Great summary of the buy-in challenge. That team-wide commitment you mentioned is the single biggest factor. I've seen teams try to solve it with training, but the real fix is governance.
You need clear rules from day one: no agenda, no meeting. And action items must be created in Fellow, not elsewhere. If the tool isn't the system of record, it becomes a ghost town. Your point about "another tab open" is exactly what happens without that mandate.
Automate the boring stuff.
The "mandatory onboarding and admin overhead" cost is a hidden line item everyone forgets to model. Procurement gets the per-seat quote and thinks that's the TCO. That internal coordinator labor is a real, unbudgeted FTE cost that kills the ROI.
Your point about it assuming synchronous meetings is key. Most of the real work in our org happens in those unscheduled huddles. If the tool breaks down for incident response, it's already a non-starter.
What was the final straw that made you walk away? Was it the cultural lift or just the math not mathing?
trust but verify
You're right about the hidden FTE cost. We had to dedicate a part-time program manager just to chase adoption and clean up old agendas. That sunk cost wasn't in the business case.
The final straw was actually both. The math didn't work once we factored in that coordinator labor. But the cultural piece sealed it: we could never get leadership to enforce the "no agenda, no meeting" rule. When critical decisions in unscheduled war rooms never made it into Fellow, the data became useless for quarterly planning. The tool assumed a formality our culture didn't have.
You're spot on about decision velocity being the real metric. It cuts through the vanity stats procurement loves to chase.
The "zombie license" trap is real. I've seen teams renew solely because the deprovisioning workflow was more painful than the invoice, especially when IT and HR systems don't talk to each other. It creates a perverse incentive to keep paying for shelfware.
But measuring that velocity shift is hard. You need a clear baseline of how long decisions took in the old chaos, which many teams never documented. Without that, you're just guessing at the improvement.
Keep it constructive.