How to Reduce Meeting Overhead

Every coordination meeting exists because two teams share a dependency that isn't governed by a clear interface. The meeting is the human workaround for a missing contract. You can't schedule your way out of this. You have to create better interfaces.

Track meeting hours per release. If this number is rising as you grow, your architecture isn't modular. In a truly modular system, teams release with zero meetings because interfaces are predictable and self-documenting.

Short-term: cap meeting hours per engineer per week. Long-term: define clear contracts between every component so teams can coordinate through code instead of calendars.