The One-on-One Diet
Hold direct-report 1:1s sacred; cut nearly all the rest — relationship-by-1:1 doesn't scale
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 92%
Fournier's contrarian take on the meeting culture that has swallowed management calendars. Keep weekly or biweekly 1:1s with your direct reports and your manager, and treat them as sacred. Then aggressively cut the sprawl of peer, stakeholder and cross-functional 1:1s — it scales linearly with your relationships, it fails against unwilling participants, and for stakeholder management specifically it actively weakens your position.
Origin
Camille Fournier, informed by years running internal platform teams with large stakeholder surfaces (Two Sigma, JP Morgan Chase) and by hearing peers at many companies complain about post-remote-work 1:1 sprawl.
Core principles
- 01The 1:1s that matter are with your direct reports and your own manager. Those are non-negotiable and roughly weekly.
- 02Relationship-building via 1:1 scales linearly with the number of relationships — so it stops working past a small team or company.
- 03A 1:1 with someone who doesn't want one produces nothing. They show up as a good corporate citizen and wonder what the point is.
- 04For stakeholders, private 1:1s hide the distribution of sentiment: your one unhappy stakeholder never sees the five happy ones and just hears 'trust me'.
- 05Booking a 1:1 is asking for someone else's time. Do it with a purpose, not haphazardly.
- 06Push against your comfort zone: if aimless relationship 1:1s are your natural mode, do fewer; if they terrify you, do more.
How to run it
- 1
Ring-fence the sacred set
Lock in 1:1s with every direct report and with your own manager, weekly or every other week, and protect them from being moved or dropped.
Pro tip This is the one meeting category Fournier will not compromise on — everything else is up for negotiation.
- 2
Audit the rest of the 1:1 sprawl
List every recurring 1:1 outside that set — peers, stakeholders, product, design. For each one, ask whether you actually have something to talk about with that person and whether they want the meeting at all.
Pro tip The honest test: are you getting something out of this, or are you ticking a box that says 'I had eight meetings today, therefore I was productive'?
Watch out Some counterparts genuinely resent the standing invite and only attend out of obligation. That relationship is not being built.
- 3
Move stakeholder management out of 1:1s and into shared forums
Where you serve many stakeholders, replace private check-ins with settings where they can see each other's positions. Otherwise you're stuck relaying 'everybody else is happy' to your unhappy stakeholder, which just sounds whiny.
Pro tip Shared visibility does the calibration for you — an outlier complaint self-corrects when the outlier can see the room.
Watch out This is exactly the trap for internal platform leaders, who accumulate stakeholders faster than anyone.
- 4
Respect your own time
Stop loading up meetings on the assumption that being a manager means being at everyone's mercy. Ask what you actually need from each meeting before booking it.
Watch out Management genuinely is a service job and your time genuinely isn't fully yours — but that's an argument for spending it deliberately, not for surrendering it.
In the wild
Running internal platforms, Fournier found stakeholder 1:1s to be an active weakness. You might have one very unhappy stakeholder and five happy ones — but because all the feedback arrived privately, the unhappy one never sees the happy ones. All you can say is 'trust me, I had these other 1:1s and they're saying it's fine', which sounds defensive and whiny.
→ She concluded that relying on 1:1 management for a large stakeholder set is not productive, and pushed sentiment into shared settings instead.
Fournier admits she is bad at aimless get-to-know-you coffees and envies people who thrive on them. Her rule cuts both ways: if unstructured relationship 1:1s are your comfort zone, do fewer; if they're not, you should probably do more — because you should always be pushing out of your comfort zone.
→ A self-calibrating heuristic that stops the advice from becoming a licence for introverts to hide.
Common mistakes
Treating 1:1s as a universal solvent
People believe 1:1s will solve all their problems. Against a counterpart who doesn't want to invest in the relationship, the meeting produces nothing but mutual resentment.
Meeting count as a productivity metric
Eight meetings in a day is not evidence of a productive day. It's a checkbox that feels like output and displaces the work of deciding what actually matters.
Managing many stakeholders privately
Private channels hide the distribution of opinion from the people who most need to see it, and leave you carrying second-hand reassurance you can't substantiate.
Is it for you?
Best for
Engineering and product managers whose calendars have filled with peer and stakeholder 1:1s, especially leaders of internal/platform teams with a large stakeholder surface.
Not ideal for
New managers still establishing basic trust with a small team, and anyone whose problem is too few 1:1s with their own reports.
From the transcript
“I you should have one-on ones with your direct reports and your manager and you should you should hold those sacred”
“it's just not a scalable approach right like linearly scale with the number of relationships you have”
“when your stakeholders just tell you in a one-on-one that they're they're happy or unhappy with things your unhappy stakeholders kind of aren't hearing that”
“or are you just being able to take a checkbox that says I had eight meetings today therefore I was productive”
From the episode
The things engineers are desperate for PMs to understand
Camille Fournier (author of “The Manager’s Path,” ex-CTO at