Lane Shackleton (
@lshackleton
) is Chief Product Officer at
@Coda_hq
, where he’s led the product and design team for over eight years. Lane started his career as an Alaskan climbing guide, then as a reviewer of AdWords ads, eventually becoming a product specialist at Google, a
Early in my career, I sucked at keeping up w/ people. I didn’t have a system.
And personal CRMs never quite fit...or evolve with me. Instead, they reduce people down to LinkedIn profiles & transactional interactions.
Here’s my take on a CRM that is a little more human.
8) One CEO I interviewed memorably said:
“It feels like the most important decisions in our company are jammed into the 100-pixel panel hanging off the side of our Google Docs. Is that really the best we can do?”
9) That leads to a key ritual at Coda & one of our secrets to shipping fast, with high quality: two-way writeups.
Phase
#3
: Two-way writeups start w/ the premise that questions/feedback are key to fast iteration—not combing through Google Doc comments to make progress.
2) I had the goal of building a great network, but no approach to make it systematic.
It reminds me of James Clear’s distinction between systems and goals.
“You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.”
3) Phase
#2
: One-way writeups, aka Amazon six-page memos
In 2004, Jeff Bezos wrote his famous ‘No more Powerpoint’ memo, and Amazon started planning in doc-based memos.
8a) You can make a ‘CRM’ more human just by structuring the information you record.
🔴 — a ‘Notes’ field in a CRM
🟢 — fields for their spouse & kids names
🟢 — field for you’ve learned from them
🟢 — field for opportunities to meaningfully help
🟢 — field for their superpowers
7) I see 3 problems with one-way writeups:
- You don’t know who has read them.
- The feedback is unstructured and all looks the same.
- The most important questions get buried in comment threads.
10) With two-way writeups, you can:
- Know who’s read the doc, so you can get moving.
- Gather structured feedback, then reflect as a group.
- Focus on the most important questions, by getting the group to add theirs and vote on each others.
@shreyas
Yes, such an important skill for leaders at all levels!
1. Present your screen
2. Roughly transcribe in doc
3. Leave time to recap/note next steps w/ group
4. Cleanup & send out same day
Found that after couple years can do
#2
without thinking at all (heard same from others)
Feel like
@lennysan
newsletter and posts resonate with wide audience because he writes like an insatiably curious product person, and not like someone producing a newsletter for profit. Well done on walking that high wire.
11) As one fellow product leader put it to me:
“We switched to two-way writeups. It’s a game-changer when you know exactly where people stand on a topic. It saved us time and heartache.”
Fun chatting with
@lennysan
about how our planning has evolved over the years, some lessons we've applied to our rituals, and much more.
Give it a read, would love to hear feedback or ideas!
The
@Coda_hq
product team has always stood out as one of the most thoughtful, deliberate, first-principled product culture out there.
In part 2 of my series on how the best product teams build product, I interviewed
@lshackleton
on their approach to product.
A few highlights:
First time getting 8 hrs of sleep since our 3rd kid was born, and honestly don't know how people do this, I'm going to break my keyboard with productivity
@johncutlefish
We wanted a similar tool for our team and ended up making a doc that connects to Google Calendar in order to satisfy the need.
Basic idea is team calendar audit, trying to maximize 1) balance, 2) flow, 3) effectiveness.
So much goodness in today's launch for makers!
🪄 Coda AI: a complete work assistant
2⃣ Two-way sync, full-page embeds and sync pages
📓 Handbooks for every team, with rituals & templates
🫶 Tons of details to simplify the product
🚀 Big news: today we’re excited to launch Coda 4.0 ��� the all-in-one platform for businesses, powered by AI.
You might be saying to yourself “Coda releases new features every day, what’s so special about Coda 4.0?”
We’re glad you asked...
Every once in a while, an amazingly talented team forms with an ambitious vision and a important technological wind at their back.
Our AI team, led by
@DKossnick
@abhishekamit
&
@carlojoerges
is one of those special teams.
See what they're building!
Say hello to your new virtual assistant: Coda AI.
✨ Summarize meeting notes & transcripts in a snap.
✨ Quickly prep for customer calls.
✨ Whatever you dream up – it’s stackable with Coda’s other building blocks like tables, controls, text, & formulas.
I think about this sentence from
@johnmaeda
's book at least once per week.
'A gentle, inspired start is the best way to draw students, or even a new customer, into the immersive process of learning.'
Since my second full time job is cleaning up after two small kids, I’d like to hug the whole team at
@Dyson
that made this product. It’s so thoughtfully designed, where can I send my daily gratitude... if the designers that made this are out there, 🙏 thank you!
1) When I first moved to SF over 15 years ago, I used to attend an informal breakfast with founders & product people.
But, I never kept notes & did a crappy job of following up w/ the amazing people I met.
Big mistake. This crew went on to create many successful companies.
Incredible effort from our Team, so proud!
So many new and exciting improvements in this launch.
And enabling anyone to build a Pack has been a dream since the beginning, fun to see creative new packs being launched everyday!
Big news: we’re pleased to introduce the all-new Coda 3.0 — the doc that brings it all together.
With a brand new editor, an open Packs platform, and hundreds of your most requested updates, Coda 3.0 is ready for your team.
Read more about Coda 3.0:
1/
#AnchorList
for 2021 is live!
We've surfaced 29 extraordinary operators in the startup ecosystem across 7 key categories:
💻product
⚙️engineering
🎨design
📢marketing & growth
📈sales & biz dev
💰ops & finance
😃talent
Learn about their stories here
5) Inspired by Bezos’ ‘No Powerpoint’ challenge, and empowered with collaborative doc editing, teams started to make the shift from slides to writeups.
Note: ‘writeup’ = catch-all term for a written doc to help teams achieve a goal, like a project plan, memo, design doc, etc.
Exciting day, we raised a $100M Series D, psyched to continue delivering on our vision!
So much fun to work with our incredible team everyday, come join us -
🎉 We just raised a $100 million round of Series D funding, led by
@OTPPinfo
— and we’re all-in on all-in-one docs.
What exactly does that mean? Glad you asked.
First and foremost, it means making docs even better for makers and their teams.
(1/7)
🚨 Big, big news:
Coda's Pack marketplace is officially open for business. This launch opens new opportunities for both doc and Pack makers.
👉 Pack makers: Sell your Packs in our Gallery
👉 Doc makers: Trial & buy any Pack, regardless of plan
The impact:
🧵 (1/7)
You can now make Packs for Coda. They're like our version of plugins. It's been a fun project for the past year & my first project as a design lead. Super proud of the design team:
@aliciasalvino
@carlojoerges
@TommyGHung
and Jessica Park!
#BlockParty21
So proud of our team for this launch!
I've been using these capabilities on daily basis. AI columns in particular are truly amazing.
And it's so fun to see all the new and creative uses from our customers everyday!
6) As a simple illustration, the other day I caught up with a leader who I hadn’t talked to in 3 years.
I looked them up in my HRM and opened the call by asking about their kid by name.
The person immediately lit up & it was a really positive opening to a great call.
6) I call this type of writeup ‘one-way’ because it’s like printing a piece of paper & putting it on someone’s desk. You’ve done all the talking.
Unfortunately, the audience interaction is crammed into the comments: a 100-pixel space in the right margin.
1) One of the things I love about Coda is experiencing the incredible creativity of our makers. Our belief from the beginning has been that people should shape their own tools, and not the other way around.
🚀Welcome to a new home for your docs: A rebuilt Doc Gallery where you can explore—and share—what you've made.
✍️ Self-publish.
🔍 Discover docs.
📚 Create and curate your doc collection.
Read more:
8b) You can write & schedule follow-ups as soon as the meeting ends.
🔴 — setting a reminder in a CRM system, then having to decide what to do when it comes up.
🟢 — writing the follow-up email directly after the meeting, scheduling it to send on the appropriate time frame.
4 year old bed time tactic
#43
Me: do you want to make pancakes when we wake up?
4 yr old: ....
4 yr old: let’s make a real hovercraft
Me: ....ok.. fun.. I’ll get supplies, go to sleep!
2) Phase
#1
: Slide presentations, aka the Powerpoint generation
In 1987 Powerpoint launched, and it was an incredible tool. But we’ve all been there, waiting through boring presentations for the ‘real’ discussion. Love them or hate them, slides are the de facto standard.
3) That’s part of why I’m writing this thread....
...because I wish someone had showed me their system for tracking people when I was earlier in my career.
I missed out on cultivating some great relationships — and probably building products and investing in great companies.
What if you could ask your doc questions? Well, now you can.
Coda AI chat takes context from the page you're on or doc you’re in to give you the insights you need—right inside your doc.
Rolling out to workspaces over the next few weeks!
4) Nowadays as CPO of Coda, I get the chance to meet lots of amazing people!
And over the last few years, I’ve built up and maintained my own little way of tracking people to build great relationships.
Love this framework for how leaders can give teams feedback while making clear what's important and what's just an FYI (from
@lshackleton
, inspired by
@dharmesh
)
Calling SMBs! Use Coda to make your perfect CRM, headcount tracker, or other lightweight app. Sign up to join our SMB bootcamp, and read more about how
@HHBakingCo
uses Coda to help deliver delicious granola to its happy customers.
If you are going to embark on a new initiative in 2022, the highest leverage activity you can do to increase odds of success is pre-mortems. Here's a
@coda_hq
guide & template for running effective (and fun) pre-mortems:
We've been playing with this for last week, & it's incredible.
I'm using the
@OpenAI
Pack to automatically summarize meeting notes from across the company.
So neat to see creative applications of AI when you combine w/ everyday work in a doc. Future here is very exciting!
🤖 NEW PROJECT
I built an
@OpenAI
Pack for
@coda_hq
, so you can leverage AI in your everyday workflow to streamline your work and augment your creative expression. Use GPT-3 & DALL-E in a doc with your data.
Read on for examples and what I'm excited for
1) Let’s start with some historical context.
Over the last 40 years, we’ve seen two significant changes in how work gets discussed and decisions get made.
And I think we’re entering a third phase.
8c) You can create a flexible set of attributes or tags to make it easy to connect people.
I often get asked questions like:
‘Do you know great product leaders I should talk to about X?’
or
‘Can you connect me to someone at Y company?’
5) A while back, I started jokingly calling it my HRM (as opposed to CRM) because I want to treat people like Humans & not Customers.
I’m don’t track relationships to generate revenue or to ‘network’ (whatever that means).
The point is to build long-term, human relationships.
Awesome work
@glennw
@helenajar
and the whole
@coda_hq
team that made this possible! Been using it for a couple months and just magical how continuously updating data allows you to shape workflows the way you want. 🚀
Say hello to Packs Tables, the new building block with data sync. Pull in info from the apps you use every dayーlike Gmail and Jiraーand say goodbye to stale data.
#codapacks
@visakanv
People love to tell you about the hard parts, partially because it's easy to talk about (eg no sleep). But in my experience the amazing parts are so profound they are often hard to put into words. And of course, imho, those wonderful moments dramatically outweigh missing a little
me, before clubhouse: i will never allow an app to send me notifications, why would i do that
also me, after 121 clubhouse notifications in one day: i wonder what they will notify me of next?!
So cool to see some of the early practice from one of the most creative music performances of all time.
Good reminder that early versions of new things can be raw and to keep going :)
We have an incredibly talented Design team at
@coda_hq
, and I'm excited we're at a point where we can provide a great experience for Product Design interns. If you or someone you know is looking, check out:
@lennysan
1. Screen w/ head of recruiting
2. Interview & meet/greet w/ a PM Lead or me
3. Provide exercise, & prep you for small group
4. Small group presentation: half your background, half exercise, & why Coda
5. Five individual interviews
6. Ref checks
(w/ variations of fast tracking)
✨ Here's my conversation with
@shishirmehrotra
, CEO of Coda, former head of product, eng, and design at YouTube, and 🤯 first-principles thinker.
Learn about:
▫️ The rituals of great teams
▫️ Black loop and blue loops
▫️ Eigenquestions
▫️ How to create change
Links below 👇
@shishirmehrotra
@zebriez
@coda_hq
Yep, about to publish the little CRM system I’ve built based on a several insights over the last few years, happy to show it to you if that’s helpful!
@danhockenmaier
On your point about writing cultures over presentation cultures, I agree. There's an interesting history in the space. Wrote about this a while back here.
Kudos to
@halesjustin
for building a tool to help people leverage this simple framework with their calendars.
I’m pretty amazed by how quickly he did this and cold DMed it to me. The internet is amazing.
I’m excited to announce that I’ll be starting a dream role managing
@coda_hq
’s new $1MM Maker Fund & doing everything I can to help make our fundees successful.
If you have ambitions to build great docs/packs and could use capital/support, apply now!
❔ What separates great product teams from the rest?
🤔 That’s a question I’ve been thinking about lately.
✍️ So I started writing down some stories, philosophy, and practical approaches in the form of first principles.
👇 Below is a little tidbit from the first post.
Is your team building cathedrals, or simply stacking bricks?
@shishirmehrotra
and
@lshackleton
discuss why teams that see how their work contributes to something more substantial are more successful than those who only see individual activity:
Made a
@figmadesign
plugin with
@carlojoerges
that let's you use data from
@coda_hq
in Figma ~~ You can use data from tables, apply data in bulk, and easily ellipse content after # of lines.
Awesome talk by
@helenajar
about building the publishing platform at
@coda_hq
from the ground up, loved her and the team's approach to developing a clear vision and complementing it with a compelling story arc (esp within fast time constraints)
About every 3 months, I remove all Infinity Pools (
@jazer
and
@jakek
's term) from my phone, eg twitter, slack, email..
It usually takes ~2 hrs of no phone/computer to have a clarifying insight on a problem I'm struggling with.
Any yet, somehow I always add them back.. 🤯😱🤡
Can't stop thinking about these families. These acts of terror are horrific. Sending love and strength to friends and colleagues in the Jewish community.
Today's a big day for the team! So much hard work went into the launches you'll see, every detail of the event and ensuring our makers have an awesome experience.
Come join us for the keynote in a few minutes!
New project! - is a small website that guides you through a slow, observational walk.
Taking a purposeless walk does so much to help me feel centered and energized, so I hope this encourages more of that 🐌
We also noticed that sometimes a single (x,y) point isn’t enough, and it’s helpful to be able to talk about a specific area in a file. With these new comments, you can now drag to highlight a region that’s tied to your comment pin.
@mgharrisdc