how to make large-scale meetings worth attending. He sets a predictable cadence, chooses a unifying theme tied to quarterly priorities, and assigns a curator and a host to own content and logistics. Production starts three weeks out, includes test runs, remote-friendly visuals, and a live Q&A that pulls questions from multiple channels. Post-meeting surveys keep the experience sharp, aiming for 80-90% satisfaction.

The article stitches these practices together, giving technical leaders a concrete toolkit to redesign meetings at every level-team, board, and company-so they become engines of alignment instead of drains on energy.