I haven’t found in-person meetups to be that useful. In my experience they only really started happening in late 2021/early 2022 due to the pandemic, and since then they’ve been severely curtailed due to the market downturn. So when you do meet up it’s more about finally seeing people in person, team building, and restating your team’s goals and mission. Any brainstorming I’ve seen happens in over-long sessions with 30+ people in attendance, where a ton of ideas are generated but there’s no actual momentum once everyone gets on the plane back home. The real collaboration happens in the interstitial times- lunch, breaks, and so on. Which again points to the importance of having at least part of the team co-located.

Full disclosure, this is at a company that is hybrid and not remote-first. But I’ve seen the pattern repeated enough times across various teams that I don’t think my experience is unique. And I say this as someone who personally prefers to work remotely- I’m just not unaware of what’s lost in that environment.