A Rare Ode to Redundant Meetings
CHIPS did away with project trackers to run one of the largest government investment programs in American history
I have killed the same spreadsheet three times.
From early 2023 through early 2025, a small group of people — usually spanning investments, legal, ops, and the front office — was designing the detailed operations of the CHIPS awards process. This group needed to work two steps ahead of the rest of the team. It felt like paving the runway as the plane was starting to taxi.
We reflexively turned to familiar spreadsheets and tools to track our progress. In trying to make them work, we abandoned and resurrected the approach multiple times. This wasn’t a failure of discipline or buy-in. The problem was that we were asking a planning tool to do something it can’t: impose structure on a system that was still being designed.
What eventually worked was a deliberate meeting architecture, with recurring conversations at different frequencies and with distinct purposes. The meetings were the project management system and did what no single tracker could.
This is not an argument for more meetings — meetings are often wasteful, and most government programs have too many of them. Instead, I’m calling for meeting discipline that is calibrated to the kind of program you’re running and the uncertainty you’re operating under.
The CHIPS Program Office (CPO) ran 35 deals through a $39 billion investment pipeline in roughly two years, 20 of them to completion. The meeting structure I’ll describe here was a key part of how we pulled it off.
Detailed trackers can’t handle flux
Milestone trackers are accountability tools. They assume you can enumerate the steps of a process in advance, assign owners, and define completion. That approach was exactly right for hiring — the steps were known and the core need was to manage ownership and accountability across a large, fast-moving team. We also got some utility out of a higher-level tracker where we set one or two quarterly milestones for each strategic goal, but that was only useful for a couple of quarters before the urgency and unpredictability of deal-making made it feel beside the point.
Project management tools are not neutral systems. Each one encodes assumptions about what kind of work you’re doing. These tools are only useful when the process is stable, the sequence is known, and the main coordination problem is timely execution. None of those conditions were true for most of the challenges we faced in the first 18 months of CPO.
In that environment, a tracker was not just useless — it was actively misleading. Target dates were impossible to establish because we were still developing the process itself. Spreadsheets became an exercise in false precision, and updating them weekly was a time-suck that did little to advance outcomes. Worse, the ritual created the impression within the team that nobody really knew what was happening or how it all fit together.
In short, detailed trackers are not made for real-time coordination across a complex system that is still being designed. We eventually stopped pretending that a massive spreadsheet could do the work of orchestration. In a start-up environment like CHIPS, we need to allow for iteration, operational dynamism, and even a little bit of chaos. That required more meetings.
The four kinds of CHIPS meetings
Not all meetings serve the same purpose, and conflating them is how you end up with too many of the wrong kind. In retrospect I’d categorize what we did into four types of meetings, each with a particular function:
Management routines. These were the meetings that kept the team calibrated and aligned with the big picture. Our daily (then thrice-weekly, and then twice-weekly) leadership stand-up was a primary example — the meeting was brief, recurring, and low-stakes individually, but essential in aggregate. All-staff meetings served a different version of this function: communicating direction, celebrating progress, and ensuring that we were all working on the right things. When the team was small, we held all-staff meetings weekly. As it grew, we shifted to a monthly cadence. Management routine meetings are not the place for big decisions. They should be focused on prioritization, alignment, and building a sense of belonging across the team.
Troubleshooting meetings. These were called when something was blocking progress and we needed to get the right people in the room to fix it. Some blockers CHIPS had to handle included: a legal term in a contract negotiation that we couldn’t resolve at the deal-team level and needed executive judgment on; a tension between two internal teams about roles and responsibilities on a particular process step; a policy question about what was reasonable to ask of an applicant that required both program and legal sign-off. Troubleshooting meetings should be ad hoc, purpose-built, and end with a decision (or a path to one).
Governance meetings. These were the formal meeting series in which we debated deals and made decisions through formal, documented votes. CPO ran two versions of this meeting type: the Investment Committee (IC) meeting series, and the Transaction Review Committee (TRC) meeting series. For deals to move from one phase to the next, they needed to clear a structured set of decision gates in one or both of these meetings. Governance meetings gave clear direction to the deal team and finalized and formalized agency decision-making through documented votes.
Throughput meetings. These were recurring, structured meetings organized around moving specific work through a pipeline. Not “where are we on everything” — that’s too broad to be useful. Not “here’s a problem to solve” — that’s troubleshooting. Throughput meetings ask: what is in the pipeline right now, where is each item in the process, what does it need to advance, and who is responsible for making that happen before we meet again?
This last meeting type did the most work for us, and the outsized value surprised me. Throughput meetings effectively replaced the standard project management tools, transforming sequential updates into an effective and dynamic system for managing a rapidly evolving portfolio.
The throughput meeting in practice
By the time we were running dozens of deals in parallel — each touching 60 to 100 people across multiple process phases — we had built a stack of overlapping throughput meetings, each scoped to a specific audience or focusing on a specific slice of the pipeline:
A weekly leadership-level deal review, run by the investments team off of a master deck that the team maintained and live-edited in the meeting. This was the only meeting where we looked at deals across all phases of the investment process simultaneously. We got direction on priority: if negotiations were stalling on one deal, we’d decide whether to escalate or pivot resources. This meeting let us signal urgency to all attendees and set the agenda for the rest of the program.
Twice-weekly Investment Committee planning meetings, attended by the IC Executive Secretary, the investment operations team, Mike, Todd, myself, and Sara O’Rourke. These meetings looked at the month ahead and tried to anticipate when each deal would be ready to present to the Investment Committee, and for which decision-gate in the governance process. This required constant recalibration because a deal team’s ability to make deadlines often relied on getting new information from applicants or other external parties. This churn informed when we scheduled votes and when deals would be ready to move into the nitty-gritty processing steps that commenced after a deal was approved to proceed.
Twice-weekly (then daily, then thrice-weekly, then weekly) transaction advisor meetings with NIST to ensure that we could solicit, select, onboard, and kick off due diligence of applicants that were advancing toward final award. This was a particularly complex and detailed part of our process, requiring coordination with internal and external stakeholders that made it tricky to calibrate the right cadence.
Weekly internal diligence and final award term sheet meetings, focused on scoping the diligence and proposed final award terms for deals moving from preliminary memorandum of terms (PMT) into diligence and award phases. These meetings were originally troubleshooting sessions to align teams on what we’d ask of applicants, but after a couple of rounds they morphed into throughput meetings for tracking our progress.
Twice-weekly award phase meetings internal to CPO, focused on tracking the back-end of deal-making, including drafting justification memos, ensuring conditions precedent to award were met, setting up awards in financial systems, and ensuring approval processes were on track with target award dates.
Weekly award phase meetings with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to coordinate across the institutional boundary that sat between us and the final obligating authority.1
In addition to these throughput meetings, we also spun up deal-specific processing meetings. There we’d review the list of conditions precedent to award and whether they were satisfied, enter and verify data into the grants system, and actually track the very final steps to closing and obligation. Each meeting had its own set of materials, scoped to its slice of the process. None of them tried to track everything, but together, they covered the whole pipeline. These meetings all evolved in either specificity or frequency.
Purposeful redundancy
There’s an obvious flaw in this architecture: it’s redundant. The same deal might appear in three different meetings in the same week, described to three different audiences. Some of the same attendees are in multiple meetings. This might sound like exactly the kind of meeting overhead that makes government slow.
But we found the redundancy to be necessary because the pipeline was moving too fast for any single meeting to carry the current state of reality. We would meet on Monday, align on milestones and next steps, and by Tuesday morning something would have happened — a company’s board had reconsidered a term, a new policy or legal interpretation had come down, or a deal team had learned something in a call that required resequencing. The next throughput meeting needed to account for the updates that happened during the week, not from last Monday’s notes. The only way for that to have made that work was to have people in the room who actually knew what had happened overnight.
Redundancy was critical for managing information streams of our volume. A handful of team members needed to regularly meet with the Secretary or other senior leaders and also attend operational meetings. We acted as translators who could connect what was being said in a planning session to a decision the Secretary had made two days earlier, or flag that a process the operations team was planning around had just been superseded by something new. Without that cross-level communication, the operations function would have been working from stale information, and the cost of that in a fast-moving pipeline is nontrivial.
The redundancy also maintained a near real-time shared understanding of the pipeline across a large team. The weekly review meeting’s decisions flowed down into the phase-specific meetings, and the phase-specific meetings surfaced issues that needed to come back up to deal review. The system worked because of the deliberate overlap and continuous flow of information.
A final irony
In fall 2024, as we were closing in on the end of the Biden administration and the most intense period of negotiation and drafting, we were asked to create a traditional milestone tracker. The request came from someone we couldn’t say no to: the Secretary herself. Having repeatedly seen the failures of false precision, Mike and I gave ourselves vague deadlines like “early November” and “late December.” But the Secretary wanted firm dates.
This time the trackers worked. By then we were managing a narrow set of late-stage steps for a defined set of deals that had already made it through merit review. The process was stable and specific enough to plan around. And the Secretary’s weekly review of that tracker then became a forcing function for the program, driving our next steps and informing every other meeting in the stack. The traditional tracker didn’t replace the meeting architecture, but was enabled by it.
That’s the thing I didn’t fully appreciate until later: the right tool isn’t the best tool in the abstract. It’s the tool that’s fit for the moment you’re in.
What this means for the next program
If you’re standing up a new program and seeking a framework: I’d recommend resisting the urge to immediately build the comprehensive tracker. Before you do that, consider your program’s maturity.
If your process is defined and you just need to establish accountability, a good tracker may serve you well. If you are still designing the process — if the flowchart doesn’t exist yet, or if you’re making foundational decisions about how the program works while also trying to move work through it — then you need a meeting cadence.
Before you build that cadence, consider your goals. Some meetings are about maintaining management routines that keep the team oriented and connected, separate from meetings dedicated to issue resolution. And if you’re running a transaction-based program, try building throughput processing meetings scoped to specific slices of the pipeline, attended by people who carry live intelligence across the levels of your organization.2
Accept that there will be redundancy. The cost of that inefficiency is lower than the cost of making decisions from stale information in a system that changes faster than any single document can track.
At the time, our work at CPO felt more like high-stakes improv than an actual functioning system. In retrospect, it was both, and I suspect that may just be a truism about what government execution at pace and scale demands.
CPO was technically situated within the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This meant we relied on them for all of our administrative functions, including financial services like funds obligation.
It’s worth acknowledging that AI tools could probably help manage some of the meeting redundancy and develop the appropriate meeting materials. The tools weren’t available to us at the time (and their use is obviously a live issue now), but there are potential applications there that are worth exploring.