YouSaid · the spoken record

Lane Shackleton

lines on the record: 98
first: 2023-10-01
most recent: 2023-10-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“On LinkedIn and Twitter, and I have a sub stack we'll be releasing that handbook for product teams that I will probably post on Substack. And in terms of useful to me, yeah, give God a try, give us feedback. I love hearing from product people all over. It's like one of the bright spots in my day to hear all the creative rituals that come from this community. you know, created just a legendary community of people. And so they always give very thoughtful feedback. So very open to all of that. And yeah, thanks for having me.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's kind of a saying, which is the safest climber is the one who knows when to come down, essentially. And I think that there are many times that you have to kind of like put your ego in check and come off a mountain or come out of a climb because it's not as quite as safe as you thought it was. So I think that's maybe one. I think the other is, you know, it's probably not a one-way door. So I think in many ways you can do climbing and you can do some of these outdoor pursuits on the side or you can, you know, you can always come back from them. So it's maybe not as big of a choice as some people think it is.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mom's a psychologist, and so, and a professional counselor. So certainly active listening, maybe the tech version of that or the modern version of that is like Steel Manning someone's argument, being able to like repeat back to someone what they said in a better form, more clear form. So yeah, she's an amazing woman, taught me a lot about listening.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if it's a motto as much as it's just a way of being. Essentially, the present moment is all that we have, you know, realizing their attention is very often on the path to the future. In so many ways, the present is where it should be always. And so I think that that is something I think about a lot. I think maybe more broadly, I had a mentor who roughly said a version of like make things happen. And so I really try to apply that to anything that I do, if that's like work or life or sports. try to be the person who creates like momentum and positive change and progress. And so I think that that's generally a good kind of motto to live by.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm become a real sleep nerd that sort of cup around your eyes I love Obviously, in the tech world, like ChatGPT, there's a product I got really obsessed with tennis during the pandemic. There's a product called Swing Vision. That's really good. It basically cuts up your match into different all your forehands or all the longest rallies or all that uses AI to do that. There's a corresponding meditation app to the book Waking Up that I really like. That one's a very good one.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I sometimes do a version of making them explain it two different ways after and making the candidate explain it two different ways and saying like okay now you have to explain that to you know your grandparent and then like now you know you just told me about sewing or some hobby of yours like i'll sell it and it's like most technical form to you know someone who knows everything about this particular topic and so it's like kind of fun to also see the range uh that people can operate”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I also recently wrote a post about my favorite ref check question, which I think I would love to learn other people's favorite ref check questions.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two I really like one is teach me something that I don't already know. I think it's like just an awesome way of seeing if someone's going to lean in and like really figure out what you don't know and then how passionate they are about sort of pitching what they do know I think is really fun. And then Shashir and I have been asking a version of teleporter question and evolving it for many years now. So I like that question quite a bit.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a little bit hard with three kids and a job these days to watch a lot of TV. I would say I really enjoyed the last dance. I like love any sports documentary, all those.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One that comes to mind is turning the flywheel. It's a little manuscript book. Jim Collins wrote it. It's really, I think, a very succinct and very fast read about how flywheels work. We talked about storyworthy. I recommend that book a lot. Good strategy, bad strategy. Love that book. Very simple framework that I've reused a bunch. Maybe outside of tech, waking up as a book by Sam Harris on Mindfulness that I really like. And then an old one that I really like is the inner game of tennis by Timothy Galway, which is a kind of classic.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, just planning way too much. And oftentimes, you really don't know what's ahead until you've launched or learned something. And so I think that's a pretty good rule to follow.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strategy process or strategy ritual that is like distinct from okay our setting and like metric setting and goal setting. And I have found you can pick whatever strategy framework works for you, but I do think it's quite important to pull those two things apart. The other kind of like rule that we live by on the planning side is what we call 10% planning rule, which is essentially just ensure that you're not for a given time period planning for more than 10% of that execution period. And I think this is a really easy mistake to make. I mean, this is a hard fought rule because we've made that mistake before. But you end up getting kind of like bogged down in planning or saying like planning felt rushed. And so we need to make it through weeks instead of one week or whatever. And the byproduct of that over the course of a lot of time is that you end up”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one thing that we've discussed before is just about strategy and planning and stuff like that. So it may be useful to touch on a couple kind of like insights there. I think there's kind of like two insights in the strategy and planning thing. And this is, again, in the handbook that we're writing. But the first that I end up seeing a lot is just this idea that like OKRs are not actually strategy. You know, I think the way that we plan and the way that our customers plan, the kind of key point is it's critical to disconnect like strategy discussions from OKR discussions. And it sounds really obvious, but it's like, I think a very common mistake. And I think a really simple question to ask yourself is like, do we have a separate?”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would not have heard that feedback. It was like very unlikely I would have heard that feedback unless they had had a sentiment table, a place to add that. And so I think the, you know, the kind of punchline on all of this is I really authentically believe that this is like where we're headed and hope that a lot of PMs and product teams adopt this in general.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I think probably the most valuable is sentiment or pulse, which is, you know, how do you feel overall about this particular proposal? And if you think about the contrast between like a comment thread on the title and seeing a list of all the sentiment, how everybody feels about this proposal, and really being inclusive to the entire audience is just wildly different. I think in my particular experience, I'll give you one example. I wrote this proposal this is now a couple years ago. I thought it was going to sail through no problem. I thought it was going to get four out of five and five out of five smiley faces from everybody that's sort of how the sentiment table works. And one of the lead designers basically said one smiley face, we shouldn't do this. I was like, oh man, this particular person's like not really vocal in meetings. And so.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I saw this pattern all the time. So if you live that life, I think the world of two-way write-ups and like the way that I think a lot of our customers are doing it, and you can do this on other tools besides Coda too, I think is quite a bit better. You end up, I guess, the alternative to go down that list is you have a done reading button at the end of a write-up. So now you can say like, oh, you know, these are all the people that have read this. And like, I think even you see a pattern in some of our customers where if it's like a particularly long write-up, you'll have three done reading buttons. So you can kind of see like where everyone has gotten to. And then the second thing is making sure that you're actually addressing the most important question. So instead of pulling questions out of the comments and trying to figure out which one to address, just putting those in a table and then letting people upload those. And that's what we call Dory.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And part of that, I think, is there are all these questions that are being raised. And so you have really no idea what the most important question is. And so if you're facilitating those discussions in one way writeups, you're often like going through the comments in the 20 minutes before that session trying to figure out which one of these do I want to address. And then the other behavior, and I don't know if you've ever seen this in a doc, but like in one way write-ups that you see a lot is like there'll be just a mega comment thread on like the title of the doc. And it's like people are like, I don't think we should do this or like, you know, you'll get into this 30, you know, 30 comment thread on the title because that's like the best place to put your like overall thought.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About at PMs and like product people are always at the like run. And really, the ones that are driving discussions oftentimes in companies. And so, you know, I think the problem with one-way write-ups, I felt very deeply at Google and YouTube. And just to name them, the first one is you would always be trying to figure out who's read your write-up. So I have many memories of sending a write up out at 11.30 p.m. And then like waiting patiently for the avatar of like the SVP in my area to show up in there. And that was like a sign that they had like read it, which is like, you know, just totally insane if you think about that behavior. The second one is you end up having a lot of the discussion in the comments itself. So this is a space that's really built for like grammar and spell checking and things like that. And you're having like these really meaningful discussions in this kind of like 100 pixel right margin.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had kind of like online collaborative editing. And the other thing was Jeff Bezos sent this very famous memo, which basically said, no more PowerPoint at Amazon. And what that did was kind of started in earnest their six-pager ritual, so you can read all about this in the book Working Backwards. Really good book, Colin Breyer's book. And so that started, I think, what was kind of like what I'll call the one-way write-up phase, which is like, you're writing down your ideas, you're expressing them clearly. It's in prose, so you have to be really clear. That was like a big step up, I think, from presenting, always presenting work and deciding on work by a presentation. And then kind of the thesis is that we're like in the midst of a new phase, which is essentially two-way write-ups. And that's where it's more conversational and feedback and discussion is like actually part of the content itself. So that's kind of like the broader historical arc. But if you think about it,”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cool. Yeah, I think, I mean, this is a concept that I wrote a bunch about and I often now get asked about. And I guess that maybe the historical view of this, I got really obsessed with the history of like how work gets discussed and decided upon. and kind of broke it down into like three phases. And so the first phase was 1980s, we had PowerPoint. It was like this amazing tool you could like manipulate shapes on a screen and we were all like using fancy clip art and it was really fun. But we've all had the experience of being in a really long PowerPoint presentation and kind of like someone's droning on in their slides and stuff like that. Second phase is in the early 2000s kind of like two things converged. One was Google bought this company called Rightly. That became Google Docs. So instead of having Word on your desktop and sending files around, you now have”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, what's next? And we definitely spent a few months trying to reach that, you know, that high watermark that was set that day and traffics and sign up. So it was a fun, memorable day. And people for like the subsequent one or two years would refer to it as Tim Ferris Day.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or, like, you know, something's going haywire. At the time, we were also in the China Basin office and the fire alarm went off. And so now we're outside on our laptops. We were like in a war room trying to figure out what was happening. And now we're outside trying to figure out what's going on. So anyway, make a long story short. Data scientists investigate. And we have eventually figured out that we had been featured in Tim Ferris' email newsletter. And I think early on you hear this lesson or this adage of like first time founder, really great product, second time founder, build great distribution. I think that was like one of those early big cues to think about the importance of content distribution and the importance of these publishing flywheels. And it definitely made us double down. We're like, okay, if we can do this with Tim Ferris.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. Yeah, there's lots of memorable days at Coda. One of them was Tim Ferris Day. So I guess me for context, we had built this kind of like publisher, very nascent publisher motion where we were going out and helping people, you know, publish their rituals. And this is what you see in the gallery, the Coda Gallery. And a lot of what we talked about today. But we had this one person on that team, this guy Al Chen, Tim Ferris fan, and also I think had been really tenacious with like the people around Tim Ferris and basically finally got an into him and like figured out a really neat way to implement one of his rituals and protodoc. And so none of us really knew this, but this is all happening. And anyway, we wake up one morning and traffic is like just like spiking through the roof. Signups are spiking. No one knows what's going on. Like I'm convinced this is all spam. I'm like, something's wrong with our data.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think most people can be way more concise with their communication. Even internally, people don't care. You should assume that people don't care. Or if you're talking to customers, writing a blog post for customers, you should assume that they don't care. When you start with that assumption, you really force yourself to be a little bit sharper in your communication.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that's basically how both me and I had a friend named Bill Farrell who transitioned into PM at the same time. And that's essentially how we got the try at being a PM inside of Google is like we needed the customer really, really well. And we were often in conversations sort of bridging the gap from here's what the customer thinks to, you know, here's what I think they're really saying or here's what I think we should build based on what they said”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Regardless of where you are in the organization, you're always serving a customer. You can't just talk to one big enterprise customer and you can't just talk to the smallest customer. You kind of have to like have a diverse and continuous stream of customer interactions in order to have good intuitions about what to do next. And your engineers aren't going to really trust you unless you have good intuitions about like where the customer's headed and what they want and stuff like that. And so the stakes, I think, are pretty high. And it's, you know, the good news is it's like easier than ever with all these tools to really get into the mindset of a customer.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think maybe to relate it to what you just said, if I were to give advice to someone who really is trying, aspires to be a PM or trying to get into PM, I think in many cases if you're in a customer facing role, you are the expert on the customer. And that is like really, really valuable in tech organizations. And oftentimes it's kind of undervalued. And so I think people who want to move into PM roles who are sort of not currently in PM roles can often lever that experience and that knowledge of the customer in ways that are, you know, pretty For the organization, if they really are creative about it. And then I think the other thing is.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“See, I probably worked for at least four or five years before being able to move to PM. And that was, I think that was like a slightly harrowing journey because at the time you had to have a computer science degree.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are like 15 product specialists at Google. And that was, for me, that was an amazing time because I was getting to sit on like seven or eight different core teams, core product teams. And my observation, most people these days, most PMs don't get to sit on other people's core teams. And so I kind of had these like three or four years of just, you know, I kind of call it like a masterclass in PMing because I was getting to watch like what was working for some PMs and what wasn't working for other PMs and just kind of like taking notes behind the scenes. So that was a really influential role. And then yeah, went on to various PM roles at Google and YouTube.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just a great lesson, and when people don't actually care about your product, so in Adward's case, people did not care about Adwards. Like you were like the expert on it and you're trying to tell them about ad groups and like how this ad format works and blah blah. And like most of the time, people are like, dude, I'm a small business owner. I'm trying to like give people to come to my auto mechanics store or I'm trying to get people to come to like my taxi service or whatever it was. I don't care, you know, and so like you're basically the product had to kind of get out of the way and really just drive impact for the customer. You know, it was like they just want more phone calls or they want more people in the store. So those are, I think, two kind of like pieces that I think about from those days still. And then I worked in a variety of other roles. I worked in a role called product specialists, which is an awesome role back when they”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beginning because you're going to end up serving a customer your whole career, like even when you're the CEO of a company, you're going to be serving a customer. So you better get really good at being in any customer scenario and being able to handle it. And so I think that that turned out to be insanely good advice. And if I think about, you know, something that a piece of advice that I give out to people who are earlier in their career, I've definitely recycled that advice. I think the other thing that I took away from that experience was”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So after working on ad approvals at that time, I moved to chat support. It was basically like when AdWords was launching chat support, I remember very fondly having two chats chatting with two advertisers at once, moved on to phone support. That was eight hours a day of talking to AdWords customers. Really a total roller coaster ride. It was basically like one minute you would pick up the phone and it would be someone from a Fortune 100 company trying to spend like millions of dollars on AdWords. And then like the next minute you would be on the phone with like a psychic or a taxi driver that was like warring with their compatriots over some really specific keyword. I think there were kind of like two lessons that I would draw from this. One is I had a mentor at the time and his advice when I was starting my career was basically like you have to get customer facing from the very beginning.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was a really memorable time. There's an amazing cohort of people that started in tech. I think there were like two or three hundred of us at that time. And then eventually thousands that started in Cheryl Sandberg's organization, I guess maybe some quick context before running ads on Google.com at that time, you had to have them manually approved by a human before that was like handled by machine learning. you know outsourced to other countries And so there was this process where basically an ad would show up on your screen, you would market family safe, non-family safe porn, and then you would, based on that, it would either run or it wouldn't. And actually funny enough, some of my most successful friends were terrible at the approval bin. Like they failed the rote task of approving ads. They just like couldn't handle it. And they went on to be really, really successful.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it's almost never as bad as you think it's going to be. So, yeah, it's just a question of how much better it can be oftentimes.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hundreds of times since stop talking about it and like go make something. Go like run an experiment, go make a prototype, you know, go write a doc, go make a mock. Just don't talk about it. And I found that people, you know, also as a leader, people really follow that concept. And I also found that it's like it transcends level. You know, like I'm not talking just to ICPMs. I'm talking to like heads of product and CPOs and CEOs to some degree like, you know, you should always be out there trying to learn by expressing your ideas and putting them out there. And that's much more valuable in many cases than pontificating about it or having endless circular discussions on it.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Figure it out essentially. And I think his point was like, look, we can debate this forever. So I would rather us see the upper and lower bounds of like how good this could be or how bad this is going to be like immediately. And so, you know, we launched a set of experiments. Sky Jamie Kearns, who's still there, tiny little skip button, you know, on one experiment, giant skip button that covered the entire player on the other side of the experiment. And within a few weeks, I think we had developed some conviction, you know, based on some very directional data that we were onto something. And so the lesson that I took”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clever way by putting a skip button on the ad and then charging people per views. And the latter part, we hadn't quite cemented yet, but it was sort of part of the core idea. And so the thing I write about in this post is as a new PM, this feels like a really consequential decision, right? It's like we've got this new product idea. Nobody really wants it. Like advertisers don't want it. The sales team doesn't want it. And it's like a very unproven thesis. And so the thing I write about is like these are the types of things that you can debate for like months or years, you know. And I was sitting in a one-on-one with this guy named Phil Farhe, who's an amazing product leader and was my boss at the time. And we're trying to figure out what to do and how to handle all the different dynamics. And he just kind of like stopped and he's like, you know what? Like just test the extremes, start the experiment tomorrow.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I moved over to YouTube shortly after the acquisition. It was an amazing tightknit team. It definitely felt like the Wild West. It was. We were getting sued by Viacom for a billion dollars when that was a lot of money. No advertiser wanted to talk to us. It was essentially viewed as like a site of cat videos and dogs on skateboards and things like that. And then I guess the other context of the sales team was like very nascent and all they wanted to sell was the homepage and for good reason. Like that was where you made your money as a salesperson. And so, you know, I had just been sponsored by Salar and Shashir to become a PM. It's a longer story that I'll leave out for now and we can go into. But on day one of being a PM, she shares like, great, you're the new guy. You get the project that nobody else wants. And that's called skippable ads. And we've got this crazy idea that we can align the incentives of advertisers and viewers and creatives in this really.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Catalyst to decision rituals to a lot of like planning and strategy and roadmaps, that kind of stuff, and trying to pull out the most interesting patterns and also give people a pretty practical view of like how to implement these things. I think that's what has been lacking sometimes.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the realizations I had the other day, probably like a month or two ago when we started working on this thing was someone I was talking to someone about Catalyst and a couple other concepts and they're like, I get it. I'm sold like let me like I want to implement some of these things. Where do I look? And so I found myself sending them a bunch of links to individual templates. So that was kind of like that queued us into the fact that we needed to have like a better kind of core handbook for teams that wanted to adopt some of these rituals and also learn from all the rituals that we have learned from and feel very fortunate to have partnered with so many customers on. And so what we did was started writing this handbook and it's going to come out hopefully by the time this recording is done. And in it, you know, we'll talk about everything from rituals like.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the whole group there, right? Like with the whole triad there. And oftentimes with the salesperson there and with the marketer there and like with everybody else. So I found that that is just a really good practice to try to sort of move a lot of that work out of one-on-ones and into a small group setting.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'll have a tag up with a small set of people from a given team, or sometimes we have kind of larger groups. And then they meet with their brain trust. And it's once a week. And it's really sort of the same mindset of a one-on-one. It's like their time. So anything that they need to unblock a decision or to like make progress, they should use that time for. And they often start by reviewing OKRs and metrics and things like that. But then we generally get into a table of topics anyone can add a topic, those topics are upvoted. So people will react and then the table will sort itself. And then we'll say, okay, this is clearly the topic on people's mind. And that's like a version of what we call Dory, which I can talk about. But essentially, the kind of principle is you should discuss that project work.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tag up is based on this insight that a lot of work and project work tends to get discussed in one-on-ones. And actually that's like, it's really an anti-pattern. It's a pattern you should try to avoid. So if you're talking to your manager about product work, what's not happening in that moment is your engage lead and your design lead, they're not hearing that. And so you end up with this big game of telephone where, you know, you'll have a conversation with your manager in one-on-one. They'll go back and translate to their engineering and design lead. And of course, like the fidelity of, you know, the game of telephone, something is lost in all of those transmissions. And so the core idea is kind of have a group one-on-one with the key stakeholders. And so we have this concept of brain trust that's kind of modeled off after Pixar's brain trust. And so”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The majority of those Shashir or I or Oliver, the head of engineering, will say, I may have some opinions but keep going. Like that's kind of like often the default. And then there are plenty where we say just notify us of the decision after. And in doing that, Nathan can now give better guidance to the PMs on his team and say, like, hey, you don't really need to involve as wide a group as you think. So just like keep going and check in later. I think those are those types of little iterations are usually based on a really good insight.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In these decisions because, like, every one of these with core product feels like they impact everybody. And so a very simple thing that he did, probably in the last six months, was he had a table of all the upcoming decisions. And then at a tag up, which I can explain if you want, but basically with a small set of stakeholders, had all the upcoming decisions and then he let people hit a little reaction and say, oh, I want, you know, I don't need to be involved just notify me of the decision after or hey, I have some opinions, but you can keep going. Or no, I really want to be like heavily involved in this decision. And it was like such a pro move. You know, it was like such a, I've been through a million of these. I don't want to treat every one of them the same because if I do, it's going to slow down the velocity of this whole organization. And so instead.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There'll be a lot of iteration on top of that. And even those systems went through a lot of iteration. Like I talked about how the calendar hold got removed. And then like individual topics got added. I mean, that took us launching like automations and the ability to add things to calendar in order for that whole process to really work. So in the years prior to us launching that, we kind of did it with very manually. So I think there's still a lot of creativity that I see every day. So I'll give one quick example. One of our PM leads on core product, this guy Nathan. He basically saw that a lot of decisions had a lot of different stakeholders because like he's in the core product. And now he's leading the core product team. So he's trying to figure out what guidance do I give to each of these PMs on like who to involve.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are always coming up with new creative ways and to kind of like make their teams run better, make decisions go smoother. And we're kind of continuously adopting those. But there's definitely a backbone of the system. Like the backbone of the system is catalyst and tagups and the concept called bullpen. And then, you know,”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of this is like we're trying to get the ambiguous stuff out there so that we can make it more clear. And so I use that as an example because you can be a brand new PM, run a brainstorm, run a planning session like that. And you're probably going to get great feedback, right? Like people are probably going to go, this is kind of cool. I've never done this before. Now to go to the other side of the spectrum, you know, we help a lot of companies that want to remake a whole process. They want to remake like a review system like Catalyst or they want to remake, you know, their decision kind of like rituals. And so in that sense, we're usually talking to like a head of product or director product or VPA product and someone who tends to have a lot more agency over, you know, the way that the team works.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ritual was essentially you can take any set of problems or solutions or themes or whatever you want to get people's input on and you put those in into a table and then people can basically vote with their dollars and usually you allocate $100. And so people will go through and say like, oh, I want to allocate $10 to this and $20 to this and $50 to this because I think it's really important. I have found that especially in planning processes, little rituals like this are great at kind of like getting the elephant in the room out. So it's like, oh, wow, we have like a huge spread on this one particular problem. You think it's a huge problem. I don't think it's a problem at all. Let's talk about it. And so I think a lot of, you know, if going back to the thesis of turning ambiguity into clarity, you know,”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it depends a lot on what your role in the company is. If you're maybe to say the extremes for a second, if you're like a brand new PM to an organization, you probably shouldn't go try to remake the whole review cycle that the head of product is really passionate about and is like crafted. But you can probably take a decision template or some interesting ritual that has facilitated a team, you know, in the past and use it with your team. Another one of my favorites there is $100 voting. We use that a lot in the context of planning. And I find that like creative rituals like that are easy to pick up for teams because oftentimes it's like, okay, maybe I'll describe the ritual real quick.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source