Latest / Tech Leadership with Fexingo: Engineering Managers, CTOs, and Technical Leadership Conversations / How One CTO Eliminated All Meetings for Two Weeks
Transcript
- Lucas: So there's a CTO I've been following — runs engineering at a mid-sized SaaS company, about 120 engineers — and a few months ago she did something that sounds almost too simple to matter. Luna: I'm listening. What'd she do? Lucas: She banned all recurring meetings for two weeks. Every standup, every weekly sync, every monthly review — gone. Not cancelled, just paused. She called it a 'meeting detox.' And the results were fascinating because they were not uniformly positive. Luna: Wait, two weeks with no meetings at all? That sounds like a dream, but also kind of terrifying. How did the teams actually function? Lucas: That's exactly what I wanted to unpack. She set up a few guardrails first. Any one-on-one could happen if either person requested it. Any meeting that was truly urgent — like a production incident — obviously still happened. But everything else was off the calendar by default. Luna: And you said the results weren't all positive. What went wrong? Lucas: Right. So first the good: engineering velocity — measured by story points completed — went up about 40 percent compared to the two weeks before. Developers reported significantly more deep work time. But here's the catch: cross-team coordination took a hit. One team shipped a feature that broke another team's integration because nobody had checked in. That kind of thing. Luna: So the detox revealed that meetings were doing something useful, even if they felt wasteful. They were serving as informal coordination points. Lucas: Exactly. And look, this kind of experiment is exactly the sort of thing we love to dig into on this show — real, specific, actionable. And if today's conversation gives you something usable, we'd love your support to keep these episodes ad-free and independent. You can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just helps us keep the lights on without chasing sponsors. Luna: Yeah, that model works for us. We'd rather focus on the content than on ad reads. Lucas: So back to the experiment. After the two weeks, the CTO surveyed the whole engineering org about what to keep. The results were pretty clear. Luna: What did they decide to keep? Lucas: They permanently cancelled about 30 percent of recurring meetings. The ones that stayed were mostly cross-team syncs — the architectural review meetings, the integration checkpoints. But they reduced frequency on a lot of them. Weekly became biweekly. Biweekly became monthly. And they made a rule: no meeting without a written agenda shared at least 24 hours in advance. Luna: That agenda rule alone probably saved tons of time. I've sat through so many meetings where the first ten minutes is everyone trying to figure out why they're there. Lucas: Right. The CTO also noticed something about one-on-ones. A lot of managers kept them, but they shifted from 30-minute weekly to 20-minute weekly, and the quality actually improved because they were more focused. The async documentation also picked up — teams started writing more detailed status updates because there was no standup to verbally dump into. Luna: I've seen that in my own work. When you know you can't just say it in a meeting, you actually write it down, which is better for people who weren't there. Lucas: Exactly. One thing that surprised me: the CTO said she initially worried that senior engineers would resist the change because they relied on meetings to mentor juniors. But actually, the juniors reported higher satisfaction because they got more focused pairing sessions instead of passive listening in status meetings. Luna: So the mentoring became more intentional. That's a big win. Lucas: Yeah. And here's another number: the CTO tracked the total engineer-hours spent in meetings before and after. Before the experiment, the average engineer was in about 12 hours of meetings per week. After, it dropped to about 7. That's five extra hours per person per week for deep work. Across 120 engineers, that's 600 hours a week. Luna: That's enormous. But I'm curious — did any teams rebel? Did anyone try to sneak meetings back onto the calendar? Lucas: A little bit. A few managers created 'ad hoc syncs' that basically became recurring. The CTO had to reinforce the policy. She made it clear that if you wanted a recurring meeting, you had to get explicit approval from the director level. That cut down on the creep. Luna: It sounds like she didn't just ban meetings — she built a system to question the value of every recurring slot. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the real takeaway. The two-week ban was a forcing function, not a permanent policy. It revealed which meetings were actually essential. The ones that survived the detox had a clear purpose that couldn't be replaced by async communication. Luna: What about all-hands meetings? Did those get cut? Lucas: They kept the monthly all-hands but cut it from 60 minutes to 30. The CTO also started pre-recording the CEO's update so people could watch it async, and the live time was just for Q&A. That alone saved about 60 engineer-hours per month. Luna: Smart. I think a lot of leaders are afraid to cut meetings because they worry about losing alignment. But this experiment shows that alignment can actually improve when you force people to write things down. Lucas: Right. And the CTO shared that she's now planning to do this detox twice a year — once in the summer, once around the holidays — to keep the culture from drifting back. She said the first detox was disruptive, but the second one was much smoother because teams had already built the async habits. Luna: So the second time around, the velocity boost might be even bigger because there's less friction. Lucas: That's the hope. She also published a playbook internally — a document that explains how to run a meeting detox in your own team. I got a look at it, and it's beautifully simple. Step one: pick a two-week window with no major launches. Step two: cancel all recurring meetings. Step three: write down every meeting someone asks to reinstate and why. Step four: after two weeks, review the list and decide what stays. Luna: I love that. It's almost like a meeting zero-based budget. You start from zero and justify every meeting from scratch. Lucas: Exactly. Zero-based meeting budgeting. That's a great way to frame it. And I think that's the core insight: most meetings exist because they've always existed, not because they're still the best way to coordinate. A detox forces you to ask that question. Luna: What about external meetings? Client calls, vendor demos, that kind of thing? Lucas: Those were exempt. The detox only applied to internal recurring meetings. The CTO said external meetings are a different beast — they have different constraints. But internally, she wanted to see what happened. Luna: That makes sense. So for a team leader listening, what's the first step? Should they just go tell their team 'no meetings for two weeks'? Lucas: I'd start smaller. Maybe do a one-week detox with a single team, not the whole org. Pick a team that's already pretty autonomous. Measure their output before and after. Then use that data to convince the wider org. The CTO I mentioned started with just her own leadership team for a week before rolling it out to all of engineering. Luna: That's a lower-risk approach. And it gives you proof that it works. Lucas: Exactly. And one more thing: she emphasized that communication doesn't stop — it just changes form. Teams that had been doing daily standups switched to a shared written status document that everyone updated by 10 AM. The document was always there, searchable, and people could read it on their own time. That alone reduced interruptions. Luna: I think a lot of people fear that async communication means slower decisions, but in practice, when you write something clearly, people can respond faster because they don't have to wait for a scheduled slot. Lucas: Right. And the CTO found that decisions actually sped up for most things. The only slowdowns were on complex cross-team trade-offs that needed real-time discussion. But those are exactly the meetings they kept. So the detox helped them differentiate between coordination that can be async and coordination that truly needs synchronous conversation. Luna: That's the ideal outcome. You don't eliminate all meetings — you just eliminate the ones that are wasting time. Lucas: Exactly. And I think that's the lesson. The detox isn't about permanent meeting abolition. It's about resetting the default. Right now, the default in most orgs is 'create a meeting.' After a detox, the default becomes 'try async first.' And that's a much healthier cultural norm. Luna: So for anyone listening who's tired of meeting overload, what's one thing they can do today? Lucas: Look at your own calendar for next week. Find one recurring meeting that you suspect is low value. Cancel it. See what happens. You might be surprised at what doesn't break. Luna: I think I'll do that myself, actually. I have a weekly sync I've been dreading. Lucas: Let us know how it goes. Maybe that's a future episode. Thanks for listening.