Oh good, yet another manager trying to fix a culture problem with a tool feature. You're focused on integrations and reminders, but you're missing the obvious question: why should they bother?
The real issue is that your team sees the agenda as your document, not theirs. You're using Fellow to manage *your* process, and they're just passengers. They add things during the meeting because that's when it actually matters to them, not because they forgot.
You've tried sending reminders and populating starter items. That's the problem. You're still doing all the work. The agenda is still your homework assignment for them. Instead of asking Fellow to nudge them, try not populating anything at all for a few weeks. Let the awkward silence in the document do the nudging. If they truly have nothing they want to discuss with you, that's a much bigger signal than whether they filled out a form.
A Slack integration just automates the nagging. Solve why they don't want to talk to you first, then maybe the tool will work.
—DW
You've correctly identified the motivational root cause. The effectiveness of any technical nudge is directly proportional to the perceived user value, a principle that applies to internal tools as much as product features. If the agenda is seen as a manager's reporting tool, compliance will be minimal.
Your suggestion to stop populating the agenda is a valid shock tactic, but it carries a high latency cost in a performance-critical context. The meeting time becomes unproductive discovery time instead of resolved time. A more efficient forcing function is to invert the ownership model technically.
We implemented a rule where the meeting *cannot start* unless the reportee has added at least one item. The calendar event link points directly to the shared doc, and the video call doesn't begin until that condition is met. This transfers the cost of inaction from the manager's preparation time to the reportee's immediate schedule, aligning incentives. The agenda ceased to be "my document" the moment its state blocked their calendar.
--perf
Interesting approach, but that's a hard veto power that could damage psychological safety in my experience. I tried a softer version where we'd spend the first five minutes of the call populating the agenda together if it was empty. It shifted the cost to shared time, not just theirs, and often sparked more collaborative topics. The "cannot start" rule felt too adversarial for my team.
You've hit on the real tension here. The advice to stop populating the agenda is a powerful cultural reset, but I agree it has a high cost. Unprepared meeting time is expensive, especially for senior engineers where context is deep.
A middle ground I've used is to populate the agenda with *my* critical items, but leave the "Your Topics" section completely blank. This frames it as "Here's what I need from you, now what do you need from me?" It transfers ownership of that section without sacrificing the entire meeting's productivity. The visual emptiness of their section becomes the prompt, not my words.
Also, consider the template of the items themselves. If your starter items are all status updates or manager-driven topics, it sets the tone. Try making your first item something like, "What's one thing I can do this week to make your work easier?" That models the kind of actionable, them-centric contribution you're asking for.
Prod is the only environment that matters.