Should you cancel your 1:1s?

You're looking at your calendar and adding it up. Eight direct reports, thirty minutes each, every week, and most of those meetings turn into a status update you could have read in Slack. You've probably wondered whether the whole ritual is worth four hours a week.

This article lays out the real disagreement among people who have run big engineering and product organizations, then gives you the conditions under which each model works, a middle path, and a way to tell whether your 1:1s are doing anything. Read the two cases before you touch your calendar, because both sides have a point and changing this badly causes real damage.

The sources are Farhan Thawar, VP and head of engineering at Shopify, who dropped scheduled 1:1s entirely at an earlier company; Camille Fournier, author of The Manager's Path and former CTO of Rent the Runway; Kim Scott, author of Radical Candor; and the published curriculum of Matt Mochary, who coaches CEOs at companies like Coinbase and OpenAI. Every video quote below plays the exact moment it was said.

What a 1:1 is for when it's working

Most arguments about canceling 1:1s are really arguments about what the meeting is supposed to do. Four things tend to have nowhere else to live:

• Feedback in both directions. What you think of their work, and what they think of your management, said out loud rather than saved for a review cycle.
• Career conversations. Where this person wants to go, and what would have to be true for them to get there.
• Things they won't say in a group. Doubts about the roadmap, friction with a peer, personal circumstances affecting their work.
• Unblocking that needs your authority. A decision, a budget, a conversation with another team's lead.

Notice what's missing from that list: project status. When a 1:1 degrades, status is almost always what fills it. If your meetings have turned into a spoken status report, you have a content problem before you have a calendar problem. Our 1:1 operating manual covers the same meeting from the report's side, and it's worth sending to anyone on your team who shows up empty-handed.

The honest case for canceling them

Farhan Thawar runs engineering at Shopify. At a company he led before that, roughly 2009 to 2013, he did something most managers would consider reckless: he took on around 120 direct reports and held no scheduled 1:1s at all.

He isn't saying the conversations don't matter. His claim is that putting them on a repeating schedule is what drains them. He went back through his own history as a report and counted.

There are two real failure modes behind this. The first is that a recurring slot invites filler. If someone has a genuine problem on Tuesday and their 1:1 is Thursday, the standing meeting teaches them to wait, and a problem that could have been solved in four minutes sits for two days. The second is that a full calendar of 1:1s makes you unavailable for exactly the unscheduled conversations that were doing the work.

What had to be true for that to work

Thawar's model came with conditions, and he's clear about them. He sat at a desk in the middle of the engineering floor and wasn't in many meetings, so anyone blocked could walk over. His teams pair programmed, which meant he could see whether work was moving without asking. There were weekly demos. He knew everyone's skills and compensation from memory. Feedback and visibility flowed through channels that had nothing to do with a calendar invite.

The model also broke down. His largest investor asked him one question about scale.

He added structure after that, promoted a few directors, and gave them around 40 reports each. Two things worth being precise about, because this story gets repeated carelessly. This was his previous company, not Shopify, and he says Shopify has guardrails and he doesn't carry 120 reports there. And Thawar dropped the model himself once the org got bigger. If you're preparing to interview there, our Shopify interview playbook goes into what this means for how the company actually operates.

The honest case for keeping them

Camille Fournier wrote The Manager's Path and was CTO of Rent the Runway. She's known for arguing that managers sit in far too many meetings. She still draws a hard line around this one.

The strongest argument for keeping the meeting is about your quieter reports rather than your most confident ones. An open door only works for people willing to knock, and the reports who most need your attention are usually the least likely to interrupt you. New hires who don't yet know what's normal. People from backgrounds where interrupting a senior person feels rude. Anyone worried that raising a problem marks them as a complainer. Remove the standing meeting and you've built a system that works best for the most confident people on your team.

Kim Scott, who wrote Radical Candor, gives the meeting a specific job that mostly can't be done anywhere else.

Two instructions are packed in there. The agenda belongs to your report, so if you're the one filling the silence with questions, you've taken over their meeting. And you should be asking for criticism of yourself every week, which almost no manager does. Scott is explicit elsewhere that you shouldn't hoard feedback for the 1:1 either. Give it when it happens, and use the meeting to ask for it.

Career conversations have the same problem as feedback. They don't happen in standups, and they rarely happen on demand, because nobody schedules an ad hoc meeting to say they're wondering whether they still want to be an engineer in three years. They come out in the second half of a meeting that was already on the calendar.

Where Fournier agrees with the cancellers

Fournier protects 1:1s with her reports and her manager. Everything else on the calendar is fair game, and her reasoning is worth borrowing because it explains why some 1:1s make things worse.

She's describing a specific cost. Run everything through private channels and you become the only person who knows the full picture, which means you spend your week relaying opinions between people who should be talking to each other. The unhappy stakeholder never hears the five happy ones for themselves, so your reassurance sounds like you're managing them.

She also has a test for whether a recurring meeting deserves to exist.

If you're going to cut something, start with the standing 1:1s you hold with peers and stakeholders. That's where most of the recoverable hours are, and cutting them usually improves how information moves around.

The Mochary Method gives two different answers

Matt Mochary coaches startup CEOs, and his curriculum is published openly. It contains both a maximally structured 1:1 and a document explaining how to stop holding them, which is a decent sign that the question is genuinely open.

His 1-1 Template and Instructions has three sections, in order, all written out by the report before the meeting starts.

The middle step is the one most managers skip. Asking someone to write down how they helped create the situation turns a complaint into something they have leverage over, and it stops your report describing a problem and then handing it to you. Mochary's rule is that they write what they'd do if they had to decide alone, rather than a list of options for you to pick from.

His Magic Questions are a separate quarterly ritual, and they're the fastest way to find out what someone isn't telling you. Ask them to rate each of these one to five, then take the lowest score and ask what would move it up one point.

Then there's the other document. How to quit 1:1s says many of the CEOs he coaches have eliminated them, citing Jensen Huang at Nvidia and Brian Chesky at Airbnb. What replaces it is a group meeting with all direct reports, where issues get raised in front of everyone who might have a solution, feedback rotates on a published schedule so one person receives it each week while everyone learns from it, and connection gets handled separately through quarterly meals and coffee. Private matters get a weekly office hour that the document notes is rarely used.

That last detail is the useful part. Even the argument for canceling 1:1s includes a deliberate replacement for every job the meeting was doing. Nobody credible is suggesting you delete the meeting and put nothing in its place.

A middle path most teams can actually run

If you don't sit in the middle of an open floor and your team doesn't pair program, you probably can't run Thawar's model as written. Here's what transfers.

If your problem is that the meetings feel empty rather than that you have too many, fix the content before you change the cadence. Send your team what to talk about in a 1:1 when there's nothing to discuss and see whether the next month looks different before you change anything.

How to change the cadence without sounding like you stopped caring

Reports read calendar changes as signals about their standing. Cut a meeting badly and a good performer starts polishing their resume. Three rules make that unlikely.

Watch what happens for the next six weeks. If problems start reaching you late, if nobody uses the open blocks, or if your quieter reports go silent, go back to weekly and say so without making it a big deal.

How to tell whether yours are working

Answer these about your last month of 1:1s, honestly, with specific examples rather than impressions.

Ask your team directly too. "Is this meeting useful to you, and what would make it more useful?" You'll get a softened answer the first time, so ask again next month. If someone new joined recently and is finding the meetings awkward, our first 1:1 with a new manager guide is a good thing to send them before your next one.

Frequently asked questions

Should I cancel my 1:1s?

Probably not entirely, unless you can replace every job the meeting does. That means a channel for feedback in both directions, somewhere career conversations happen, a way for quiet reports to raise problems without needing courage, and enough presence that people can reach you in real time. Cancel the standing 1:1s you hold with peers and stakeholders first, since those usually take the most time for the least return.

How often should I do 1:1s with my team?

Weekly or every other week is the common recommendation, and Camille Fournier does hers on that cadence. Weekly for new hires, anyone struggling, and anyone whose scope just changed. Every other week for experienced reports in a steady period, with more time per meeting so the conversation can go somewhere.

Are one on ones a waste of time?

They are when they turn into status updates you could read in a document. That's a content problem. Move status into writing, hand the agenda to your report, and spend five minutes at the end asking what you're doing badly. If the meeting is still empty after a month of that, reduce the frequency rather than deleting it.

What are the alternatives to one on ones?

Group meetings where issues are raised in front of everyone and feedback rotates on a schedule, which is the Mochary Method's replacement. Unscheduled access, which is what Farhan Thawar ran, and which depends on you being genuinely available. Written check-ins for accountability and numbers. Skip-level meetings for signal you can't get from your own reports. Most teams end up combining a lighter 1:1 cadence with one or two of these.

How many direct reports can I have without 1:1s?

Thawar reached about 120, and by his own account the model was heading for trouble around 400 people, at which point he added directors with roughly 40 reports each. The number matters less than the conditions. If you're not physically or reliably available, the ceiling is much lower.

Decide what to do with your 1:1s