The meeting where everyone says yes
There's a specific type of meeting I've learned to dread. Everyone nods. Every idea gets a "yeah, makes sense." The whiteboard fills up with sticky notes, the action items multiply, and we leave feeling productive.
Then nothing happens. Or worse — everything happens, in every direction at once.
Agreement vs. alignment
Agreement is easy. Alignment is work.
Agreement means nobody pushed back. Alignment means everyone understands why we're doing this thing and what we're not doing as a result. The difference matters because products are built on trade-offs, not on consensus.
I've sat in rooms where a stakeholder says "can we also add X?" and the PM says "sure, we'll look into it." That's agreement. Alignment would be: "X is interesting, but it conflicts with our current bet on Y. Here's why we're choosing Y. If Y doesn't work, X is the next thing we try."
The parking lot that never empties
Every team has a parking lot — the place where ideas go when you don't want to say no. The problem is when the parking lot becomes the actual roadmap. I've seen teams with 40+ items in their "future considerations" list, each one added because someone in a meeting said "we should think about this" and nobody wanted to be the person who said "no, we shouldn't."
The parking lot should have an expiration date. If something has been parked for two quarters and nobody has pulled it back in, it wasn't important enough. Delete it. The act of deleting tells you something: if nobody notices, it was never a priority.
What I do instead
Before the meeting, I write down the one decision we need to make. Not the agenda — the decision. "We need to decide whether to build the integration in-house or use the vendor SDK." That's it.
During the meeting, when someone says "yes" too quickly, I ask: "What would change your mind?" If they can't answer, they haven't thought about it enough. If they can answer, we've just discovered a risk worth tracking.
After the meeting, I send a one-line summary: "We decided X because Y. We are explicitly not doing Z." The "explicitly not doing" part is the most important sentence. It's the constraint that makes the decision useful.