Running Products via the Daily Meeting
Assign one owner to an urgent problem, give them unlimited resources except time, and force a daily report until it's solved.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
Binance operated at 0-to-$400B scale with a near-flat structure (the CEO once had 55 direct reports) by running the whole leadership team on a single daily call where no decision could be blocked for more than 24 hours. For anything urgent, one owner is named on that call, expected to go all-hands-on-deck for as long as it takes, and to report progress on the daily meeting until the problem is closed. Removes the layers, one-on-ones, and week-long decision latency that slow normal orgs.
Origin
Mayur Kamat's codification of how Binance under founder-CEO CZ operated as Head of Product; he named the pattern 'running products via daily meeting' and now carries it to N26.
Core principles
- 01No decision stays blocked longer than 24 hours
- 02Everything except time is negotiable — money and headcount are not the constraint
- 03One named owner per urgent problem, not a committee
- 04Leadership meets daily (even weekends/holidays) so escalations resolve same-day
- 05Extreme ownership: title and headcount don't determine who owns a problem
How to run it
- 1
Convene a standing daily leadership call
Get the decision-makers on one recurring call every day, timed so a globally distributed team can attend, so any escalation is decided within 24 hours rather than waiting for a weekly sync.
Pro tip Most decisions can be closed on chat before the call even happens; reserve the call for the genuinely big escalations.
Watch out This cadence is brutal on people — Kamat's Singapore call was 11pm nightly, 1am for Sydney. Only sustainable with the preconditions in the notes.
- 2
Name a single owner for each urgent problem
On the daily call, pick one owner for the most urgent thing regardless of their title or team size. They are accountable for the outcome, not for coordinating a committee.
Watch out Randomizing teams by re-assigning owners without thought is the failure mode; be deliberate about what actually warrants this treatment.
- 3
Remove every constraint except time
Give the owner whatever money and people they need. Kamat's team went from 20 to 500 people on KYC for three months. The only scarce resource is time.
Pro tip The power isn't having 500 people — it's being able to maneuver them onto one problem in days instead of years.
Watch out Throwing 500 people at a problem has real downsides in team stress and individual development — accept that trade-off consciously.
- 4
Report progress on the daily call until solved
The owner reports updates every single day on the leadership call until the problem is solved or the opportunity is realized, then the intensity is released.
Pro tip Because you're in the details daily, your team learns they must be in the details too — the behavior cascades.
In the wild
A daily-meeting-level problem was framed as getting 15 financial licenses across 15 countries in the next three months — a scope that would take years elsewhere. An owner was named and ran it on the daily cadence.
→ 'And people did it' — the extreme-ownership cadence compressed a multi-year regulatory effort into months.
When regulation dropped signup conversion from ~100% to ~2% across 200 countries, the team built a spreadsheet of the top 50 countries x top 10 document types (500 cells), each showing conversion, and worked cell by cell (new vendor, better imaging, new SDK) rather than only chasing the top 90th percentile.
→ 'No user left behind' — even a passport in Kazakhstan or a driver's licence in Kenya got attention; KYC team scaled 20 to 500 people for three months.
Common mistakes
Copying the flat structure without the preconditions
55 direct reports and daily 11pm calls only work when the company is growing extremely fast, people are compensated so well they care about KPIs over promotions, and there's a genuine mission. Without those, it just burns people out.
Randomizing teams
Re-pointing owners at new fires without thinking it through causes churn and thrash; the mechanism amplifies whatever intent drives it.
Is it for you?
Best for
Leaders at hyper-growth companies facing existential, time-boxed problems (regulatory, growth, crisis) who can actually redeploy resources fast
Not ideal for
Steady-state orgs, or teams where sustainable pace and individual career development are primary goals
From the transcript
“I call it the running products via daily meeting so we would pick a owner for something really urgent at the the nightly leadership call”
“that owner would be expected to have like all hands on deck for however long that problem is every single day and then report the…”
“how do we get 15 financial licenses in 15 countries in the next 3 months”
“when you have really smart people, you give them really hard problems, you have no constraints on what can you need to solve them, whether…”
“for the next 3 months we want 500 which has its own downsides too”
From the episode
Unconventional product lessons from Binance, N26, Google, more
Mayur Kamat (CPO at N26, ex-Binance Head of Product)