The phrase "I understand", when you don't, can be one of the most expensive phrases you use during a meeting.
We've all done it.
Technical meetings help organizations make decisions, but they also create hidden costs when attendees leave without understanding.
What you think you understand could lend itself to multiple meetings, email chains, and back and forth over one simple misunderstanding.
The cost of misunderstanding
There is not a reliable study yet that isolates how many meetings are scheduled because someone did not understand an earlier conversation.
However, there are studies that support this idea and share how much time organizations lose to similar problems. These include: unproductive meetings, unclear communication, information searching, and rework.
According to APQC's 2021 survey, 982 full-time knowledge workers evaluated time lost in meetings weekly, with employees estimating the following lost time:
- 2.2 hours participating in unnecessary or unproductive meetings
- 2.8 hours looking for or requesting needed information
- 3.6 hours managing internal workplace communication
Together these activities account for 8.6 hours weekly. That's a lot of time wasted. Now not all of this time is caused by technical misunderstanding, but these are exactly the places where lack of clarity creates hidden work.
Microsoft's 2023 Work Trend Index found that employees ranked inefficient meetings as their number-one productivity disruptor, ahead of having too many meetings.
The research also found that:
- 55% said next steps at the end of a meeting were unclear
- 57% said it was difficult to catch up when they joined a meeting late
- 56% said it was difficult to summarize what happened
Only 35% believed their absence would be noticed in most of their meetings. Even still, employees attended because they expected the meeting would provide information needed for their jobs.
In this case, the problem is not simply the number of meetings.
It is that people often leave meetings with information, but without understanding.
A meeting summary is not the same as understanding
The majority of meeting tools today are designed to capture what was said and provide a summary.
They can record the conversation, create a transcript, identify action items, and summarize major topics.
This is useful, especially when you missed the meeting or you were multi-tasking. However, it does not solve the underlying issue.
Understanding.
A summary might tell you:
"The engineering team will refactor the authentication service after the regression suite passes."
But someone outside engineering may still need to know:
- What is being changed?
- Why does it need to change?
- Is the release delayed?
- What could go wrong?
- Does this affect customers?
- Is a decision required from me?
- What should I ask next?
The distinction between a summary and understanding matters. Meetings exist to align people, make decisions, identify solutions and risks, and move projects forward.
When people leave the meeting without understanding, projects are delayed, the right questions are not asked, and an unclear direction is set.
This can cause more meetings and more people leaving wondering — what's next, or why did I waste my time?
The hidden cost for product managers
Incorrect prioritization
Without understanding technical language, limitations may be missed. This could cause a major dependency when writing requirements and prioritizing a feature based on a timeline that is no longer realistic.
Weak follow-up questions
The wrong questions could be asked, delaying further clarification. When asking the wrong questions, this leaves open opportunities for features, requirements, and dependencies to be missed. All of these are critical and can be not only time impacting, but revenue impacting.
- Is this a temporary workaround or a permanent solution?
- Does this create technical debt?
- Is customer data affected?
- Does this change the launch date?
- Are there alternative approaches?
- What tradeoff are we making?
Repeated engineering conversations
The product manager may later reach out to the engineer to debrief or ask them to re-explain.
Now more time is wasted in re-explaining for both the product manager and engineer.
The hidden cost for consultants
Consultants are not new to entering organizations they are unfamiliar with. They are expected to quickly understand a company's complexities and then provide expert recommendations.
When a consultant does not understand a technical meeting, the cost may appear as:
Additional discovery
The consultant may schedule more stakeholder interviews because they don't understand.
Now instead of one meeting, they require three — which delays their recommendation and the company's ability to move faster.
Rework
A recommendation could be incorrect simply because of an incomplete understanding. This can cause significant re-work and time for stakeholders to review the material, provide feedback, and redo their presentation.
Loom (an Atlassian company) and Wakefield Research found that 80% of workers had recently spent time on unnecessary work or rework because they misunderstood a written message. Nearly nine in ten regularly spent time trying to understand unclear communication. This study did not review technical meetings specifically, however it helps demonstrate how quickly a misunderstanding can cause more rework.
Loss of client confidence
Consultants are expected to synthesize and provide recommendations quickly.
When clients have to repeat information or help consultants with their re-work, it may put them under the impression that the consultant does not know what they are doing.
Recommendations that cannot be implemented
A strategy may look strong on a slide, but it may not be realistic. It may exclude key components of execution based on a misunderstanding of the company's policies, regulations, and processes.
The hidden cost for executives
Executives do not need every technical detail.
They don't have the time.
Decisions made without full context
An executive may approve a timeline, investment, or launch without having all of the right information to make their decision.
Something may sound routine, but then it leads to the wrong decision because they were moving quickly and misunderstood.
Delayed escalation
If the risk is not clear, executives may delay responding because they need more time to think through what was shared — and even worse, set up more time for clarification.
Expensive organizational rework
Atlassian's 2026 miscommunication research found that one in five VP-level and higher executives had lost more than 24 hours in a single month to work that was later scrapped or redone because of miscommunication. Again, the survey focused largely on written workplace communication, not technical meetings alone. This still showcases the cost of miscommunication.
Why existing AI meeting tools aren't enough
As we just uncovered, AI tools exist to help with summarization and recaps.
These tools are missing one key function: cutting through technical communications to help with faster informed decisions, better requirements and recommendations, and cost avoidance from rework.
hmm AI was built to help everyone understand technical conversations. Not just document them.
If a product manager does not understand an engineering update, this isn't just a confusing email or meeting. Now it impacts prioritization, decision making, and required updates needed for the business.
If a consultant does not understand, it can reputationally make them look bad, lead to wasted time spent on an unrealistic recommendation, and stakeholder doubt.
If an executive does not understand, this causes delays in approvals, unnecessary spend on the wrong decision, and presentation re-work.
We believe AI can help solve a different problem.
Not by replacing humans, but by making humans speak to each other in a way that every audience understands.
Instead of engineers wasting their time re-explaining, teams can move quicker and make even better decisions.
We think AI can do better.
That's why we are building hmm AI.
Today hmm AI exists as a tool you can paste into for a quick breakdown in terms every audience understands.
What's coming is even more exciting.
hmm AI is working to introduce a new Teams feature that will listen in real time and translate what an engineer is saying.
Rather than leaving a meeting with pages of notes and a list of terms you have to search later, or dump into another AI tool, you will actually understand what was said.
Even better, you'll understand in real time, so you can ask informed questions and leave the meeting knowing why you were there.
That's the future we are building at hmm.
Stay tuned for a waitlist to see how we're helping product managers, consultants, executives, and other non-technical professionals understand technical conversations in real time.