Field notes
Notes on async-first work and meeting culture.
Essays from the rooms where cross-functional decisions get made, what works, what doesn't, and why the meeting on your calendar this week could open ten minutes in.
20 field notes
May 22, 2026
The hidden cost of a 30-minute meeting is closer to four hours than thirty minutes
A 30-minute meeting with five people doesn't cost two and a half hours of team time. It costs over four. Here's the math, and the part of it that nobody puts on the invoice.
4 min readLeadershipMay 15, 2026
No-meeting Wednesdays work, but only if you fix the meetings that survive
Asana, Shopify, and Meta all chose Wednesday. MIT says one no-meeting day a week boosts productivity 35%. Here's why blocking the day alone doesn't get you the gain, and what does.
5 min readLeadershipMay 8, 2026
How to run a roadmap review that doesn't waste the first fifteen minutes on recap
Most roadmap reviews lose the first fifteen minutes to recap, catch-up, and context refresh. Here's how to move that work to before the meeting and open with the real decision.
5 min readProductDecisionsMay 4, 2026
The two-pizza rule is not really about pizza, and it's not really about size either
Amazon's famous rule says keep meetings small enough to feed with two pizzas. The size limit is the headline. The actual lesson is about who's contributing versus who's just present.
4 min readDecisionsApril 29, 2026
Decision drift: why your team revisits the same call two sprints later
A decision made in May, re-litigated in August. Not because anyone disagreed at the time. Because nobody captured the why. Here's how decision trails stop drift.
4 min readDecisionsApril 26, 2026
How to kill the weekly status meeting without losing visibility for the people who actually needed it
The Monday 9am status meeting is recap theater. Replace it with async updates that land where the work already is, and the team that loses an hour gains the visibility the meeting was failing to provide.
4 min readLeadershipApril 22, 2026
Async decision-making frameworks: when a doc beats a meeting, and when it doesn't
Not every decision belongs in a meeting. Not every decision belongs in a doc. Here's the framework for choosing, and why most teams default to the wrong one.
5 min readDecisionsApril 15, 2026
The loudest voice wins, and what to do about it before your next sprint planning
Sprint planning rewards the people who think out loud. Here's how to surface the quiet engineer's input, the one whose call usually turns out to be right, without rebuilding the meeting.
4 min readEngineeringApril 8, 2026
How to run a retro that surfaces the real problem, not another "we should communicate better"
Most retros end with "we need better communication" or "let's improve our docs." Both are diagnoses pretending to be solutions. Here's how to get specific enough to actually change behaviour.
5 min readRetrosApril 3, 2026
Voice notes vs. written input: when each one wins in async work
A 42-second voice note can carry what a Slack thread can't. A written paragraph can carry what a voice note can't. Here's the difference, and why most teams default to the wrong one.
5 min readDistributedMarch 30, 2026
The blameless postmortem that actually finds the cause, not the safest summary
Blameless doesn't mean vague. The postmortem that says "monitoring gap" is the one that didn't get specific enough to fix anything. Here's how to keep the safety and lose the abstraction.
5 min readEngineeringRetrosMarch 26, 2026
How to get honest input from a team that's afraid to disagree in the live meeting
The retro that runs smoothly and lands nothing real isn't a facilitation problem. It's a sequencing one. Here's how to surface the things people won't say out loud.
4 min readLeadershipMarch 22, 2026
The board update your investors actually read, and the forty slides they won't
Most board decks are 40 slides; the investor reads ten and forms an opinion on three. Here's how to write the one-pager they actually want, and where the work that fed the forty slides should live instead.
4 min readLeadershipMarch 17, 2026
Cross-functional kickoff checklist: what engineering, design, and CS need before the call starts
A project kickoff that opens with the real disagreement on the table is faster, sharper, and avoids the rework that hits two sprints in. Here's what each function needs to arrive with.
5 min readProductMarch 12, 2026
The hiring debrief that doesn't drift to whoever talked first
Five interviewers, five hours of interview, thirty-minute debrief: whoever speaks first sets the frame. Move the takes out of the meeting and the decision improves before the candidate even leaves the building.
4 min readHiringMarch 6, 2026
Follow-the-sun handoffs: making decisions without waiting for the next overlap window
A distributed team across CET, EST, and SGT doesn't have a meeting problem. It has a window problem. Here's how to keep decisions moving when the overlap is forty-five minutes a day.
4 min readDistributedDecisionsFebruary 26, 2026
What a chief of staff actually does in their first ninety days
Most COS hires think they're being hired to take meetings off the CEO's calendar. The job, in the first ninety days, is the opposite: make the meetings on everyone else's calendar count.
5 min readLeadershipFebruary 19, 2026
Brainstorms that don't reward the loudest extrovert, and produce three times the ideas
Decades of research show that group brainstorming produces fewer and worse ideas than individuals working alone. Here's the structure that combines both, and why product teams that adopt it ship more interesting work.
5 min readProductFebruary 12, 2026
The five-minute meeting prep that replaces a thirty-minute one-on-one
Most 1:1s are part status update, part venting session. Here's how five minutes of structured prep before the meeting changes what gets discussed.
4 min readLeadershipFebruary 5, 2026
Calendar Tetris is not a personal problem. It is a diagnostic about your org
Knowledge workers attend 21.7 meetings a week and spend 392 hours a year in them. A manager whose calendar is fully booked isn't suffering from poor time management. The org has structural reasons for needing them in every room.
5 min readLeadership
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