Meetings Are Where Roadmaps Go To Die: The Three-Element Meeting Filter

Before Hercules could attempt any of his twelve labors, he had to determine if the task was worthy of a demigod's strength. Slay the Nemean Lion? Yes. Help a neighbor move furniture? Not so much. The power wasn't just in his ability to complete the labor. It was in his discernment about which labors deserved his effort in the first place.

Your calendar deserves the same discernment.

Most meeting invitations arrive claiming urgency, promising alignment, demanding your presence. But when you ask them to prove their worth, they have nothing. No clear decision to make. No single owner accountable for the outcome. No preparation that respects your time. Just another hour where your roadmap goes to die.

Here's what that costs: $399 billion lost annually to poorly organized meetings in the U.S. alone. The average employee now spends 18 hours per week in meetings, with executives hitting 23 hours. Worse, 71% of senior managers call these meetings unproductive. You're not imagining it.

Your Portfolio Should Gatekeep Your Calendar

Even Hercules had a framework. The Oracle at Delphi didn't hand him a vague list of suggestions; she gave him twelve specific labors, each worthy of his strength. Your portfolio should function the same way: a clear map of what deserves your effort and what doesn't.

Picture a life science tools company with a typical portfolio: sample prep kits, qPCR reagents, recombinant proteins, and emerging automation platforms. Now add the meetings: weekly portfolio reviews for each product line, cross-functional validation meetings with R&D, commercial readiness syncs for upcoming launches, competitive intelligence reviews, and field feedback forums.

Each initiative feels critical. Each has a recurring meeting. Your calendar shows 40+ hours of commitments per week, yet none result in actual decisions. Should you prioritize the assay kit launch or the antibody validation expansion? Accelerate the automation workflow or invest in the companion software? Expand into proteomics or double down on genomics?

When everything is a priority, nothing is. Prioritization is a Product Manager's superhero strength.

The Three Horizons framework makes this concrete. Horizon 1 captures your core business generating revenue today (60-70% of resources). Horizon 2 covers emerging opportunities 12-36 months out (20-30%). Horizon 3 holds transformational bets 3-5 years away (10%). If you've done portfolio planning correctly, you know exactly where every initiative sits.

Here's the logic that should govern your calendar: If it's not in the portfolio, you don't meet about it.

The Three-Element Meeting Filter

Before any meeting earns a slot on your calendar, it must pass three tests. Not two. All three. Think of these as the labors a meeting must complete before it deserves your strength. Like Hercules facing the Nemean Lion, the Lernaean Hydra, and the Erymanthian Boar, each labor tests a different kind of worthiness.

1. Decision: What Binary Choice Gets Made?

When Hercules arrived to slay the Nemean Lion, there was no ambiguity about the outcome: either the lion dies, or Hercules does. The labor had a clear, binary resolution.

Think about the meetings that actually move work forward at some of the most respected life science companies. A validation review where the team decides: do we proceed to beta testing or go back to formulation? A portfolio prioritization where leadership commits: do we fund the automation module or the companion software? A launch readiness check where the answer is go or no-go for the trade show announcement.

These meetings end with a clear outcome. One path is chosen. Resources are committed or reallocated. Everyone leaves knowing what happens next.

Now think about the meetings that don't work. "Let's align on the competitive landscape." "We should discuss the Q3 pipeline." "I want to get everyone's input on the messaging." These aren't decisions. They're discussions masquerading as work.

The test: Can you name the specific yes/no or A/B choice that will be resolved? If not, it's not a meeting. Send a Slack update. Share a Google doc for async comments. Don't burn an hour of calendar time for information transfer.

2. Owner: Who's the Single DRI?

Apple has a term they use relentlessly: DRI, the Directly Responsible Individual. Every meeting agenda item has a single name next to it. Every project has one owner.

This does two things: it clarifies who must attend (the DRI and the people who can unblock their decision), and it clarifies who shouldn't (everyone else). When Shopify deleted 12,000 recurring meetings in January 2023, they preserved one-on-ones but eliminated everything with 3+ people. Why? Because most multi-person meetings exist only because nobody was brave enough to exclude anyone.

The result of Shopify's purge: 322,000 hours reclaimed, a 33% reduction in meeting time, and one engineer reported that "for the first time in a long time, they got to do what they were hired to do."

The test: Who is the single person accountable for this meeting's outcome? If the answer is "the team" or "we all own it," that's diffused responsibility. No DRI, no meeting.

3. Document: Can People Read Before They Talk?

The worst meetings start with someone presenting information that could have been read in advance. Twenty minutes of context-setting. Slides walking through data everyone is seeing for the first time. Half the room squinting at a screen while the presenter narrates what they're looking at.

Flip this. If a decision is important enough to warrant a meeting, it's important enough to warrant preparation. Send the competitive analysis, the validation data summary, or the launch readiness checklist 24 hours before the meeting. Make it clear: "Read this before we meet. We'll spend our time debating the decision, not reviewing the data."

This shifts the work to before the meeting, where it belongs. It also exposes meetings that shouldn't exist. If you can't produce a document worth reading, you probably don't have a decision worth making.

The test: Has the meeting owner created a document that required real thought to produce? Can attendees review it beforehand? If you're asking people to show up cold, you're stealing hours from their roadmap work to compensate for lack of preparation.

When Mortals Learn From “the Gods”

The myths weren't just entertainment. They were instruction. And some modern companies have absorbed the lesson.

Shopify's COO Kaz Nejatian looked at the company's calendar in January 2023 and saw "meeting creep." His response was nuclear: delete 12,000 recurring meetings instantly, institute meeting-free Wednesdays, and restrict large meetings to a six-hour Thursday window.

His philosophy: "Meetings are a bug. If you properly root cause them, you will find a trust issue, a clarity issue, or a missing API." He painted a picture: "Imagine if Van Gogh had to paint Starry Night while perpetually being interrupted every 20 minutes."

Six months later, when meetings crept back, Shopify deployed a cost calculator showing the real price of every meeting in red numbers. A 30-minute meeting with three employees? $700-$1,600. A one-hour meeting with seven people? $2,115.

CFO Jeff Hoffmeister: "No one at Shopify would expense a $500 dinner. But lots of people spend way more than that in meetings without ever making a decision."

Asana ran a similar experiment, deleting all standing meetings under five attendees for 48 hours and forcing teams to justify which ones to restore. Result: 11 hours saved per person per month.

In my years working with life science tools companies, I've yet to see anyone attempt this kind of calendar reckoning. The meetings continue. The roadmaps continue to die. Perhaps someone reading this will be the first to bring Herculean discernment to their organization's calendar. The labors are waiting.

Make Them Complete the Labor

Hercules didn't waste his strength on tasks unworthy of a demigod. Neither should you.

When a meeting invitation arrives, demand it complete the labor first:

Decision. What binary choice gets made?

Owner. Who's the single DRI?

Document. What should I read before I arrive?

If the meeting can't answer all three, it hasn't earned your time. Decline it. Protect your calendar. Get back to the work that actually moves your portfolio forward.

Your roadmap is waiting. Stop letting it die in meetings that never deserved your strength in the first place.