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I work in a small team and recently we had to merge with another team (slightly larger) in a business vertical. Both teams are dealing with some satellite applications related to Business Intelligence.

While day to day work is not affected, our product owner suggested to have some regular meetings to share our knowledge. This is great because we are virtually working on the same data warehouse and we can find out a lot. These meeting should be highly technical (talk about tech stack, architectural choices, show some code examples etc.)

Each meeting is organized by one of the members, who invites all the members in the both teams.

Last session was organized by one of my colleagues and invited all the members. However, one the colleagues in the other team immediately forwarded the meeting to his manager. So, we had this extra person during the meeting.

The issue is that this manager has little technical knowledge, asks lots of trivial questions and usually eats up all the time and the meeting will take more than expected, usually not covering the agenda and reaching some conclusion. This is not an isolated case and many other colleagues complained about this behavior.

We (my team) are trying to learn from this experience and thought about/done the following:

approached our product owner : he agreed with us that the organizer should decide who participates, but did nothing

: he agreed with us that the organizer should decide who participates, but did nothing prevent meeting forwarding : we found out that we can deny forwarding of the meeting, but this can be easily circumvented since the colleague can just simply tell his manager about the meeting. This option also marks our intention to avoid other persons being invited

: we found out that we can deny forwarding of the meeting, but this can be easily circumvented since the colleague can just simply tell his manager about the meeting. This option also marks our intention to avoid other persons being invited talk to the person forwarding the meetings - our relation with the guy is not really good and we are not sure about the reaction. He might tell his manager that we do not want him at these meetings and things might get complicated

- our relation with the guy is not really good and we are not sure about the reaction. He might tell his manager that we do not want him at these meetings and things might get complicated talk to manager's boss - while this might also be a good opportunity to draw attention about other issue as well, the hierarchical distance is quite high (he is leading over hundreds of people and this issue seems really small)

- while this might also be a good opportunity to draw attention about other issue as well, the hierarchical distance is quite high (he is leading over hundreds of people and this issue seems really small) try to make impossible for him to attend - we can find out about an important meeting the manager must attend and program the meeting in the same time interval. This should be more subtle, but have to deal with change proposals

Question: Are there any alternatives we should consider?

I know it sounds like a small issue, but our little team took these meetings really seriously and tried our best for the presentations and relevant discussions.