Can a company run without managers, meetings and one-on-ones?

Jeff Lawson · Jun 28, 2021 · hedged

A flat structure with everyone reporting directly to the founder works at three to five people, but at some point — for Twilio, around 30 people — you hit a tipping point where an org chart that isn't just a straight line is needed to make sense of things and make progress.

He was persistently frustrated at ~30 people and only saw why when asked to draw the org chart and found a straight line of everyone reporting to him

Scope: based on his own experience at Twilio

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Severin Hacker · May 19, 2025

Fully flat organisations with no managers, levels or hierarchy do not work beyond a certain scale — you need layers and career progression

The oldest surviving organisation in the world, the Catholic Church, is extremely hierarchical, which suggests there is a reason for hierarchy

Scope: at a certain scale

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Paul Erlanger · Jun 27, 2026

A company can run extremely horizontally — no meetings, no one-on-ones, no hierarchy, everyone self-reporting — at least at small scale, though this will have to change past some headcount

Scope: currently at 17 people; expects it to break at a certain size

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Daniel Dines · Dec 18, 2024

Regular one-to-ones and management discipline are overrated — he doesn't believe in one-to-ones even with his directs

They give the impression of doing work without actually doing work; if you can't call each other for an honest, candid discussion, a scheduled one-to-one won't fix it

Scope: prefers working from dynamically reassessed priorities

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Edwin Chen · Jul 21, 2025 · hedged

Standing weekly one-on-one meetings are almost a negative sign, indicating you don't know what your people are doing; the company is ruthless about killing unnecessary meetings

If you need a weekly one-on-one, it means you aren't talking daily in Slack and don't know what your collaborators are doing — you're waiting for the meeting to surface problems instead of raising them as they arise

Scope: he keeps no one-on-ones and a largely blank calendar himself; people arriving from Google or Facebook default to the habit

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David Heinemeier Hansson · Apr 14, 2020

Meetings are only good for vigorous debate among a handful of already well-informed people who disagree and need to reach a shared conclusion

Debate requires participants who share the same information and are at opposite ends of an issue; beyond four or five people it already becomes problematic

Scope: two to four people; five starts to break down; participants must already share the same facts

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Jason Citron · Nov 25, 2024

Live meetings are only genuinely required for expansive collective brainstorms and for resolving live disagreements after everyone has loaded context asynchronously

Brainstorms need the creative back-and-forth to generate many options; debates go faster and richer when participants arrive already full of context

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Jason Citron · Nov 25, 2024

Losing broad participation and discussion in product reviews is a feature, not a cost — most decisions don't need it, and the CEO should just give direct feedback

A 20-person product review turns feedback into a bizarre ceremony; he wants to be direct rather than have everyone talk

18:35 Large group product reviews should become direct feedback not broad discussion

Fabien Pinckaers · Feb 12, 2025

Most CEOs manage their time wrongly by filling their calendars with external meetings, coffees and events when their own company needs them more

Looking at CEO agendas, they are constantly meeting outside people, but the company needs them more than the external people do

32:53 Recurring meetings should be banned teams working together daily dont need them

Antoine Le Nel · Oct 18, 2024

A fixed standing meeting structure removes the need for ad hoc meetings, because there is already a meeting for every topic

His agenda is identical every week and already set until mid next year, so anything that needs discussing has a slot; you just repeat

34:18 Fixed standing meeting schedule eliminates need for ad hoc meetings

Antoine Le Nel · Oct 18, 2024

Large team meetings are worth running even with 40 attendees who don't speak, because they are where culture and expectations get transmitted — especially under remote working

Even as a passive participant you see how things happen, what the expectations are, and what the team is trying to achieve and how it delivers

34:53 Large passive attendance meetings transmit culture and expectations especially remote

Geoff Charles · Dec 6, 2023

A product development process should have only two recurring meetings — a Monday leads meeting and a Tuesday team-wide scrum — with every other meeting scheduled ad hoc around a specific blocker, question or brainstorm.

Keeping recurring meetings to a minimum means every other meeting is extremely rare and therefore extremely well run.

12:04 Minimal recurring meetings plus ad hoc scheduling for everything else

Raaz Herzberg · Dec 12, 2025

The non-obvious trait required to succeed at Wiz is being a hands-on doer who owns outcomes and won't blame other teams for blocking them

Wiz has few meetings, no strategy discussions, no long documents, a flat org with no managers of managers, everyone takes customer calls, and the co-founder VP of Engineering still writes code

50:56 Flat meeting light org works at scale only if you hire pure doers

Chad Peets · Jan 9, 2026

The right cadence is weekly one-on-ones with every direct report, and frequent ad hoc contact is not a substitute

ad hoc calls cover a specific issue the caller raised, whereas a one-on-one focuses on what's going on in that person's business

63:45 Weekly one on ones are mandatory ad hoc contact is no substitute