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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“And the impact of this, I think, if you really watch it in progress is huge. You basically have many topics running all the same time. So the throughput is much better. And you have the right attendees every single time. And you have like a clear set of drivers and roles in these meetings. So that means that we can review work much, much faster with the right people. And ideally, that results in more value to our customers, more things getting shipped, just a higher velocity organization. So that's one that we get asked about a lot. And actually, a couple weeks ago, we spent a while kind of remaking the template for that one.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the driver is like the person who's actually going to drive the meeting, drive the decision, drive the outcome, things like that. And basically, this is all centralized in like one doc. And what happens is the day before that hold that's on calendar gets removed. And then you have specific topics that get added. So there may be like three topics going all at the same time because they don't have overlapping attendees.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The calendar in two weeks. And the downside of both of the downside of the, you know, not being able to get on the calendar is that now you've just slowed down the whole velocity of the company because the like throughput of your review meeting is really slow. So we built catalysts to really solve those two problems. And so the way it works is it's essentially three one hour blocks throughout the week. And the assumption is that the whole company is free. So you can get anyone in the company for those three hours. And each topic has essentially four roles, driver, maker, brain trust, and interested. It's a very transparent system. So like a salesperson.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second problem is single threaded, so like one topic at a time. So if you think about if a product development process is like somewhat of a chaotic assembly line for a second, your reviewer, your decision forum ends up being a big time bottleneck in many cases. And like obviously, you know, you want to be in a situation where product people have a lot of autonomy and they can make most of the decisions themselves. And I'm a big believer in kind of like decentralized leadership and all of that. But there are things that cut across the company that need to get reviewed by a broader set of stakeholders. And so what happens when those things are single threaded is either the meeting is like really long. So it's like a three hour review meeting once a week. And by the end, everyone is like, you know, about to fall asleep or it's really short and it's like really hard to get on the calendar. You're like, oh, can we get on?”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You either have the situation where you have like too many people in the meeting or you have not enough people in the meeting. And both of those can cause problems, right? So like if you've ever been in a meeting, I certainly have where it's like, hey, do we have the salesperson who like knows most about this or do we have the engineer who's actually implementing this here? Oh, great. They're not here. They're not like a part of the standing set of attendees. You either like have to reschedule the meeting or worse, you just like do the discussion without the person who's most knowledgeable, which seems, you know, crazy and retrospective.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess one that I get asked about a lot on our team is called Catalyst. And I guess maybe to set some context on this one. In most product teams, there are review forum is just like a really important part of the product development process. And the kind of like core insight for most review forums or product reviews or decision forums is that they generally suffer from two problems that are like kind of hard to spot unless you've sat through, you know, hundreds of them. The first is they have standing attendees. And the second is they're normally single threaded, meaning they're normally like one topic at a time. So maybe I'll talk about both of those because I think they're not exactly intuitive. So when you think about what happens in a standing set of attendees,”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wig gets used in Code Docs in the way I think other companies have made it a ritual is like you'll have a feedback table and you'll write your feedback and then there'll just be like a little select list and you can select between those four. And usually what people do is they include the description. So you can kind of like as you're choosing it think, you know, am I really do I really feel that strongly about this? And honestly, it's just good hygiene. You know, otherwise every bit of feedback is taken the same, which is just fundamentally like the impact of that is it slows everything down because now you're looking at like a list of pieces, 100 pieces of feedback and you're going like oh man, we got to address all this feedback. Whereas, you know, as soon as you distinguish between what's most important, it's much easier to sort through that.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's, I mean, it's honestly a sign of, in Darmesh's case, I don't know him super well, but like it's a sign of a really experienced leader to know that scale. But every time I look at the scale and I'm sort of weighing where I am between suggestion and recommendation, I have to kind of like giggle to myself.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And someone gave a lightning talk to our team on how valuable this has been just to calibrate, you know, hey, we got 100 pieces of feedback and there's like one plea. Okay, let's spend our time on that, you know, or, you know, there's a whole bunch of FYs. I think we're fine. Let's keep going. No worries.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It or leave it kind of thing. Suggestion is, and he uses this hill dying metaphor. So is this a hill I'm going to die on? And FY is like, you know, there's no hill in sight. Suggestion is like, there's a hill. I'm not going to die on it. Like, you know, this is what I would do if I were you. Like, you can take it or leave it. Recommendation is I'm climbing the hill. I'm not going to die here, but like I've thought about this a lot. So like don't ignore this, you know. And then The fourth one, plea is, you know, hopefully rarely used in the organization. It's like, I don't like dying on hills. That's not what we do here. But this is a pretty good candidate for it. Like you should really trust me. And so we have ended up using that. I was actually just at a”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are so many. It's like it's hard to choose. Maybe I'll choose two that are top of mind. One is Darmesh Shah has this ritual from HubSpot called Flash Tags. Have you heard So, yeah, we've all probably been in the situation where Someone gives you feedback and you're either underinterpret it or overinterpret it. And as an organization I think the kind of core principle here is like you want to be calibrated on how much to pay attention to a bit of feedback. And so he outlined four flash tags he presented this in a dinner, one of our dinners. And I absolutely love the phrasing of these as like someone who's given a lot of feedback on product stuff in their career. So it ranges from, I think it's FY suggestion, recommendation plea. So FY is basically like I had a thought, you know,”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nowadays with CODA, we're building new rituals alongside people. So someone has a creative idea about how to implement something and we're, you know, we're like partners or collaborators with them on that, which is honestly incredibly fun to just like see people's creativity expressed in a tool. And then, you know, by extension, kind of the social construct that they exist in. That's a little bit about how we got started in that whole process. And then, of course, Shashir's writing a book called Rituals of Great Teams. So we've been kind of cataloging. We've been hosting a bunch of rituals dinners where we basically get people together for a dinner. And we usually have, you know, three or four presenters at those dinners. And it's just a great chance to learn and think about, you know, how the engine runs in a lot of these companies.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, in general, I'm a big believer in. Good design and good product starts with noticing. And I think Tony Fidel has a great talk on this. So I think a bunch of us that are really obsessed with rituals, we just honestly try to be great at noticing. So, you know, see something happening with a customer, ask a few questions, get introduced to their team, hear about something interesting from a non-customer, ask for an intro, you know, end up kind of like just probing and asking a lot of questions. And then in many cases”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nice. That reminds me of, have you read the book The Obstacle is the Way? It's a great book by Ryan Holliday and the kind of core thesis is a book a bit about Stoicism. But the core idea is essentially instead of running away from obstacles, you should be running toward them. And that's where you experience either the most growth or the most profound moments of your life. And he gives a lot of examples in that book of people throughout history who sort of made that choice. And I think he's also given that talk to hundreds of sports teams. It's a good book for three.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Last like six months, year, two years. And what are they? And like, I think if you ask yourself that question and the answer is it's been a really long time since I've been like stretched in some meaningful way or I've felt like I'm underqualified to be there, then it may be worth kind of like digging into.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, yeah. I think I picked this up originally from Seth Goden, the author, and it just totally stuck with me. The basic kind of thesis is that moments that stretch you or moments that you feel uncomfortable in or you find yourself saying like, oh shit, you know, I shouldn't be here. I'm underqualified to be here. Those are the moments you should be seeking out, right? Like those are the moments that stretch you and give you sort of like a new foundation. And so I found that they turn out to be a pretty good way to calibrate whether someone is growing in their career. So oftentimes, you know, you'll hear like a career question like, hey, do you feel like you're growing in your role? And that's like a very ambiguous, in my opinion, way to ask this question. And like a much sharper way is like, hey, how many like, oh shit moments have you had?”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the world is much better for it. You know, this podcast is an amazing resource you've done. Done something very special.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, that's like what I would say is maybe a principal version of this, you know, the way that you learn or the way that everyone, including me, learns new things is like you go seek out the best at that given craft. So in this case, you go to the moth, Story Slam, you see some like really good stories. Like if you ever watch these on YouTube, and then you just kind of like unpack what they're doing and how they're doing it. And then obviously I think the other way to learn quickly is to like throw yourself in the deep end. So insofar as you can put yourself in situations that are uncomfortable or having force you to do things like tell a story or force you to come up with a clear strategy, you should always opt into those, especially early in your career.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The insight is amazing. The insight, just in case your listeners are interested, the insight is basically the nugget of a great story is like five seconds of transformation. So if you just orient everything else around that moment of transformation, then you end up usually telling a reasonably good story. And so we actually had, I had a conversation with the author right after I read that book because I was just like totally enamored with it. And then we ended up bringing him into Coda and he gave a great talk. So yeah, big plug for Matthew Dick.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Huge fan of everything team sports, storytelling, you know, go look at some of the best storytellers in the world. And they're actually out there on a stage telling stories. There's a book called Storyworthy that I really like.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably two things. One is reading really broadly. So I think not just reading kind of like PM style literature. Like I said, I think tend to get a lot of inspiration from outside of tech. That's one thing. I think the other thing is insofar as you get the opportunity to mentor other people, think about what you're saying to these people. Think about, okay, this person came to me with this challenge. What was my response? Why was that my response? Am I giving that response a lot of times? Okay, maybe like this is a more deeply held belief. And so I think noticing those instances was helpful for me.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mystery out of the set of like broader constraints or where we're headed. And so I think that that is great product teams and great PM leaders tend to Always orient their teams towards a broader cathedral as opposed to laying bricks.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've learned many times that. One kind of unexpected bit of this is that everybody needs to see a different facet of the cathedral, right? So very often, and I've made this mistake before plenty of times, very often people will do a great write-up on vision or strategy or whatever it is. And the result is people can't quite see their version of what this broader arc is or this broader cathedral is. And so one of the things that we have tried to do when we go through big planning cycles is kind of show all the different sides of this. So instead of just having like a write up, we may have a write up. We may couple that with a metric. We may couple that with directional mocks and what the billboard might look like or how our homepage might change. And really what we're trying to do is kind of take”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the cathedral story is basically you walk up to three people, they're laying bricks, you ask the first person, what are you doing? They say, well, I take the bricks from over here and I put them on that stack over there. You ask the second person, what are you doing? They say, well, I take this little cement and I put it on top of the brick that that person lays. You ask the third person, what are you doing? And they say, well, we're building a cathedral. And the sort of core insight here is that you want your teams to feel like they're building a cathedral and not laying bricks. And I think it's really, really easy to do when PMs are really busy on a day-to-day to just like be one task after the other, really execution oriented, and maybe not take the time to sort of help the team take a broader frame, open the aperture a little bit, and have a view of what the cathedral is. And I think.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the other one is cathedrals, not bricks. And then the other one is proactive, not reactive. Cathedral is not bricks, I think, is a kind of classic one. I think I had a moment of realization and talking to Shashir in a one-on-one when I was at YouTube, sort of bemoaning the fact that my team wasn't performing to the potential that I thought they had. He had a very sort of pointed and unexpected question, which is like, do they know their cathedral? Do they have a cathedral? And I'm sitting there like, man, what are you talking about? Like we're talking about like performing as a team. And you're asking me about cathedrals. And then he sort of explained the cathedral story, which I can talk about in that cathedral story was quite clarifying.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell me more. The prompt is essentially sort of put yourself in the shoes of someone who knows nothing about this topic whatsoever and like kind of have beginner's mind and then walk through with five or ten people watching you and let's sort of fix all the problems that we see.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way he talks about it is essentially you want to listen and absorb sort of every fragment of what that person is saying, including their body language and everything else and try to turn off the side, which is crafting your response or figuring out what you're going to say next or what the problem with their argument is or whatever. You know, it's really quite hard to do, right? Because like your default mode is always sort of the next step of the conversation. But I think if you can really challenge yourself, like he says, to pause and really try to internalize sort of holistically what that person's saying, it's pretty powerful.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's got a great thing on listening. I really admire what he says about listening. And I think that a lot of PMs could take that lesson, which is”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the point is that it was default on, right? And so, like, the way that we developed good customer instincts was not the goal. It was really just the sort of system behind it. So that's one that I'm kind of passionate about. And I think it's also translates into a lot of the rituals that we talk a lot about.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Draw a contrast, that's just really different than a team that has some default on system for talking to customers. Every few times a week, they're talking to customers for whatever reason. And the impact of that is really hard to see until you understand that the latter team tends to have like really good product instincts or really good customer instincts. It's because they've just had this sort of default on mindset of talking to customers. In the early days of CODA, we actually did something similar. We had a time allotted on Fridays and it was basically like it was on the calendar, a customer or a potential customer was coming in. And so you knew that it was going to happen. And you had to have something to show. And so like sometimes we'd be scrambling, you know, the three hours before to, you know, have a prototype ready for a customer. Sometimes we would have had something that we've been baking for a while.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a team may have a goal, like an OKR of talking to 10 customers this quarter. And they may or may not hit that OKR. And then if you watch closely the next quarter, they may not have a goal of talking to customers anymore. And so they're sort of like learning is going up and down.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the goal isn't that important. What's important here is the system. So the system that he uses is he writes for an hour every morning, doesn't write for more if he doesn't want to. And then he goes and performs at night, right? And so when you rinse and repeat that system, do it hundreds of times, that's how he builds up from five minutes to 15 minutes to 30 minutes of material. And so I think that, you know, I take a lot of inspiration from that. And I think product people can generally, which is instead of being obsessed with the goal, you know, be obsessed with the system that gets you there. And so the phrase I sometimes use is goals with good intentions don't work. And I think that a really to give a common example, a really common example is teams that are trying to like learn about customers or do research. And, you know, one thing I've observed.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On how to do this. So, the first one that I wrote about was systems, not goals. And one of the ways that I started this post, I'm a big fan of getting inspiration from outside of tech. And so one of the stories that I tell is basically the story of Jerry Seinfeld. If you haven't seen the documentary comedian, it's amazing. It's definitely worth watching. But the story goes, you know, he's done Seinfeld the show and he's got all this material from the last like 15 years and he comes in one day and he says, look, I'm going to throw away all my material and I'm going to start fresh, right? And like this is like unheard of in comedy for someone to just like throw away all their old material and start fresh. And, you know, so the question is like, what do you do next? And the thing that he does is he sets a goal, which is basically to build up to an hour of material again.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe it's helpful to start with a little higher level context on. Of unifying thesis. I think the unifying thesis is the core job of a product person in general is to turn ambiguity into clarity. And if you think about the job of a product leader or product manager, kind of like everything is ambiguous all the time. It's like, what's my role on this team? What problem are we solving? Who's the target customer? What prototype is going to solve this particular problem? So it's like literally everything. And so if you're going to do the job well, you really need to get good at spotting ambiguity and kind of turning it into clarity, right? And so the obvious question that follows from that is like, okay, great, that sounds like great hallmark card. But, you know, how do you actually do that? And so I think the principles that I've been writing down are very personal. They're like my take.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. They're described similarly at a high level, but then the specifics, like if you get into it, are a little bit different.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have 10 to 15 levels. I think we've made a really conscious choice to have only five. I think the other bit of contrast I would draw is basically role stages are not visible across the whole company. Like, you know, we're not showing levels of any individual PM or designer. And that's partially because we just don't want to put a big focus on it. And then probably the biggest difference is we have a centralized compensation committee and that's who decides compensation. And so it's not the manager that drives your compensation. So those are some differences.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, you have five levels, and we call them role stages, and they go from apprentice to principal. So apprentice is kind of rope analogy here is learns about rope. Practitioner is can tie basic knots, shown complex knots, you know, sort of given a problem, they can do it. Career is you can calculate rope strength. You know a lot about knots. Principle is basically invented nylon. So the bar is like really, really high for principle in these levels. And I think that that is, you know, that's appropriate. Like it should be aspirational that the bar is exceptionally high at the highest level of our role stages. I find it's a pretty good process to draw contrast maybe a little bit of contrast with other companies. I think most other companies, especially large companies, has”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we were doing career ladders, first of all, we We put it off for quite a bit of time, and that was based on the advice of a lot of other leaders that said, like, as soon as you introduce this, then the incentives sort of slip from being company focused to being individual focused. And so I think we delayed it for a good bit of time. There came a time where we kind of decided, hey, look, we really do need to provide better guidance here about like what it means to grow and what it means to be great. And so about the same time we were doing the levels thing, I started writing down some of the principles that I've been publishing. One of the things that I think about a lot when talking about levels is just how to keep everyone oriented toward their team and their company. And I think that we've done a really good job of that over the years. So levels aren't by any means at the forefront of any company discussion. In fact,”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mind was blown. And I think it was one of those examples of someone developing a clear view of what principles they should operate with and then like following that principle, right? And it was just sort of a meta example of how important it is and how impactful it can be when you decide on a principle and then follow it. And so ever since then, I've been thinking like, you know, what are my principles as it pertains to like building software and other things? So those are kind of like the three reasons that led me to start writing these things down.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or running your product team or things like that. And so like, That's sort of one I won't rant further on that, but I think that's one sort of piece of it. And then I think the last reason I'll mention is I was pretty inspired by a talk that is by this guy named Brett Victor, who's kind of like a prototyper thinker, may have heard of his work. He has this talk called Inventing on Principle. And in the early days of CODA, one of our first designers, this guy Jeremy Britton, showed this talk to the company.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second reason is I've always been pretty frustrated with career ladders. You know, most companies have career ladders with like 10 or 15 levels. And as soon as they hit some scale, levels, there's like levels between levels. And I feel like I looked at the one at Google and you kind of needed a PhD to decipher it and interpret like how to operate within it. So that's sort of like one piece of the construct. If you think more broadly though, they aren't consistent across companies, right? So like now you're in a situation where you're like in your version of the rat race. And so I found that I basically wanted to have a broader set of principles that transcended level, right? So things that could be true when you are an ICPM starting your career and things that can also be true when you're ahead of product.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I, you know, there's a few reasons. One reason is I just found myself giving a similar set of advice in one-on-ones. And so I think anytime you find as a leader yourself kind of like repeating the same lessons, it's a good, it should be a good flag to say like, oh, I should probably scale this in some way. And as you know, as soon as you write something down, you have to clarify your own thinking. And so it becomes very useful for that. And I don't think I quite expected how useful it would be in that sense, like writing something down and then putting it out there, you know, you start to get feedback back of like where you might have been right or where you might not be right. And so for me, it's been a good learning experience there as well.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a client pull a big chunk of rock off and break their feet. And that was, you know, I was like the junior guide on that particular instance. And the more senior guide looked at me, looked at the situation and was like, okay, we're getting this guy out of here right now. You know, put him on his back and we basically took turns varying him out for a couple miles. And I'll just never forget like instances like that where the clarity of, you know, stay calm, assess the situation, prioritize, take action. You know, it's like that's sort of like a, there's a mini version of that when you're building software, I think. So experiences like that, I think we're, you know, even though I only did it for a handful of summers, we're pretty profound.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is just preparation. I think when you go climbing or when you guide climbing, you spend like months and months preparing for usually like a few days of climbing. There's that kind of preparation. There's also just a million checklists. So before you go on an expedition, you may check a checklist of all your equipment, stuff like that a dozen times or more. So you kind of like ensure redundancy across all your systems. So that was definitely a parallel. The other thing I think about a lot is just How to stay calm and like challenging or scary scenarios, we had another incense where”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is you're roped to another person. And the reason that you do that is because if you fall, if someone falls in a crevass, you want to be able to like stop them or pull them out. So anyone's ropes to a very nice client that I was guiding. And he fell pretty close to the top on our way down. And luckily, like we were able to self-arrest and arrest that fall. But, you know, I spent probably the next like six hours walking down that mountain thinking the same thing over and over again, which is like, I really don't want to die, you know, rope to someone that I barely know and like don't trust or love. So that was sort of the last season that I guided, but tons of great memories and learnings and I think it impacted my life in a pretty significant way.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, very, very different, very different time. Didn't have kids back then. I think I was convinced at the time I wanted a career outside, just like love spending time in the mountains and climbing things like that. To be honest, I wasn't the best guide. There were a lot of amazing guides out there that just had, they were almost invincible in terms of their ability to climb for 20, 30 hours. But I learned a lot from the experience and maybe the quick story on why I stopped guiding. I was on sort of a what is like a dream trip for mountain guides, which is we were flown to a remote portion of southeast Alaska about an hour, it's an hour long flight, mountain called Mount Fairweather, beautiful 15,000 foot peak. And as a part of climbing on glaciers, one of the things that you do for context.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's probably distant at best. I wish it was close. I wish I could claim as my father or grandfather. But I definitely grew up with those stories and reading a lot about them as a kid in high school. We read endurance, which is a great book. If you haven't read it, it's an amazing story. Basically, you know, very inspiring how he put people first and brought back all of his men from this journey to the South Pole. So have taken a lot of lessons from that. But that's as close as I can come to the greatness of Ernest Shackleton.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moments that stretch you or moments that you feel uncomfortable in or you find yourself saying like, oh shit, you know, I shouldn't be here. I'm under qualified to be here. Those are the moments you should be seeking out, right? Like those are the moments that stretch you and give you sort of like a new foundation. So oftentimes, you know, you'll hear like a career question like, hey, do you feel like you're growing in your role? And that's like a very ambiguous, in my opinion, way to ask this question. A much sharper way is like, hey, how many like oh shit moments have you had in the last like six months, year, two years? And what are they? I think if you ask yourself that question and the answer is it's been a really long time since I've been like stretched in some meaningful way or I've felt like I'm underqualified to be there, then it may be worth kind of like digging into.”
2023-10-01 · Lenny's Podcast · What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source