Your company's obsession with meetings is destroying your product team's ability to think.
I used to believe the problem was time management. I've since realized it's something more insidious: we've built organizations where the appearance of productivity—synchronous communication, calendar Tetris, inbox zero—has completely displaced actual productive work.
Nothing illustrates this dysfunction better than the modern PM's relationship with breakfast. What should be 15 minutes of fuel and focus has become a multi-variable optimization problem. And the saddest part? We've normalized it so completely that we make jokes about it instead of fixing it.
The Optimal Consumption Window (A Case Study in Organizational Failure)
The "ideal" breakfast consumption window at most companies: 6:45 AM - 7:15 AM. Before your APAC stakeholders wake up. Before your European counterparts go to lunch. Before the American meeting industrial complex spins up.
You're eating breakfast at 6:45 AM because your organization has failed to protect your time. Not because "that's just how global companies work."
The real question nobody asks: Why does your company allow any recurring meeting before 9 AM or after 5 PM local time? The answer is cowardice. Leadership won't make the hard call about who actually needs to be in which meetings, so everyone attends everything and eats breakfast in the dark.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Every good product needs metrics, and breakfast is no exception. Here are the critical KPIs for measuring breakfast success:
- Protein-to-Meeting Ratio (PMR): Maintain a minimum of 12g protein per scheduled sync
- Time-to-First-Slack: Should not exceed 2 minutes (we're professionals here)
- Breakfast Net Promoter Score: Target is 8+ (as measured by your energy levels in your first morning meeting)
Coffee Requirements Specification
Coffee intake should follow an agile methodology, with continuous deployment throughout the morning. Initial MVP (Minimum Viable Pour) should begin at first wake-up call, with subsequent iterations every 30-45 minutes.
Current Sprint Coffee Count: 1 (Use increment button as needed)
The Meeting Paradox
As any seasoned PM knows, meetings follow the law of inverse productivity: the more important your breakfast, the more likely you are to have conflicting meetings. Our current data shows:
Current Morning Meeting Count: 3 (Numbers only go up)
Success Metrics
As the ancient product management proverb states: "A successful breakfast should be measured not by the calories consumed, but by the number of Slack messages sent while eating."
Key Success Factors:
- Multi-tasking capability (minimum 3 simultaneous activities)
- One-handed eating proficiency
- Strategic mute button usage during chewing
- Slack response time < 30 seconds (even with mouth full)
The Real Conclusion
Here's what I actually believe: No meeting before 10 AM. No meeting after 4 PM. No meetings over 30 minutes without a written agenda and clear decision to be made.
If your organization can't function under these constraints, the problem isn't the constraints. The problem is that you've built a company that substitutes synchronous communication for actual decision-making authority.
Every PM eating breakfast during a standup is a symptom of an organization that values presence over output. Every "quick sync" that could have been a Slack message is theft—theft of the focused time your product team needs to actually build something.
Stop joking about breakfast meetings. Start declining them.
About the Author: Jonathan Haas is a Product Manager who has stopped attending meetings before 9 AM and discovered, shockingly, that the company continued to function.