> In these I find it harder to follow what's being discussed and I also need to balance my need to ask questions with the need of the meeting to proceed smoothly.

I think this is a key issue/insight. The larger full-department meetings will inevitably have parts to them that various people won't understand. It might be a 10-minute section about sales strategy that the engineers don't understand, or a 15-minute section about a technical issue that marketing doesn't understand. When you get that many people together across different disciplines with different areas of expertise, it's inevitable that this will happen.

The important thing is knowing what you (as an individual) need to understand, and if there's something in that bucket that you don't understand in the moment, hopefully the atmosphere is inclusive enough that you don't feel embarrassed or penalized asking a question, and the question can be answered quickly enough that it doesn't bog down the meeting. And on the flip side, if there are things you don't need to understand, you just accept that and wait until meeting conversation moves to something that's relevant to you.

You could argue that this type of meeting is horribly inefficient, and you'd be right. But sometimes inefficient meetings are just necessary, because doing it in a way that seems more efficient turns out to not actually be that efficient (or it is, but it's not thorough enough, and you end up with people missing critical information that they need to know). But this is also why this type of meeting (hopefully!) doesn't happen often, like maybe only once per quarter.

If you're in this type of meeting once a week, then something is wrong. Either your company is terrible at internal communication, or the person inviting you has misunderstood your role. A quick side conversation with the meeting organizer after the meeting is over should hopefully clear things up, and maybe excuse you from further attendance.

> I guess what I'm confused about is how other people seem to follow along in these meetings.

Why are you so sure they do? I mean, yes, certainly there will be some people in these meetings whose job function aligns pretty well with everything discussed. But there will also be others, like yourself, who sit there and listen (or pretend to listen), but don't really understand a lot of what's being said. They just don't admit to anyone else that this is the case, so you might think that they follow along but just don't have much to say.

> I know I'm doing something wrong, I just don't know what it is.

I don't think you're doing anything wrong. Consider your day-to-day job. Do you think you have the necessary information to do your job effectively most of the time? If so, then it's fine that you don't get much out of these meetings. If not, it's still not certain that your inability to understand these meetings is the reason. It's possible your direct manager doesn't give you enough context (either one-on-one, or in smaller team meetings), or maybe there are other meetings that you should be invited to but aren't.

Please don't immediately assume you're at fault here. Meetings -- especially those with a lot of attendees -- are just these big amorphous things that are often not very useful to many people attending. That's just how corporations work, for better or worse.