The Meeting You Shouldn't Have to Attend

Not all meetings serve the same purpose.

Some meetings are collaborative. You’re there to make decisions, debate trade-offs, coordinate on strategy. Your presence matters. Your input shapes the outcome.

Other meetings are extractive. You’re there to absorb information that should have been available some other way. You’re not contributing. You’re downloading.

That second kind of meeting? You shouldn’t have to attend it.

”Sometimes I need to join the call to actually know what’s going on”

A product marketer at a large enterprise company said this to me recently. She’s responsible for updates across 20 different products. To know what’s shipping, she has to join engineering syncs, sprint reviews, and cross-functional standups.

She’s not there to give input on technical decisions. She’s there because it’s the only reliable way to learn what happened.

This is shockingly common. In conversation after conversation, I hear variations of the same theme:

“I sit in on the dev standup so I don’t miss anything important.”
“I need to be in the room when they demo to leadership, otherwise I won’t know what to write about.”
“The only way I find out about bug fixes is if I happen to be on the call when someone mentions it.”

These are smart, capable people spending hours per week in meetings where their primary function is listening.

The calendar cost

Let’s do some math.

Say you’re a product marketer covering three products. Each product has a weekly sync where shipping decisions get discussed. That’s three hours a week, at least.

You also need context from the engineering side, so you join the bi-weekly sprint review for each. Add another three hours.

And there’s the monthly leadership update where new features get demoed. Another hour.

That’s seven hours a week, nearly a full workday, just to stay informed about what shipped.

Now imagine you’re covering 10 products. Or 20.

The calendar fills up. The strategic work gets squeezed into the margins. And the meetings you actually need to contribute to? You show up exhausted and underprepared because you’ve been in back-to-back information extraction sessions all day.

Why this happens

The root cause is a visibility gap.

In most organizations, there’s no single source of truth for “what shipped.” Engineering tracks their work in Jira or Linear. Some of that makes it to Slack. Some gets mentioned in standups. Some just… happens, and nobody outside the team ever hears about it.

People cope. They build informal networks. They get invited to meetings where decisions happen. They develop relationships with engineers who give them a heads-up.

It works, sort of. Until the organization grows and the informal networks can’t scale. Until the PMM covering three products becomes the PMM covering ten. Until the time spent extracting information crowds out the time needed to do something with it.

The collaboration trap

Here’s the insidious part: these meetings often feel collaborative.

You’re in the room. People ask your opinion. You contribute a comment here and there. It feels like you’re participating.

Ask yourself: if you had perfect visibility into what shipped, would you need to be in this meeting?

For most “stay informed” meetings, the answer is no. You’re there because of an information gap, not because the team needs your expertise.

Real collaboration meetings are different. You’re debating positioning. You’re syncing on launch timing. You’re working through customer objections. The meeting exists because different perspectives need to converge on a decision.

The test is simple: are you there to give, or are you there to get?

What changes when visibility improves

Teams that solve the visibility problem describe a transformation in their meetings.

Instead of spending 45 minutes scrolling through what shipped, everyone shows up already informed. They’ve seen the automated updates. They know what’s new. The meeting immediately jumps to: “Here are the two things we actually need to discuss.”

A product marketer told me her meetings used to be “lengthy calls to debate product value forever.” People were processing information in real-time, so every item became a discussion. Give people the information in advance, and suddenly they come prepared with focused questions instead of exploratory ones.

Another described the shift this way: “Before, I was a human router, sitting in meetings so I could carry information to other meetings. Now I actually have time to think about what the information means.”

Declining with confidence

There’s a psychological barrier to declining meetings, especially for product marketers who need to maintain relationships across the org.

When you have reliable visibility into what shipped, you can decline with confidence.

“I saw the update on the dashboard. Looks like the new API endpoints shipped. I’ll reach out if I have questions about the customer messaging.”

“I reviewed the recap before the meeting. I’m good on everything except the pricing change. Can we do a quick 15 minutes on that specifically?”

You’re not out of the loop. You’re not missing context. You’re just choosing to consume information asynchronously and reserve synchronous time for actual collaboration.

That’s not being a bad team player. That’s being efficient.

The meeting audit

Here’s an exercise: look at your calendar for the past two weeks. For each meeting, ask:

Did I contribute something that changed the outcome?
Or was I primarily absorbing information?

For the information-absorption meetings, ask: could I have gotten this information another way?

If the answer is “yes, if someone had just written it down” or “yes, if there was a reliable update feed,” then you’ve identified a meeting that shouldn’t need to exist.

The goal is to attend the right meetings, the ones where you’re genuinely collaborating, and get the information from other meetings through more efficient channels.

Freeing up the calendar

The time you get back from unnecessary meetings is significant. But even more significant is the mental energy.

Context-switching between back-to-back meetings is exhausting. Every meeting has its own frame, its own participants, its own emotional register. By the fifth meeting of the day, you’re barely absorbing anything.

Free up the extraction meetings, and you have time for deep work. Time to actually think about positioning. Time to craft messaging that resonates. Time to do the strategic work that product marketing exists to do.

You shouldn’t have to attend a meeting to learn what your own company shipped.

If you’re spending hours per week in meetings just to stay informed about product changes, let’s talk about how Changebot can give you visibility without the calendar tax.