Meetings That Turn Into Typhoons

In the last post, I briefly mentioned the CJ ENM Plus app. We shipped. Team mood wasn't bad. So why does the memory feel like hot soup you eat against your will? This post unpacks the heat. Maybe not only a CJ ENM story. Maybe for whoever is in a meeting room right now.

Meetings are communication

On the Mnet project, one thing I did most was meet. Every plan change added meetings. At first that seemed natural — align on what changed. But more meetings meant more fatigue. Later I understood: lots of meetings means lots of places where minds don't match 100%.

Plan change → more meetings → more communication → more misalignment → energy drain.

Not a one-line summary. A loop that actually repeated. CJ ENM and our company built the same app with different speeds and priorities. Contract signed. Team grown. Launch date approaching. Plans kept moving. Tighter deadlines → more meetings → implementation lagged → bugs poured → plans changed again.

Nowhere to measure energy

The problem wasn't who was bad. Team mood was fine. First-time collaborators — messy process was expected. We were converging. But there was nowhere to measure energy.

Plan changes flipped development. Flipped dev backed up QA. Backed-up QA shook launch. Time and emotion spent in that chain don't show up as numbers in meeting notes. Wind started. Wind became a typhoon. Bugs after launch weren't only code quality. They were the bill for pushing forward before plans stabilized.

Looking back: ten-plus people, nearly a year — the system was still strained. Not because we lacked people. Because there was no structure to absorb change cost. Weak fixed baselines in docs. "This week's decision" didn't reliably become "still valid next week."

Typhoons aren't Mnet-only weather

This structure isn't unique to enterprise outsourcing. Startups get it too. One PM, two devs, one designer — small team, shaky plans, meetings grow, energy leaks. Slack threads lengthen. "We agreed on that last week" repeats. Someone pulls an all-nighter.

I'm not saying kill meetings. I'm saying notice when meetings amplify energy drain. Frequent plan changes and more communication channels mean more time aligning than building. At Mnet I stood in the middle of that typhoon.

So one thing that surprised me working with AI three years later: no meetings. I set direction. AI executed. I corrected. We split again. Energy didn't become a typhoon. More on that in later posts.

Landing: https://foodbook.cc/en/