It would be good if more tech companies embraced this. I bet if they need tools for themselves we’ll see a lot of progress in remote collaboration tools. To make this work I wonder how executives will adapt. In my company the higher you go up the chain, the more they want face to face communication. I guess most top executives are people persons so not seeing things like body language or using body language takes awa…
As an executive (Product and Technology specifically) at a mostly work from home company: I find that engineers can do a pretty good job of effectively collaborating thanks to PR's, Slack, JIRA, and a host of other asynchronous tools. It's on the product side that things are tougher. Great product work is often about finding meaningful insights in the data available to you, and that often involves long conversations…
And now that they are at home, they are not trying as hard to pretend they are listening closely, and since they are more comfortable, they are staying in the meetings and saying what they want? Whereas before they would let the most assertive person talk, and after a few minutes could not tolerate the in person meeting anymore and so pretended that they were all in agreement so you would let them go, knowing they would work out the actual details amongst themselves later?
And now they don't have the option of working things out after the meeting, which is another reason the meetings are taking longer.
The biggest issue for you is probably that you have a lot of wasted time where only a part of the team is working together in the meeting but other people who are not involved in that part are just waiting for them to finish.
Do some research on the tools that engineers use to work asynchronously and train your product team. Also consider smaller video chat meetings, and chat rooms, etc.