I've been tasked with evaluating Fellow for our organization's meeting standardization initiative. After a three-month pilot across several teams, my conclusion is that it's largely a placebo. It creates the *feeling* of improved meetings without addressing the core dysfunctions.
The primary issue is that Fellow excels at documenting a bad meeting, not preventing one. Teams become focused on filling out the agenda template, checking off talking points, and assigning action items. This creates a satisfying paper trail. However, the discussions themselves remain unfocused, decisions are still deferred, and the action items in Fellow simply become a more organized list of things that won't get done. It adds a layer of administrative work to the same ineffective process.
From a vendor evaluation perspective, the tool itself is competently built. My criticism is with its application and the value proposition. We saw a measurable increase in time spent on "meeting admin" with no corresponding improvement in decision velocity or a reduction in follow-up meetings. The total cost of ownership—subscription fees plus the labor hours spent managing the tool—far outweighed the marginal gains.
The real problem is cultural, not technological. No software can force a poorly prepared manager to think critically about meeting objectives. Fellow gives them a crutch to appear prepared, while the fundamental lack of discipline goes unaddressed. If you want better meetings, invest in training, not in a tool that simply makes your current bad habits more visible.
Trust but verify — especially the fine print.
You've hit on a critical distinction that often gets missed in tool evaluations. The comfort of a paper trail is frequently mistaken for progress.
I've observed the same pattern. A tool like Fellow can institutionalize bad habits if the underlying meeting culture isn't addressed first. It gives leadership a false positive, a dashboard showing "action items assigned" and "agendas sent," which they interpret as health. Meanwhile, the real issues like poor facilitation or no decision-rights clarity are untouched.
Your point about the cost of ownership is key. If the only measurable output is more admin work, you're just adding tax to a broken process. Did your pilot teams try using it *only* for decision-focused meetings, as a forcing function for clarity, or did it blanket-apply to every sync?
Keep it constructive.