In January 2023, Shopify ran a bot through every employee’s calendar and deleted every recurring meeting with three or more people in it. Roughly 12,000 calendar events vanished in one sweep. A month later, COO Kaz Nejatian told NPR the company had “deleted 322,000 hours of meetings,” which he compared to adding 150 people to a company of about 10,000. (Fortune’s later reporting clarified that the 322,000 hours, along with 474,000 discrete events, was the projection for the full year.)
The purge was crude on purpose. Teams were free to rebook anything they genuinely needed. The interesting number is what happened after that: by the first five months of 2023, average meeting time per person was down 14% against the same stretch of 2022, according to CFO Jeff Hoffmeister in that same Fortune piece. People rebooked some of what was deleted. Not all of it. That gap is a rough measurement of how many recurring meetings existed only because nobody had ever been asked to justify them a second time.
Here is my position: product managers create more recurring meetings than almost anyone else in a company, so they should be the ones putting an expiry date on every one of them.
The product manager is the biggest meeting creator in the building
Look at what a single launch does to a calendar. There is the weekly sync with engineering and design. The biweekly stakeholder review with sales, support and marketing. The standing check-in with the executive sponsor. A go-to-market working group. Maybe a dependency call with the platform team. Each one was a good idea on the day it was created, because on that day there was a real coordination problem and a real decision to make.
The trouble is the recurrence setting. A one-time meeting has to earn its slot once. A recurring meeting earns it once and then never has to earn it again. The default in every calendar tool is “no end date,” and defaults win. Six months after the launch ships, the invite is still there, the attendee list has grown, and the person who created it (you) has moved on to the next initiative and created three more.
Nobody cancels these meetings because cancelling feels like a statement. If the PM drops the weekly stakeholder review, someone in sales will read it as “product doesn’t want our input anymore.” So the meeting keeps running, and everyone quietly agrees to keep paying for it.
What one standing stakeholder sync actually costs
Shopify built a calendar plugin after the purge that puts a price on every invite with three or more attendees. Its internal estimate: a 30-minute meeting with three employees typically costs between $700 and $1,600, and any meeting with an executive in it runs $2,000 or more. Put a weekly hour-long stakeholder review with eight people on that scale and you are spending a mid-level salary every year to read updates out loud.
Independent research lands in the same territory. A survey led by organizational psychologist Steven Rogelberg found respondents losing nearly six hours a week to unnecessary meetings, worth more than $25,000 per employee per year. That sample leaned heavily toward senior managers with a median salary of $185,000, so the dollar figure runs high for a typical product team. The hours are the part I believe.
The cost that matters more for product work is where those meetings land. Microsoft’s 2025 telemetry on the “infinite workday” found that half of all meetings fall between 9 and 11 a.m. and 1 and 3 p.m., the hours most people do their best focused work. The same report found people interrupted every two minutes by a meeting, email or notification, and meetings after 8 p.m. up 16% year over year. When your recurring sync sits in the middle of an engineer’s morning, you are not just spending their hour. You are splitting the four-hour block around it into pieces too small for hard problems, which is the context switching tax every delivery team already pays too much of.
How a meeting outlives its purpose
Early in my time running operations at a large telecom, I inherited a weekly cross-functional review: fourteen people, sixty minutes, every Tuesday morning. It had been set up to coordinate a billing platform cutover. The cutover had finished well over a year before I arrived.
Nobody hated the meeting enough to kill it, and nobody owned it enough to. The agenda had decayed into a round of status updates, each team reading out what was already written in the tracker. When I asked who the meeting was for, the answer was “everybody.” In my experience, a meeting that is for everybody is for nobody.
We replaced it with a short written update every Monday and a 25-minute decision meeting that only ran when there was an actual decision on the list. In the first quarter, that meeting ran in about a third of the weeks. Nobody complained about the weeks it didn’t.
The signs were obvious in hindsight, and I see the same ones in product teams constantly:
- The agenda is a recital of things that already exist in writing. If the status lives in Jira or a doc, reading it aloud adds nothing except the chance to polish a status into green.
- The person who needed the decision no longer attends. The original sponsor sends a delegate, then stops sending anyone.
- People attend “to stay informed.” Informed is what reading is for.
- Nobody in the room can name the last decision it made. This is the test that settles it.
Put an expiry date on every recurring invite
The practice I push on every product team I coach is blunt: every recurring meeting you create ends after six or eight occurrences. Set the end date when you send the invite. When it lapses, renewing it takes one sentence in the description: the decision this meeting exists to make. If you cannot write the sentence, the meeting does not come back.
Most renewals are easy. The engineering and design sync survives because it decides scope trade-offs every week. The executive check-in survives because it decides priorities. The stakeholder “alignment” review, which is mostly a broadcast, gets turned into a written update plus a standing offer: reply to this note if something needs a conversation, and I will set one up within two days.
The research on cutting meetings is encouraging, with a caveat attached. A 2022 study in MIT Sloan Management Review looked at 76 companies that had introduced meeting-free days and reported that cutting meetings by 40% came with a 71% rise in productivity. That productivity figure is self-reported by employees, not an audited output measure, so treat it as direction rather than proof. The direction is consistent with what Shopify saw and with what I have watched happen in my own teams.
The honest objection
The best argument against all of this is that meetings are where stakeholder relationships actually live. Cut too hard and you get a different failure: stakeholders who forget what you told them because the only channel left is a document they skim. Leslie Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley and Eunice Eun made a version of this point in HBR’s “Stop the Meeting Madness”. After surveying 182 senior managers, most of whom said their meetings were unproductive, the authors still argued against quick fixes like blanket bans, because meetings carry real coordination and social weight that a purge can damage.
Microsoft’s data shows the other risk: 57% of meetings are already ad hoc calls with no calendar invite. Delete the recurring sync without replacing what it did, and the coordination does not disappear. It turns into unscheduled calls that interrupt people at random.
So the expiry date is not a ban. It is a forced question. Keep your one-on-ones with the stakeholders whose support you need; those are relationship meetings and they earn their place. Keep any meeting that makes a decision. What should go is the group broadcast that survives on inertia, the one where fourteen people listen to three of them talk.
At your next renewal, ask the question that Shopify’s bot asked by force: if this meeting did not exist today, would you create it? If the honest answer is no, let the end date do its job.