The No Fluff Framework

Engineers are allergic to fluff.

Your leadership should be tight, tangible, and to the point.

Back when I first became an EM, stand-ups dragged to 30 minutes, specs read like novellas, and every design review spiralled into “what-if” edge cases no one would ever build. Velocity tanked, morale followed, and I realised fluff was the common enemy.

A framework that changed how I lead engineering teams is the No Fluff Framework.

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How to adopt No Fluff

Step 1 – Slash the meeting menu
Pick one recurring meeting and cancel it today. If nobody screams, keep it dead. That free calendar space becomes maker time.

Step 2 – Gate the backlog
When a product pitch isn’t crisp—clear problem, success metric, user flow—bounce it back to the PM. High standards protect engineering focus.
Quality in means quality out.

Step 3 – Cap specs at one screen
If a spec runs longer, run a spike instead of writing a manifesto. This forces clarity up-front and prevents rewrite thrash later.

Step 4 – Time-box every sync to 15 minutes
Use a visible timer. When it dings, either decide or move the leftovers async. Decisions beat discussions. Clocks keep you honest.

Step 5 – Replace status recaps with dashboards
Pipe live metrics to a dashboard and stop reading Jira aloud. Data speaks faster than people.

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Implement these five steps and you’ll see what I did: faster ships, quieter calendars, and engineers who run toward problems instead of away from meetings—because they never waste cycles on fluff that should have been filtered out.