A tool for fewer, more effective meetings
This guest post was authored by May Wong, a thoughtful product ops professional who has been a tremendous thought partner to me over the last year. They run ProductTO, Toronto’s leading product management discussions community, and produces Product Conversations on LinkedIn every other Friday (links). They’re also on the hunt for their next product operations role, and I can confidently say would be an amazing asset to your team.
“I’d love to talk to you about my challenges at work as a PM! My calendar opens up in 2 weeks, unless this release gets delayed.”
When I first joined that company as the solo product operations person, the biggest struggle from the product team was trying to get on their calendars.
I was not surprised. I came from the world of extreme sales-led product orgs. PMs bogged down in operations and project management was typical. But I wondered – just how bad was it?
PMs were frustrated with the amount of meetings, but they felt it was beyond their control. It was impossible to block time for focused work given their current calendar commitments.
Some people were working ridiculous amounts of overtime: online at 9 pm wrapping up work for the day, and up again at 8:30 am to talk to the devs in India.
The PMs needed their working hours back to effectively focus on discovery and strategy.
This was the meeting audit process I used to find the root causes of the issues and reduce PM meeting time by 3 hours per week, a 27% decrease in meetings. The perceived value of meeting time went up 50%.
Time is not the only cost
The goal of the meeting audit is to focus on improving a costly part of our communication structure.
Meeting cost includes several elements:
- The direct salary cost of the individuals in the meeting
- Context switching
- Opportunity costs associated with the time not spent doing high value things, like actual development work for engineers or discovery for PMs and UX
Reducing costs can be done by removing meetings, but can also be achieved through restructuring or adding some infrastructure to augment the impacts of decisions or communications made in a meeting.
Set a clear scope from the beginning
There will be meetings that are high priority, as well as others beyond your control to change. The goal can’t be to fix every meeting, but to fix what is inside your control.
These are the meetings and parameters that product leadership can control:
- Recurring meetings that are required for PMs
- Number of PMs per meeting
- Meeting purpose, outcomes and structure
I set ad-hoc meetings and 1:1s out of scope. If we fixed our core communications, the need for those would evolve.
I also decided agile ceremonies were out of scope. There were already people looking into changing the way we worked on the engineering side, and I was happy to let them do what they needed to do, and advocate for product when needed.
Go-to-Market was the most important area and my top priority. There were a lot of launch issues, and the meetings weren’t doing their job. It had the most 1:1s popping up and where alignment was needed the most.
One of the things I strongly recommend is to set an end date for how long you want to run this audit.
1.5 quarters works well because then you get to hit all the quarterly meetings, especially if your organization has a heavy emphasis on QBRs or a quarterly roadmapping process.
The meeting audit should be a project with an end date. An evergreen meeting tracker becomes needless process and could get in your way of future change.
How to run a meeting audit
There are 4 steps in a meeting audit:
- Discovery and data gathering
- Prioritize the work
- Take action
- Review your progress (and end the audit).
This process is guided by the Meeting Audit Spreadsheet, a tool for you to be able to address the cost of your recurring meeting overhead and the value that each meeting brings to the outcomes that you care about.
On the front page of the spreadsheet are some values for you to enter. These values drive the calculations in the rest of the spreadsheet.

There are also dropdown values below that which you can customize to fit your organization’s particular situation. You will need to edit the categories, and may want to adjust the frequency selections or add new actions.

Now that the tool is set up for your organization, let’s walk through how I ran the meeting audit and what I learned, step-by-step.
Step 1: Discovery & data gathering
In a 1:1 with every PM, I gathered a list of their recurring meetings and added them to the spreadsheet. I had the PMs invite me to every single meeting with teams outside product-development, and I went to observe what was really happening.
I entered these values into the spreadsheet, and you can enter them on the “working sheet”:
- Star rating (the participants’ perceived value of this meeting)
- Category
- Meeting Name
- Purpose
- # of PMs in each meeting
- Duration
- Frequency
Here’s what the output of my initial discovery looked like:

Once this data has been entered, the spreadsheet calculates a number of useful metrics:
- Percentage of PM time spent in recurring meetings
- Percentage of high value meeting time (4 or 5 ⭐)
- Percentage of low value meeting time (1 or 2 ⭐)
- Total meeting hours per PM
- Total meeting hours with 50%+ of your PMs
The output is a visual dashboard.
IMPORTANT: When you’re done gathering data, click the button to lock the “Data Gathering” tab and propagate your numbers in the “Working Sheet” tab. The “Data Gathering” tab will be your record of your starting state, while the “Working Sheet” tab becomes where you record all the changes you’re making and track your progress.

Once you have this data visualized, the next step will be to prioritize individual meetings to match your strategy.
Step 2: Prioritize
Move over to the“Working Sheet” tab.
For me, the percentage of PM time spent in recurring meetings came out to 28.9%. This means that if a PM wiped their calendar, they would still spend almost 30% of their time in recurring meetings.
It was clear I needed to get this metric down, so I started focusing on the most important categories where I could make a difference.
I grouped the meetings by categories and cleaned up duplicates.
I recommend prioritizing categories of meetings first, focused around process areas and stakeholders groups. Then, evaluate the meetings in that category.
Evaluate meetings
Decent meetings usually fall into one of these three buckets:
- Decision making – especially complex decisions;
- Early co-creation with lots of rapid fire discussion points;
- Dedicated time for communications or ceremony.
You need different people and meeting structures for each one.
I asked these questions when investigating a meeting:
- Which above bucket(s) does this meeting fall in?
- Given the purpose of the meeting, do we have the right people?
- Is the meeting structured to serve the intended outcomes?
- Is there a better way of achieving the intended purpose?
You’ll choose to either keep the meeting as-is, improve it, or cancel it. Sometimes you’ll need a new meeting too, and that’s okay. The spreadsheet lets you pick a category in the “action” field.
Action | Description |
Keep | Leave meeting as-is |
Needs Investigation | Flagged for evaluation next |
Evaluation | Investigation and solutioning underway. |
Improved | Done meeting changes and have run the new format at least once. |
Cancelled | This meeting has been removed off everyone’s calendar. |
New | This was added over the audit (by the audit or external factors). |
Now that you know which meetings you’re going to be working on first and next, it’s time to do something about them.
Step 3: Take Action
For each meeting or blocks of meetings, I tried to understand their intended purpose and current outcomes. If they weren’t in alignment, I solved for that intended purpose. You should keep the “working sheet” updated as you make changes.
Keep Meeting
Surprisingly, this is often the hardest decision to be made. No meeting is ever perfect, but there may be other things that would be better worth your focus. Change always has a cost.
And sometimes meetings are good. Mark as Keep and move on.
Improve Meeting
There are many parts of a meeting that can be improved. Some guiding questions I asked for each one:
- Should we redefine the purpose of this meeting?
- What sort of preparation is involved? Do we need another meeting to make this one more effective?
- Do we expect any objections to these changes?
- Do we need a tool or a template instead or in addition?
- Should we make an iterative improvement or do we need to build a whole new ceremony?
These questions helped me figure out what a good solution would look like. From there, I started to design the new solution. Some key things I considered:
- Are there additional costs?
- Who owns this new meeting going forward?
- Who do I need to engage?
- What does success look like?
Test it out. For more complex changes, I made sure to have participants keep evolving it over time. Some meetings took multiple iterations to get right.
Cancel Meeting
Before cancelling a meeting, I always made sure that the meeting’s communications purposes were served elsewhere. It’s usually better to run another bad meeting than to let critical communications fall.
Cancelled meetings could be replaced with a Slack channel, a ticket, a written knowledge base, or combined with other meetings. You could also just drop it if people are showing up with no agenda.
Step 4: Review progress
A few weeks after I changed a meeting, I would follow up with the participants. At this point I would update the value rating in the spreadsheet and make sure my records are up-to-date. This allowed me to evaluate progress.
I did not set an end date the last time I did this, so the project went on for about 6-9 months (this is why I now strongly recommend setting an end date). Here are our outcomes:
Current | Before | Net change | % change | |||
% of PM time spent in recurring meetings | 21.0% | 28.9% | -7.9% | -27% | ||
% of high value meeting time (4 or 5 ⭐) | 67.2% | 43.8% | 23.3% | 53% | ||
% of low value meeting time (1 or 2 ⭐) | 19.1% | 36.9% | -17.9% | -48% | ||
Total meeting hours per PM | 7.9 | 10.8 | -3.0 | -27% | ||
Total meeting hours with 50%+ of your PMs | 3.1 | 5.7 | -2.6 | -45% |
This is automatically calculated for you in the Working Sheet. It gives you a nice little progression check while you work, but the final numbers at the end of the audit is where you’ll likely find the most value.
By removing the legacy processes and giving people room to breathe, I saw my organization moving again. The gridlock was gone.
Get everyone’s time back
If too many meetings is a top complaint of your product managers, run a meeting audit.
One of the most powerful effects of a meeting audit is it makes it easy to show people that the way we work today is unsustainable.
Some qualitative results of our audit:
- PMs felt like they had much more time back and that they were “wasting less time”.
- We didn’t stop at meetings. This opened the door to completely reimagine our communication and alignment flows with the go-to-market teams. The feedback from the head of sales 3 months in: “I’m really happy with the new updates from the product team and how well our teams are communicating now!”
- The improved communications naturally resolved some of the tensions in the org, reducing the amount of stakeholder alignment work PMs had to do.
Overall, this reset freed up focus time for doing important product strategy work. Streamlining communications was critical for this team’s success.
To review, the four key steps:
- Fill out the spreadsheet and understand your context.
- Prioritize what you’re doing next.
- Build your solutions, one at a time.
- Measure your outcomes from this audit.
An additional bonus: while gathering the data for the audit, you will have many conversations with stakeholders about what they need from the product team to be successful. This is a powerful way to collect additional data, not just about meetings, to help the company thrive.
If you’d like to do this yourself, here’s the Meeting Audit Spreadsheet, free to copy and adapt with attribution. And please share your stories of successful meeting audits!