I hate meetings as well but I don't have another solution to replace them. Today I had the following meetings: 1 hour with new product managers to explain how we do things in Engineering, the development teams we have, and how to work with us effectively 1 hour with a customer advisory board to get feedback on how our product is or isn't serving their needs and to preview upcoming enhancements 1 hour to review new feature plans from the product team and estimate their level of difficulty 1 hour presentation from a third-party vendor whose functionality we may integrate with our product 30 minutes to get a bunch of people from different parts of the company together who seem to be independently trying to solve the same problem, and make sure we're not wasting effort Maybe we don't have the kinds of meetings people complain about. None of the above were, as a practical matter, optional for me.