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[MUSIC]

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Well, hey again everyone, Giul here and
welcome to rituals of product teams.

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It's my pleasure to
introduce Angad Singh today.

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Angad is a product manager and
a former founder.

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He has helped to lead the core product
team at Coda, my new favorite tool,

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for the last two and a half years and

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has gotten to work on just about
every aspect of the product.

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Previously, he founded a startup
that built an automated note taker,

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he built an automated note taker, rather.

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And the company was acquired by Evernote
where Angad worked on Evernote for teams.

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He got his start in product
management while taking classes at

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the Stanford D School and working at
startups like Fitbit, Down to Lunch and

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Motion Math.

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In his spare time, Angad has been getting
to know Chicago with his wife and

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two dogs.

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Everyone please welcome Angad.

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>> Okay,

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I think maybe let's just get started
assuming that everybody can still hear me.

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Maybe a great place to start would
be to just hear from a few of you

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who are able to respond in the chat.

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We'll be excited to hear what
brings everyone in the session.

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Maybe what you're hoping to get out of it.

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Obviously, I'm happy to tell
you more about myself and

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some of the things that I
prepared to talk about.

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But throughout the course of
the talk wherever possible,

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I'll try to pivot a little bit and adjust
to whatever people are most curious about.

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So, I will make time for questions.

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I'm happy to stay, for
the next 45 or so minutes,

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try to answer as many
questions as possible.

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But if if anybody's interested,
we'd love to hear in the chat what brings

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you to the session and how I can
help you get the most value from it.

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With that, I'll Introduce what I
had planed to, I guess, talk about.

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So, my goal for

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this talk is to go over some of the most
common concepts in product management.

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Many of the things that as you're
transitioning into a career like product

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management, you might encounter or
you might even need to learn and

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get better at and
I'm happy to kind of be your guy.

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If I'm assuming that many of
the people in this audience don't yet

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have much experience with that,
but of course,

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happy to take on more
advanced questions as well.

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And then even if you're not really
interested in product management,

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I think the second point here is,
any kind of technical role,

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you're probably going to
work very closely with DNS.

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And so, this this talk might
give you a good sense of what

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kinds of things you might
expect to kind of encounter.

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How do I best work in
an environment like that and so on.

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And then the third thing,
which is sort of, I think,

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my big takeaway from this talk,
is the importance of rituals.

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I think every team has rituals.

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Some teams know what their rituals are,
some teams don't.

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But if you're very intentional about what
your rituals are as any kind of team,

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I think you can have a much more
effective working relationship.

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You can build better things together.

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And so my hope is to kind of enlighten you
a little bit about the power of rituals,

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if that's not something
you're already familiar with.

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And then kinda just give you some ideas
that I employ in my own day to day life,

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but also give you some inspiration
from other teams as well.

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With that,
let me just pause to see if there's any,

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no looks like there's no
chat has come through.

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So I'll just kinda follow
along with my agenda.

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And then again, I'm happy to make time for
for questions at the end.

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Great, so, here's kinda what
I had in mind for the doc.

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I'm gonna quickly introduce myself and
spend just a few minutes talking about

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Coda just cuz I spend probably six,
seven hours of my day inside of Coda.

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Working on the product, but also that's
what I use to do all of my PM work.

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Maybe with the exception of a few other
tools, happy to talk about what those are,

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I think probably 90% of my work
day is spent inside of Coda.

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So I'm happy to talk about it,
show you all the ins and

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outs many of the things I've worked on.

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And then, there's about five different
rituals that I collected just from my day

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to day life, that I think would be
pretty good as a starting point for

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what you might encounter,
working on a product team.

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And just some some of the rituals
that I've designed my workflow, but

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also happy to talk about some
other tools that people use.

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And then I'll end with some examples
from other teams that I know of that I'm

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inspired by, and then leave time for
questions at the end.

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So that's sort of a rough outline for the
doc and I'll try to leave this up most of

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the time so that you're kind of following
along where we are in the talk.

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But again, just to kind of go
back to this idea of rituals.

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I love this quote from Ben Gordon.

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He's a very iconic VC and was on
the board of Amazon for a very long time.

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Yeah, he talks about how every company
has a small list of golden rituals.

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They're named, every employee knows them
by the first Friday and they're templated.

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And so, just really keep this idea in mind
of, what are the kinds of rituals that you

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use on your teams or
on the teams that you've worked on?

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And how can you be more intentional in
designing those as you go about your

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careers.

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Awesome, so, quickly to introduce myself.

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My name is Angad Singh.

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I'm a PM at Coda.

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Just sort of a brief background.

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I grew up in India.

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Ever since I was a kid,
I loved creativity and design.

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And I also got into
programming very early and so

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got really excited about building things.

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And I think more than that, the act of
programming I really enjoyed the process

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of designing and thinking about
products and experiences for people.

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And I didn't really at that time know
that there was such a job called product

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management, but this idea of going through
the process of building something,

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I just fell in love with it.

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That also is what convinced me to
come to college in Silicon Valley.

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I just was inspired by
people who build things.

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And in college I came across this
whole school called the D School,

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which I'd never heard of.

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It's the place where people learn design,
but people go from all disciplines,

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all walks of life, come together and
work on difficult problems together.

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And that process just felt
like really inspiring,

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to see people's creativity come out and
ideas get connected from different places.

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So, that was a really great sort of
formative experience in my background.

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And that's also where I really learned how
to think about different disciplines and

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what they bring to the table.

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So, before I was kind of this kid who
was doing everything on his own, but

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here I realized that different
people can have different strengths.

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And in particular that my strengths
are more on the design and the PM side.

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And that's kind of where I really
started to work with different teams and

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learn about what it's like to
be a PM in the real world.

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Again, I'm happy to answer any
questions about any of this.

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After college,

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one of the great experiences that I got
a chance to have was, started a company.

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So, straight out of college decided to
take the leap and start my own startup,

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which was a really, it was definitely
a very big learning opportunity,

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great experience.

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I was able to get some
great investors on board,

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one of my professors on board as
an advisor, and then built a great team.

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That's something that I was most proud,

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of was the people that I was able
to convince to join my team, and

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what we built together over those,
like two or three years was really fun.

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We ended up building
this app called cassette.

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Which you use to record your meetings.

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So this is five years ago,
before transcription and

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subtitling and so on, as we've seen.

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We built this recording app you just
bring with you, you turn it on, and

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it would record your meetings, and
it would transcribe them for you.

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And then in addition to transcribing, you
could do other things like highlight and

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share that with your team or
search across all conversations.

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And that quickly became fairly popular and
lots of people started to use it.

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And actually only a few months after we
launched, we got a pretty interesting

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offer from Evernote and ended up
ended up getting acquired by them.

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I spent a little while working at
Evernote, but really that's also where I

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fell in love with thinking
about how teams work together.

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And that's when I came across Coda.

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So that's where I've been for
the last two and a half years,

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I work on a product called Coda.

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Again, I'll talk about Coda in a second.

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But what I love most about working at Coda
is this idea of building, building blocks.

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It sounds fun to say, but

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it's actually also just really awesome to
think about how you can build things that

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enable people to do things
that they couldn't do before.

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I feel like every day of my job,
I'm like, the most inspiring parts

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are hearing about people who didn't have
the ability to do something before, but

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then as a result of something
that I worked on or made,

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even if it's something really small,
they're able to do it now.

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And I think just that feeling again
of empowering people of creativity

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coming out, that's really awesome.

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And then lastly, just outside of work,
I have two small dogs,

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you might actually hear
them sometime on this call.

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So, just wanted to say, in case in case
that interrupts us just for a second.

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But yeah, I just recently moved to Chicago
and my wife and I really liked it here.

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So happy to hear about any other
recommendations that you have from

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Chicago since I'm new here.

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Awesome, let me check if there's any
questions or anything in the chat so far?

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All right.

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Looks like, nope.

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All right.

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So let's keep going.

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I hope I'm looking in the right place.

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Okay, looks again.

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Great, cool.

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So, quick intro about Coda.

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So, Coda is a, you'd like to say,
it's a new doc.

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That's a new dock surface.

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Actually, I'm using Coda right now.

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So, you might have recognized that you
don't know this product from somewhere

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else or if you use Coda,
you might recognize it.

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But it looks a bit like a mix of all
the different productivity software that

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you might have used between a document and
slide deck or

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I will see some more use cases
that do more with data, but

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really Coda is a surface that
blends all that together.

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And so, it's a place where you can kinda
just in a seamless way, move between

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the different types of modalities
that we're used to thinking about.

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And really what makes Coda as
special is these building blocks.

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And I'll maybe spend a few minutes
explaining what these building blocks are.

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I think it's a lot easier to just show
them rather than to talk about them.

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But these building blocks, I think,

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are really the the power that allow you
to take something that looks more like

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a document that feels like authoring
a document and go all the way to

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actually building something much,
much more like an application.

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With that,
let me actually like the Treehouse course.

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So, Treehouse has helped us build
an awesome course about Coda.

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It's a really brief intro
about the The product.

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I think if any of you are interested
in learning more about Coda,

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that's probably a great place to go.

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And again, I'll share this link
again at the end of the talk.

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But it's out there, Gilbert on our course.

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And I think it's a great summary of how
to sort of get started with this tool

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that I spend all day in.

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But even maybe a much more short summary
just so that everybody's on the same page

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of what I work on day to day, and then
we will go some more specific examples.

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This is a tool I work on,
it's called Coda.

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Probably the easiest place to go see
what's in here in Coda is to press

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the Explore button and you'll see a bunch
of different types of building blocks.

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This is really what we mean when we
say building blocks that are available

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inside of Coda.

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So everything from templates, to more
like text and media oriented things,

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as well as tables for
doing data, and so on.

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And then connecting to other apps,
importing data from other apps, and

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then really going into interactivity
with buttons and so on.

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So these sort of five categories I think
are really good way to sort of get

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an overall summary of
what you can do in Coda.

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So again, just getting started into the
text and media category, I could start by

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just saying, I wanna put, I don't know,
let's see I wanna put a file.

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I can drag your file, I can actually
attach a file inside of this document I'm

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seeing the way to attach it.

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Or I can directly just drag in
a file from my computer into here.

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So I could start to build something that
looks much more like a rich website or

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something like that.

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But really, you get some very
unique things many services still

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don't have a way to do checklist.

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So you can now insert a checklist, check
items off, make sub tasks, and so on,

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really simply much like
authoring a document.

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So again, this should really just
feel very similar to other things

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that you might have used like a notepad or
something like that.

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But really, I think the power of
it when you're working in a team,

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00:11:44,017 --> 00:11:47,167
it does start to come out like,
I can actually invite people or

225
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mentioned somebody, hey,
what is the status of this?

226
00:11:49,847 --> 00:11:52,070
And assume that they will get
a notification, and so on.

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00:11:52,070 --> 00:11:54,380
So, that's really in the text and
media category.

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I think this is also really fun
when you can embed YouTube, and

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other kinds of media into your doc.

230
00:12:01,490 --> 00:12:03,770
I'll show you examples
of that in a second.

231
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But then, going more towards things
that you might have seen in sort of more

232
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task tracking, or even just spreadsheet
[INAUDIBLE] applications, you can

233
00:12:13,295 --> 00:12:18,250
start to bring in kinds of things that you
might expect not to see in a document.

234
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So this is for working with data, for
example, you can start to do something

235
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that looks much more like a Kanban board,
Trello board, or something like that.

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Where you can start to manage your tasks,
simple things like that.

237
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But you can really go, sky's the limit,
with this type of stuff.

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You can start adding fields that
you care about, like a due date, or

239
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something, or maybe you wanna do
a slider for how hard something is.

240
00:12:42,866 --> 00:12:47,835
And then you can really start to see
some of the unique things that Coda has

241
00:12:47,835 --> 00:12:48,950
to offer.

242
00:12:48,950 --> 00:12:51,030
And then again, I won't have too
much time to go into Coda, and

243
00:12:51,030 --> 00:12:52,695
I don't wanna spend all
my time talking about it.

244
00:12:52,695 --> 00:12:56,475
But really, there's a lot of interesting
things around pulling in data,

245
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for example, pulling in your emails into a
document, or your calendar, or your Slack.

246
00:13:00,982 --> 00:13:05,073
And sending out things like pushing
a GitHub PR from inside your doc.

247
00:13:05,073 --> 00:13:07,660
You can really build some
really awesome workflows.

248
00:13:07,660 --> 00:13:10,799
And then that's the last thing I wanted
to talk about here is we have an awesome

249
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library of templates.

250
00:13:12,300 --> 00:13:15,351
So if you see here, there's hundreds
of templates that have been

251
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built by us at Coda, as well as people
within your team can build them, and

252
00:13:18,790 --> 00:13:22,070
then there's a whole gallery
that I'll talk about later.

253
00:13:22,070 --> 00:13:26,365
But you can really easily just drag in
something that seems interesting, and

254
00:13:26,365 --> 00:13:27,100
just try it.

255
00:13:27,100 --> 00:13:30,020
So as an example, here's a really
simple project brief template.

256
00:13:30,020 --> 00:13:31,607
It doesn't even have anything fancy in it.

257
00:13:31,607 --> 00:13:35,533
But it could still be really helpful to
have an overall structure that someone's

258
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created of how you should explain
your project to somebody, and

259
00:13:38,649 --> 00:13:40,630
there's just these five or six things.

260
00:13:40,630 --> 00:13:45,658
And again, this is a great thing that
you might think about as a pm is,

261
00:13:45,658 --> 00:13:50,690
okay, how do I create a process
that I can repeat over time?

262
00:13:50,690 --> 00:13:52,040
Then other people can use.

263
00:13:52,040 --> 00:13:54,709
And then what are the kinds of things
that are important to make sure we

264
00:13:54,709 --> 00:13:55,640
hit every single time.

265
00:13:55,640 --> 00:13:59,002
So in this case, when you start a project,
you wanna explain the idea, you wanna talk

266
00:13:59,002 --> 00:14:02,100
about how it ties into the company goal,
what's the problem we're solving?

267
00:14:02,100 --> 00:14:04,320
How are we gonna measure it and so on?

268
00:14:04,320 --> 00:14:07,290
And in this particular team's case,
I would consider this a ritual, right?

269
00:14:07,290 --> 00:14:10,690
So they've created this format
that they want everybody to use.

270
00:14:10,690 --> 00:14:12,851
That's what it means by being templated,

271
00:14:12,851 --> 00:14:16,100
is gets repeated every time that
somebody needs to do a project.

272
00:14:16,100 --> 00:14:18,140
You don't have to think how
should I explain this idea?

273
00:14:18,140 --> 00:14:21,112
You just say I'm gonna drag
this project overview and

274
00:14:21,112 --> 00:14:25,160
get get a really good summary out for
other people to consume.

275
00:14:25,160 --> 00:14:27,895
Awesome, I think that's pretty
much all I'll say about Coda and

276
00:14:27,895 --> 00:14:29,896
then kind of just show it
as part of my workflow.

277
00:14:29,896 --> 00:14:36,518
But I'll stop to check if there's
any additional questions so far.

278
00:14:36,518 --> 00:14:39,180
I see, I think I'm looking at
the right place now, awesome.

279
00:14:39,180 --> 00:14:43,521
And I'm seeing some comments but
sounds like so far people are all good and

280
00:14:43,521 --> 00:14:48,017
excited to learn about some of
the hardware skills and products, awesome.

281
00:14:48,017 --> 00:14:50,877
Great, so with that, I'll spend the next,

282
00:14:50,877 --> 00:14:54,880
let's say few minutes talking
about five different rituals.

283
00:14:54,880 --> 00:14:59,536
So these planning until reflecting are
five rituals that I came up with that I do

284
00:14:59,536 --> 00:15:02,650
pretty often, that are easy to understand.

285
00:15:02,650 --> 00:15:06,310
And again, for the harder questions,
I'm happy to stick around, and

286
00:15:06,310 --> 00:15:08,710
I'll show you just exactly how I do them.

287
00:15:08,710 --> 00:15:11,349
Obviously, this is a sort of
summarized version of them, and

288
00:15:11,349 --> 00:15:13,970
I'm happy to take on some
of the harder questions.

289
00:15:13,970 --> 00:15:16,450
But hopefully, this will give you
a good sneak peek of what it's like.

290
00:15:16,450 --> 00:15:17,147
So what I did for

291
00:15:17,147 --> 00:15:21,340
this exercise is I picked a feature that
I worked on recently, which is dark mode.

292
00:15:21,340 --> 00:15:24,560
So in Coda, we recently shipped dark mode,
I worked on that feature.

293
00:15:24,560 --> 00:15:26,770
And dark mode is something you
might know from other apps.

294
00:15:26,770 --> 00:15:29,330
So I thought it would be really easy
to understand what I'm talking about.

295
00:15:29,330 --> 00:15:32,721
You don't need to know too much about Coda
to know what it means to work on a dark

296
00:15:32,721 --> 00:15:33,740
mode feature.

297
00:15:33,740 --> 00:15:37,534
But let's say that you are somebody that
works at Coda, whether you're a PM or not,

298
00:15:37,534 --> 00:15:38,869
but let's say you're a PM and

299
00:15:38,869 --> 00:15:41,650
you're interested in this
feature called dark mode.

300
00:15:41,650 --> 00:15:44,220
And maybe not everybody
understands that the same way.

301
00:15:44,220 --> 00:15:47,704
And so one of the things that we really
like to do at Coda is we run quarterly

302
00:15:47,704 --> 00:15:48,290
planning.

303
00:15:48,290 --> 00:15:50,516
So every quarter,
the whole company comes together and

304
00:15:50,516 --> 00:15:53,330
talks about what we're gonna
work on over the next quarter.

305
00:15:53,330 --> 00:15:56,700
And one of the rituals that we've built in
as part of that is writing one feature.

306
00:15:56,700 --> 00:15:59,861
And so for any project that we're
thinking about starting or funding,

307
00:15:59,861 --> 00:16:03,229
all we're gonna do is write us a quick
one pager very similar to what I was just

308
00:16:03,229 --> 00:16:06,620
showing you on the previous page,
where we talk about what is this feature?

309
00:16:06,620 --> 00:16:07,950
Why are we thinking about building it?

310
00:16:07,950 --> 00:16:09,940
What are some of the tricky things,
and so on?

311
00:16:09,940 --> 00:16:13,588
And so here, I've just created a very
simple summary of what you might see in

312
00:16:13,588 --> 00:16:14,796
one of these one pagers.

313
00:16:14,796 --> 00:16:18,840
Somebody has written, I want to build
dark mode across mobile and desktop.

314
00:16:18,840 --> 00:16:20,910
These are the four or
five reasons that you might wanna do it.

315
00:16:20,910 --> 00:16:23,670
And then here, this is an example of
the embeds that I was talking about.

316
00:16:23,670 --> 00:16:27,454
What they've done is actually embedded
in their tweets that we've seen from

317
00:16:27,454 --> 00:16:30,304
customers where lots of people
are asking for dark mode and

318
00:16:30,304 --> 00:16:32,060
in particular somebody put a gift.

319
00:16:32,060 --> 00:16:35,860
And this is really nice in Coda, which
you can actually even hide the tweet, or

320
00:16:35,860 --> 00:16:38,989
retweet it, and so on,
other things that you can do on Twitter.

321
00:16:38,989 --> 00:16:41,916
Because this is not just an image but
live tweet.

322
00:16:41,916 --> 00:16:44,575
For example, you could go here, and
quick respond to the customer, and

323
00:16:44,575 --> 00:16:46,000
ask further questions.

324
00:16:46,000 --> 00:16:46,596
But yeah, so

325
00:16:46,596 --> 00:16:49,974
I think one thing that I really wanted
to call out is this expected impact.

326
00:16:49,974 --> 00:16:52,863
I think it's really important
before you build a feature,

327
00:16:52,863 --> 00:16:55,040
think about what you
expect to see from it.

328
00:16:55,040 --> 00:16:57,796
And this is, I think,
the kind of thing that as a PM,

329
00:16:57,796 --> 00:17:01,374
you might be expected to do all
the time as you're prioritizing what

330
00:17:01,374 --> 00:17:04,110
are the things that are gonna
have the most impact?

331
00:17:04,110 --> 00:17:06,720
What are the things that align
the most with the company's goal?

332
00:17:06,720 --> 00:17:08,471
And in particular, at Coda,

333
00:17:08,471 --> 00:17:12,050
we recently had a huge focus on
focusing on simple use cases.

334
00:17:12,050 --> 00:17:15,435
We used to work a lot on more
complex advanced use cases, but

335
00:17:15,435 --> 00:17:19,447
we felt like we also really want
people to use Coda for simpler things.

336
00:17:19,447 --> 00:17:23,349
And so as an example, somebody might say,
hey, some people really like using dark

337
00:17:23,349 --> 00:17:26,601
mode when they're taking meeting notes or
writing their to do list.

338
00:17:26,601 --> 00:17:28,362
And so, for those types of people,

339
00:17:28,362 --> 00:17:32,310
Coda would be the place that they
would start using for simple things.

340
00:17:32,310 --> 00:17:35,320
Because they weren't doing that before
as a result of not having dark mode.

341
00:17:35,320 --> 00:17:38,316
That's a really simple example,
but that's kind of a one pager,

342
00:17:38,316 --> 00:17:39,450
what it might look like.

343
00:17:39,450 --> 00:17:41,208
Again, for each of these rituals,

344
00:17:41,208 --> 00:17:45,616
I've called out what other tools that I've
seen in other previous jobs, people using.

345
00:17:45,616 --> 00:17:49,130
And so it's not really just about using
Coda, but it's more about the ritual.

346
00:17:49,130 --> 00:17:52,730
So you could do this in, for
example, in slides or even sheets.

347
00:17:52,730 --> 00:17:55,414
I've seen sheets being used where
people just create columns for

348
00:17:55,414 --> 00:17:58,970
each of these types of things and you just
have to go right in like some bullets.

349
00:17:58,970 --> 00:18:02,858
Obviously, it gets hard to do things like
this or putting media, specs, or marks, or

350
00:18:02,858 --> 00:18:04,350
things like that.

351
00:18:04,350 --> 00:18:06,919
But one other fun thing that I
wanted to share with Coda is,

352
00:18:06,919 --> 00:18:10,328
sometimes you send out these write-ups,
and you send out a long writ-up and

353
00:18:10,328 --> 00:18:12,520
you have no idea if anybody's read it.

354
00:18:12,520 --> 00:18:16,319
And so one thing that I love doing in Coda
is to do this thing called a reaction,

355
00:18:16,319 --> 00:18:19,083
where I'll just put in
something that looks like this.

356
00:18:19,083 --> 00:18:22,537
And you can see how quickly I just made
it, I just type slash reaction, and

357
00:18:22,537 --> 00:18:23,670
chose an icon.

358
00:18:23,670 --> 00:18:25,443
And now I have this button down here, and

359
00:18:25,443 --> 00:18:27,955
this is a ritual that everybody
at Coda is familiar with.

360
00:18:27,955 --> 00:18:30,900
Or if they're not,
you could just say hit this button.

361
00:18:30,900 --> 00:18:34,057
And so the idea is that as people
are done reading the write up,

362
00:18:34,057 --> 00:18:37,358
you can put at the bottom, and
that way people start to press it.

363
00:18:37,358 --> 00:18:39,549
And you have an idea even in
the meeting or something,

364
00:18:39,549 --> 00:18:42,480
how many people are done reading so
that you're ready to talk about it.

365
00:18:42,480 --> 00:18:45,509
And it's really helpful just to get,
sometimes you just feel like you're

366
00:18:45,509 --> 00:18:48,797
putting things out there as a PM that you
don't even know if anybody's reading.

367
00:18:48,797 --> 00:18:52,895
And it's really, really simple button or
I would say a ritual of seeing of just

368
00:18:52,895 --> 00:18:55,850
indicating that you
finish reading something.

369
00:18:55,850 --> 00:18:58,759
I think it actually just adds a lot
of power in the day to day dynamic of

370
00:18:58,759 --> 00:18:59,379
how you work.

371
00:18:59,379 --> 00:19:02,350
And this is again an example
of what I mean by rituals and

372
00:19:02,350 --> 00:19:04,240
being thoughtful about them.

373
00:19:04,240 --> 00:19:07,099
I'll pause there,
if there's any questions,

374
00:19:07,099 --> 00:19:11,297
otherwise we can move on to the next
ritual, which is prioritization.

375
00:19:11,297 --> 00:19:12,420
Just check into the chat.

376
00:19:13,680 --> 00:19:15,695
Okay, it looks like nothing so
far, but again,

377
00:19:15,695 --> 00:19:18,168
feel free to keep dropping in
your questions as I'm going.

378
00:19:18,168 --> 00:19:20,690
And again, I'll make time for
questions at the end as well.

379
00:19:22,140 --> 00:19:24,303
Awesome, so
let's move on to prioritization.

380
00:19:24,303 --> 00:19:27,195
So one thing I would say is
many people would say, PM,

381
00:19:27,195 --> 00:19:29,136
your biggest job is to prioritize.

382
00:19:29,136 --> 00:19:34,032
Because the list of things that you can do
or want to do is almost always larger than

383
00:19:34,032 --> 00:19:36,554
the list of things that
you are able to do.

384
00:19:36,554 --> 00:19:40,683
That you have the resources to do, or
that your team is interested in doing,

385
00:19:40,683 --> 00:19:41,270
and so on.

386
00:19:41,270 --> 00:19:45,523
And so I think it's really important to,
as a PM work with your company,

387
00:19:45,523 --> 00:19:48,890
with your team,
to think about what are the priorities?

388
00:19:48,890 --> 00:19:51,961
And I think that's something that,
again, you can do a simple version, but

389
00:19:51,961 --> 00:19:54,670
that's something you just keep
getting better at your whole life.

390
00:19:54,670 --> 00:19:57,750
And that's probably one of the biggest
steps that you do as a PM.

391
00:19:57,750 --> 00:19:59,850
But one particular tool that you can use,

392
00:19:59,850 --> 00:20:02,490
or I would say ritual that
many teams use is something

393
00:20:02,490 --> 00:20:06,450
that's called either product spec or
product requirements document, PRD.

394
00:20:06,450 --> 00:20:07,866
These are kinds of terms that get used.

395
00:20:07,866 --> 00:20:12,338
And what will usually happen is people
will describe the kinds of Nothing,

396
00:20:12,338 --> 00:20:15,356
let's say we have decided
to work on dark mode.

397
00:20:15,356 --> 00:20:17,866
What specifically are we talking about?

398
00:20:17,866 --> 00:20:20,419
What are the things that
are the most important?

399
00:20:20,419 --> 00:20:22,998
What are the things that
are not that important that we

400
00:20:22,998 --> 00:20:24,901
can even consider not doing right now?

401
00:20:24,901 --> 00:20:28,040
And then in what order would you
roughly think about doing this?

402
00:20:28,040 --> 00:20:29,717
So this is not again,
not individual tasks,

403
00:20:29,717 --> 00:20:31,758
not the things that each person
is working on and so on.

404
00:20:31,758 --> 00:20:35,616
But maybe even before the project is
started, to make sure that everybody's on

405
00:20:35,616 --> 00:20:38,565
the same page about what kinds
of things are being worked on.

406
00:20:38,565 --> 00:20:41,411
Again, so you don't have to use Coda for
this, you could use,

407
00:20:41,411 --> 00:20:43,306
I've seen people use Docs and Evernote.

408
00:20:43,306 --> 00:20:45,080
We used to use Confluence, ironically.

409
00:20:45,080 --> 00:20:48,131
And then also some people just do
this directly inside of Figma,

410
00:20:48,131 --> 00:20:51,252
where they might have a certain
handful of marks inside of Figma.

411
00:20:51,252 --> 00:20:53,690
And then you can just kind
of as a team go in there.

412
00:20:53,690 --> 00:20:56,272
And so you don't have to create
over a process or anything.

413
00:20:56,272 --> 00:21:00,014
You can just go in there and say, okay,
yeah, this stuff seems the most important.

414
00:21:00,014 --> 00:21:02,892
Like we use yellow stars and
red stars, sometimes Figma.

415
00:21:02,892 --> 00:21:08,975
And then here's, I think a more
organized cordial way of doing it.

416
00:21:08,975 --> 00:21:12,462
One thing I do think you'll run into
even as an engineer or some other role

417
00:21:12,462 --> 00:21:16,590
that's working on a product team is, is
these terms that sound really meaningless.

418
00:21:16,590 --> 00:21:20,953
P0, P1, P2, but for some reason we use
them and everybody kind of adapts to them,

419
00:21:20,953 --> 00:21:23,510
because I think they do
convey something useful.

420
00:21:23,510 --> 00:21:27,715
So P0 usually means like the most
important, and then P1 and so on.

421
00:21:27,715 --> 00:21:30,632
So you kinda go down from there.

422
00:21:30,632 --> 00:21:34,734
In this case, what I usually like to do is
call out what I mean by P0, P1, and P2.

423
00:21:34,734 --> 00:21:38,105
Because I think for everybody P0,
P1, and P2 mean something different.

424
00:21:38,105 --> 00:21:41,070
Just as an example,
at Coda we also track our bugs.

425
00:21:41,070 --> 00:21:42,459
And in the case of bugs,

426
00:21:42,459 --> 00:21:46,225
a P0 means, drop whatever you're doing and
do this right now.

427
00:21:46,225 --> 00:21:49,120
And P1 means, we would like to do
this before the next build goes out,

428
00:21:49,120 --> 00:21:50,460
which in all cases is every day.

429
00:21:50,460 --> 00:21:52,395
So it's like, you don't need
to drop what you're doing, but

430
00:21:52,395 --> 00:21:53,315
you do need to fix this today.

431
00:21:53,315 --> 00:21:55,010
So that it gets done before tomorrow.

432
00:21:55,010 --> 00:21:58,165
And P2 is like we should fix this but
we don't have to fix it today.

433
00:21:58,165 --> 00:22:00,196
And then we usually also use P3 for that,

434
00:22:00,196 --> 00:22:03,310
which is like it'd be nice to
fix this someday and so on.

435
00:22:03,310 --> 00:22:05,840
But in this case for this spec,
I've just really called it out here.

436
00:22:05,840 --> 00:22:09,177
I like the idea of being very
clear about what I mean.

437
00:22:09,177 --> 00:22:10,730
And you don't have to
go too much in detail.

438
00:22:10,730 --> 00:22:13,493
In this case what I've said is,
for this feature,

439
00:22:13,493 --> 00:22:16,532
P0 are things that we
absolutely cannot ship without.

440
00:22:16,532 --> 00:22:19,593
Like if we don't have these things,
we cannot ship the feature.

441
00:22:19,593 --> 00:22:20,460
P1 is a must have.

442
00:22:20,460 --> 00:22:22,203
You could still ship without them,

443
00:22:22,203 --> 00:22:26,680
but you can't really say that the project
is done until you've done these things.

444
00:22:26,680 --> 00:22:28,612
And then P2 is kind of a nice to have.

445
00:22:28,612 --> 00:22:31,977
And again, this is not really an exact
example of what I've done in the past.

446
00:22:31,977 --> 00:22:34,701
But it's just to give you
an idea of what kinds of things.

447
00:22:34,701 --> 00:22:36,854
So as a really simple example, I said,

448
00:22:36,854 --> 00:22:39,940
actually this is just making
the dark mode itself work.

449
00:22:39,940 --> 00:22:41,882
You need to wait for
users to turn it on and off.

450
00:22:41,882 --> 00:22:43,991
If you don't have that you
might not be able to ship.

451
00:22:43,991 --> 00:22:45,760
And then it should also work on Mobo.

452
00:22:45,760 --> 00:22:48,381
And maybe you might have people that say,
I don't agree,

453
00:22:48,381 --> 00:22:50,130
Mobo is not a blocker for launch.

454
00:22:50,130 --> 00:22:52,144
So this is a great way
to have that discussion.

455
00:22:52,144 --> 00:22:54,920
Is to say, actually Mobo feels like a P1,
right, not a P0.

456
00:22:54,920 --> 00:22:57,599
That's the kind of discussion that
might come out of a document that

457
00:22:57,599 --> 00:22:58,308
looks like this.

458
00:22:58,308 --> 00:23:01,155
And so here I've added some other
things like, we've charts in Coda.

459
00:23:01,155 --> 00:23:05,335
And so if charts don't flip, that doesn't
look great cuz it still hurts your eyes.

460
00:23:05,335 --> 00:23:08,179
And so those are the kinds of things
that I've added to these P1s.

461
00:23:08,179 --> 00:23:11,708
And then maybe in the future we could do
things like more custom themes that that

462
00:23:11,708 --> 00:23:12,680
users could create.

463
00:23:12,680 --> 00:23:15,066
But in this case I've just said,
that's a nice to have.

464
00:23:15,066 --> 00:23:17,456
But probably we're not gonna do them.

465
00:23:17,456 --> 00:23:19,884
One other thing I wanna call out is,
is I've added an image column,

466
00:23:19,884 --> 00:23:21,176
which I was just kinda indicating.

467
00:23:21,176 --> 00:23:24,164
And that can be really helpful in making
sure that everybody knows what they're

468
00:23:24,164 --> 00:23:24,796
talking about.

469
00:23:24,796 --> 00:23:26,499
Everybody knows what it
means when we say auto mode.

470
00:23:26,499 --> 00:23:29,370
It's like, on your computer you
have the light, dark and auto,

471
00:23:29,370 --> 00:23:30,400
do you wanna match that?

472
00:23:30,400 --> 00:23:32,350
So that's that's a helpful thing.

473
00:23:32,350 --> 00:23:35,715
And then in here I've also added
a very rough concept of size.

474
00:23:35,715 --> 00:23:38,466
And so you might do it as a T shirt size,
like small, medium, or large.

475
00:23:38,466 --> 00:23:40,690
In Coda we have these
things called scales.

476
00:23:40,690 --> 00:23:43,135
And I just use a three point scale
here again to kind of do a small,

477
00:23:43,135 --> 00:23:44,280
medium and large.

478
00:23:44,280 --> 00:23:46,430
And this isn't again a great
place where you're not really

479
00:23:46,430 --> 00:23:47,468
costing individual tasks.

480
00:23:47,468 --> 00:23:50,080
But as a PM, you're also gonna
be working with an eng partner,

481
00:23:50,080 --> 00:23:53,530
an engineering manager, or
a tech leader, or something like that.

482
00:23:53,530 --> 00:23:55,452
And you wanna just go through
with them and say, hey,

483
00:23:55,452 --> 00:23:57,180
what's the rough size of
each of these things?

484
00:23:57,180 --> 00:24:00,099
Maybe you can have a more
precise definition like this.

485
00:24:00,099 --> 00:24:02,611
Sometimes what we use is
small as two days or less.

486
00:24:02,611 --> 00:24:06,201
Medium is two weeks or less,
then large is larger than two weeks,

487
00:24:06,201 --> 00:24:07,452
something like that.

488
00:24:07,452 --> 00:24:11,517
And that really gives you a sense of, if
this thing is actually a three point task,

489
00:24:11,517 --> 00:24:14,540
then it doesn't feel like we need
to block launch on it and so on.

490
00:24:14,540 --> 00:24:18,520
That's really simple example of
what a PRD or spec might look like.

491
00:24:18,520 --> 00:24:19,900
Again, I just created a few columns.

492
00:24:19,900 --> 00:24:23,267
You can obviously customize this for
your own use.

493
00:24:23,267 --> 00:24:25,438
And I'm tempted to do
questions in a second.

494
00:24:25,438 --> 00:24:27,208
But I wanted to show one unique, for

495
00:24:27,208 --> 00:24:31,167
every one of these features I wanna show
one unique Coda thing that I love using.

496
00:24:31,167 --> 00:24:34,038
So one of the things that we use at Coda
a lot is called the Sentiment Tracker.

497
00:24:34,038 --> 00:24:35,910
And that's what I have down here.

498
00:24:35,910 --> 00:24:36,459
And by the way,

499
00:24:36,459 --> 00:24:39,010
you can add that really easily in
Coda by just typing slash sentiments.

500
00:24:39,010 --> 00:24:41,120
So you don't need to know
how to build it yourself.

501
00:24:41,120 --> 00:24:45,028
But the idea is, any kind of document like
this, you wanna send it out to let's say,

502
00:24:45,028 --> 00:24:46,200
15 different people.

503
00:24:46,200 --> 00:24:47,680
You wanna hear what everybody has to say.

504
00:24:47,680 --> 00:24:50,453
But you don't necessarily have
time to meet with everybody or

505
00:24:50,453 --> 00:24:53,080
to have everybody talk in
a meeting going around the room.

506
00:24:53,080 --> 00:24:57,461
And so
here I'm just gonna come in and say,

507
00:24:57,461 --> 00:25:01,599
I'm very excited to use this feature and

508
00:25:01,599 --> 00:25:05,150
everything looks great, right?

509
00:25:05,150 --> 00:25:06,229
Now, I do that.

510
00:25:06,229 --> 00:25:09,530
And then we have this button, this
checkbox here where you can check this.

511
00:25:09,530 --> 00:25:11,360
And the idea of this
is to not bias people.

512
00:25:11,360 --> 00:25:12,736
So while you're writing your sentiment,

513
00:25:12,736 --> 00:25:14,830
you can't see what
everybody else has written.

514
00:25:14,830 --> 00:25:16,065
But once you check the box,

515
00:25:16,065 --> 00:25:18,530
you can quickly see what
everybody else has written.

516
00:25:18,530 --> 00:25:20,848
Again, you don't need to go around
the room, you didn't get biased for

517
00:25:20,848 --> 00:25:21,740
everybody else.

518
00:25:21,740 --> 00:25:23,429
But you can still uncover
what the issues are.

519
00:25:23,429 --> 00:25:28,265
For example, perhaps somebody has talked
about how there might be issues with

520
00:25:28,265 --> 00:25:32,015
a spec that's here,
we might be under estimating and so on.

521
00:25:32,015 --> 00:25:35,519
And that's really helpful to surface
what kinds of concerns people have.

522
00:25:35,519 --> 00:25:38,171
And then you could just spend your
meeting time talking about that

523
00:25:38,171 --> 00:25:39,721
instead of just doing this exercise.

524
00:25:39,721 --> 00:25:41,865
Or you're actually offended
to talk about the takeaways.

525
00:25:41,865 --> 00:25:43,243
So this is something I love doing.

526
00:25:43,243 --> 00:25:46,377
I think almost every meeting at
Coda has a sentiment tracker in it.

527
00:25:46,377 --> 00:25:50,020
Even just for your weekly check
ins we just do sometimes.

528
00:25:50,020 --> 00:25:51,336
How's everybody feeling?

529
00:25:51,336 --> 00:25:53,060
How's everybody's weekend?

530
00:25:53,060 --> 00:25:55,047
Also helps you here [INAUDIBLE].

531
00:25:55,047 --> 00:25:56,228
Sorry about my dogs.

532
00:25:56,228 --> 00:26:00,886
But yeah, this is a really simple example
of where, it's really just a table and

533
00:26:00,886 --> 00:26:01,651
a checkbox.

534
00:26:01,651 --> 00:26:06,291
But what you can do is to kind of create
a kind of team to join that I think

535
00:26:06,291 --> 00:26:10,063
gives everybody a voice,
builds connection and so on.

536
00:26:10,063 --> 00:26:13,117
So this is an example again
to motivate the idea of,

537
00:26:13,117 --> 00:26:17,820
why intentionally designing rituals
can help you run better as a team.

538
00:26:17,820 --> 00:26:20,783
And I'll stop again just a second for
questions.

539
00:26:20,783 --> 00:26:24,960
All right, let me switch to the Q&A,
is what I'm being told.

540
00:26:27,858 --> 00:26:30,054
I see in the, there we go.

541
00:26:30,054 --> 00:26:33,572
Awesome, a second.

542
00:26:33,572 --> 00:26:37,366
All right,
do you use RICE score to prioritize?

543
00:26:37,366 --> 00:26:39,020
I think everybody works differently.

544
00:26:39,020 --> 00:26:42,288
So RICE is, I think it's like Reach,
Impact, Confidence and Effort.

545
00:26:42,288 --> 00:26:45,000
This is like a pretty common
thing that many PMs use.

546
00:26:45,000 --> 00:26:47,757
I personally never use them,
but I've seen people use them.

547
00:26:47,757 --> 00:26:50,290
And I think that's a decent way to do it.

548
00:26:50,290 --> 00:26:52,312
I think it doesn't incorporate everything.

549
00:26:52,312 --> 00:26:55,602
For example, it doesn't incorporate
your company's strategy and

550
00:26:55,602 --> 00:26:56,800
other things like that.

551
00:26:56,800 --> 00:27:00,630
Sometimes we're very willing not to work
on things that we think are high impact,

552
00:27:00,630 --> 00:27:02,698
because our customers are asking for them.

553
00:27:02,698 --> 00:27:05,977
Because we really want our product
to go in a different direction.

554
00:27:05,977 --> 00:27:08,188
And our customers don't
even know about that.

555
00:27:08,188 --> 00:27:12,589
So that's an example, sometimes when we
pick up things even though our customers

556
00:27:12,589 --> 00:27:13,819
are not asking for it.

557
00:27:13,819 --> 00:27:16,669
But again,
these things are very much like,

558
00:27:16,669 --> 00:27:20,580
when you start out you can start
by trying to play by the rules.

559
00:27:20,580 --> 00:27:25,500
And then over time you can go
experiment and improvise as well.

560
00:27:25,500 --> 00:27:30,342
So RICE is a perfectly great way to
start if you've never done it before.

561
00:27:30,342 --> 00:27:32,600
It's a great way to rank features.

562
00:27:33,790 --> 00:27:36,160
Do I mark it,
let's see how do I mark this done.

563
00:27:36,160 --> 00:27:37,730
I'm just gonna leave them in there.

564
00:27:37,730 --> 00:27:39,276
Laura's question.

565
00:27:39,276 --> 00:27:40,849
You as a PM always make one pagers or

566
00:27:40,849 --> 00:27:43,849
do other people in the team bring
them to you or consider you to do?

567
00:27:43,849 --> 00:27:45,235
Yeah, that's a great question.

568
00:27:45,235 --> 00:27:49,057
So at Coda we don't like to think
of ourselves as a PM led company,

569
00:27:49,057 --> 00:27:51,219
we think everybody has equal voice.

570
00:27:51,219 --> 00:27:54,747
And so very often one pagers
get written by others.

571
00:27:54,747 --> 00:27:57,920
We can help people write their
one pagers if they want.

572
00:27:57,920 --> 00:28:01,364
For example, sometimes people want
data to be part of their one pager.

573
00:28:01,364 --> 00:28:04,994
Just say look, 20% of users are using
this feature and it's not very good or

574
00:28:04,994 --> 00:28:06,048
something like that.

575
00:28:06,048 --> 00:28:08,604
And so that's a great place
where PM can help them.

576
00:28:08,604 --> 00:28:11,442
Or just to tell the story tied
to the company's strategy.

577
00:28:11,442 --> 00:28:15,181
But by no means it's just like a thing
that PM should just monopolize.

578
00:28:15,181 --> 00:28:19,132
I think it's actually a great sign in your
culture if other people feel empowered to

579
00:28:19,132 --> 00:28:20,156
take on these tools.

580
00:28:20,156 --> 00:28:21,966
And that's kinda what I mean.

581
00:28:21,966 --> 00:28:23,494
This is not just a talk for PMs.

582
00:28:23,494 --> 00:28:25,292
But if other people feel empowered,

583
00:28:25,292 --> 00:28:29,528
as an example there's a really technical
feature, like a rewrite of some something.

584
00:28:29,528 --> 00:28:32,654
Or even performance improvements
that PMs don't know, but

585
00:28:32,654 --> 00:28:35,174
might be low hanging fruit or
not, or whatever.

586
00:28:35,174 --> 00:28:39,555
It's like a language, you can just write
something out in a particular format that

587
00:28:39,555 --> 00:28:41,443
everybody knows and understands.

588
00:28:41,443 --> 00:28:45,498
And so I think one pager just as
a tool is a great way to do that.

589
00:28:45,498 --> 00:28:48,451
And I don't think you
should limit it to PMs.

590
00:28:48,451 --> 00:28:51,234
I will say one other thing,
I think the idea of the one pager,

591
00:28:51,234 --> 00:28:53,099
the goal of it also is in the same spirit.

592
00:28:53,099 --> 00:28:55,347
It's not so
that PMs can convince other people, but

593
00:28:55,347 --> 00:28:58,480
it's sort of to put the decision
making power in other people's hands.

594
00:28:58,480 --> 00:28:59,723
It's to say that,

595
00:28:59,723 --> 00:29:04,552
every engineer in my team is sort of
part of the decision of what we work on.

596
00:29:04,552 --> 00:29:06,282
But then again engineers, for example,

597
00:29:06,282 --> 00:29:08,314
aren't spending all day
talking to customers.

598
00:29:08,314 --> 00:29:11,375
And so as a PM my goal is to help
them sort of see why we might work

599
00:29:11,375 --> 00:29:15,060
on something, even if they haven't
heard it from a customer directly.

600
00:29:15,060 --> 00:29:16,692
But at the end of the day, really again,

601
00:29:16,692 --> 00:29:19,097
putting the decision making
power in the hands of the team.

602
00:29:19,097 --> 00:29:22,667
So that people don't feel they're
being told what to work on, but

603
00:29:22,667 --> 00:29:24,981
rather they're choosing what to work on.

604
00:29:24,981 --> 00:29:28,969
Awesome, is the customer feedback
mostly used as backup or rationale, or

605
00:29:28,969 --> 00:29:30,757
what is driving the new feature?

606
00:29:30,757 --> 00:29:32,307
I think that's not necessarily true.

607
00:29:32,307 --> 00:29:35,537
I think sometimes you build a feature
just because a lot of customers

608
00:29:35,537 --> 00:29:36,452
are asking for it.

609
00:29:36,452 --> 00:29:38,416
I think dark mode is a great example.

610
00:29:38,416 --> 00:29:41,519
It's a feature that we've known about for
a long time.

611
00:29:41,519 --> 00:29:44,633
Many of us including myself,
have always wanted it internally, but

612
00:29:44,633 --> 00:29:46,577
there's been a lot of customer feedback.

613
00:29:46,577 --> 00:29:49,944
And I think we've been kind of
putting it behind other priorities.

614
00:29:49,944 --> 00:29:53,335
But the customer feedback,
the volume of it continuing to increase,

615
00:29:53,335 --> 00:29:56,163
probably the biggest reason
why we ended up working on it.

616
00:29:56,163 --> 00:29:58,749
On the other hand, I think there might
be many features where customers don't

617
00:29:58,749 --> 00:29:59,780
even know what to ask for them.

618
00:29:59,780 --> 00:30:01,217
For example, I showed you integrations.

619
00:30:01,217 --> 00:30:03,142
And the first time that we built them,

620
00:30:03,142 --> 00:30:06,043
I don't know if we had a lot
of customers asking for them.

621
00:30:06,043 --> 00:30:09,529
Or they were more like, this is driven
back or something more like that.

622
00:30:09,529 --> 00:30:10,746
And I'm happy to go on.

623
00:30:10,746 --> 00:30:12,245
I'm also paying attention to the time.

624
00:30:12,245 --> 00:30:13,969
Looks like we don't have
too much time left.

625
00:30:13,969 --> 00:30:17,830
So I'll come back to, let me just try
to finish the next three rituals.

626
00:30:17,830 --> 00:30:22,810
And then we'll leave at least five or ten
minutes at the end for questions as well.

627
00:30:22,810 --> 00:30:23,470
Awesome, great.

628
00:30:23,470 --> 00:30:25,850
So the next feature I wanna
talk about is tracking.

629
00:30:25,850 --> 00:30:29,603
No matter what kind of team you work on,
even if you're working by yourself,

630
00:30:29,603 --> 00:30:33,594
you're gonna benefit from having someplace
where you're tracking what you're

631
00:30:33,594 --> 00:30:35,820
working on, what everybody's working on.

632
00:30:35,820 --> 00:30:39,287
But especially if you have more than one
person, it can be really helpful to make

633
00:30:39,287 --> 00:30:43,020
sure that things, for example, no two
people are working on the same thing.

634
00:30:43,020 --> 00:30:46,639
Everybody knows how their work like, they
unblocked somebody else's work, and so on.

635
00:30:46,639 --> 00:30:49,540
And so, here's a really simple
example of a task tracker.

636
00:30:49,540 --> 00:30:52,252
This is a kinda task tracker
that I use every single day.

637
00:30:52,252 --> 00:30:54,280
Actually, let me just
make one small change.

638
00:30:54,280 --> 00:30:57,566
So this is something that I do all
the time in all of my projects,

639
00:30:57,566 --> 00:31:00,510
is I'll build something
that looks a lot like this.

640
00:31:00,510 --> 00:31:02,790
These are actually the exact
statuses that I use.

641
00:31:02,790 --> 00:31:05,829
So for example, most tasks will
start out here as needs, PM,

642
00:31:05,829 --> 00:31:08,470
I'll make sure that they're
clear enough and so on.

643
00:31:08,470 --> 00:31:11,833
And then they'll kinda move up this chain,
then go through design and

644
00:31:11,833 --> 00:31:12,864
if they need design.

645
00:31:12,864 --> 00:31:14,725
And then the designer will
market is ready for dev,

646
00:31:14,725 --> 00:31:16,900
which means that they're ready for
an engineer to pick up.

647
00:31:16,900 --> 00:31:19,753
And then a dev market is in progress,
in particular, in this case,

648
00:31:19,753 --> 00:31:22,740
maybe this task gets done, and
I'll talk about that in a second.

649
00:31:22,740 --> 00:31:26,039
The other thing I like to do in Coda is
like we have this idea called grouping,

650
00:31:26,039 --> 00:31:29,260
where you can group something, and
so I'll often group tasks by person.

651
00:31:29,260 --> 00:31:33,242
And so that way, when we do our weekly
stand ups or daily stand ups or something,

652
00:31:33,242 --> 00:31:37,175
we can just go by person and say, hey,
what's going on with your in progress?

653
00:31:37,175 --> 00:31:39,520
And this person, I'd say, my task is done.

654
00:31:39,520 --> 00:31:41,630
And so you can very quickly say,
okay, this task is done.

655
00:31:41,630 --> 00:31:44,896
And you'll see that it moves
up to the done category,

656
00:31:44,896 --> 00:31:46,935
this section actually was here.

657
00:31:46,935 --> 00:31:50,113
And then maybe this person is
ready to pick up another task,

658
00:31:50,113 --> 00:31:53,720
so maybe they go in here and
they say okay, I'll work on this one.

659
00:31:53,720 --> 00:31:55,260
And so they marked this as in progress.

660
00:31:55,260 --> 00:31:58,572
This is the kind of thing that I'm
doing a lot as a PMs, very often,

661
00:31:58,572 --> 00:31:59,828
I'm sharing my screen.

662
00:31:59,828 --> 00:32:03,899
And I have a tracker, we're using that to
keep track of everything so that I'm not

663
00:32:03,899 --> 00:32:07,801
pinging people randomly on email or Slack
to say, can you also do this or that?

664
00:32:07,801 --> 00:32:10,230
There's an order to how we
are going through things.

665
00:32:10,230 --> 00:32:13,418
I have the ability to kind of,
for example, within the ready for

666
00:32:13,418 --> 00:32:16,782
dev tasks to kind of reorganize them
with the sort of the things that I

667
00:32:16,782 --> 00:32:18,688
think are most important to do first.

668
00:32:18,688 --> 00:32:22,929
And then we often use, for example,
commenting to get more clarification,

669
00:32:22,929 --> 00:32:26,383
as well as to say, hey,
also make sure to keep an eye on this, or

670
00:32:26,383 --> 00:32:28,750
watch out for that, something like that.

671
00:32:28,750 --> 00:32:30,750
This is a very simple version
of a task tracker, but again,

672
00:32:30,750 --> 00:32:32,070
you don't have to use Coda.

673
00:32:32,070 --> 00:32:37,270
People use JIRA, is a very commonly
used tool in the PM, product team space.

674
00:32:37,270 --> 00:32:42,701
Asana is also getting popularity, and then
GitHub has some version of fast tracking.

675
00:32:42,701 --> 00:32:44,569
Because many people work
in engineering teams,

676
00:32:44,569 --> 00:32:46,080
they often end up using GitHub issues.

677
00:32:47,190 --> 00:32:50,181
This is again, a really simple example,
but I think this idea of grouping is

678
00:32:50,181 --> 00:32:53,560
something that over time have evolved,
and it's worked really well for me.

679
00:32:53,560 --> 00:32:55,080
I've also created some new statuses.

680
00:32:55,080 --> 00:32:58,059
So as an example, I'll show you some of
the statuses that I have in here, and

681
00:32:58,059 --> 00:33:00,245
this is again, my actual status tracker.

682
00:33:00,245 --> 00:33:02,757
But one thing that we have for
example is design PM.

683
00:33:02,757 --> 00:33:05,564
Is when a designer has something
that they wanna talk to me about,

684
00:33:05,564 --> 00:33:07,568
I'll often encourage
them to mark this year.

685
00:33:07,568 --> 00:33:09,318
So that when we do our next one on one,

686
00:33:09,318 --> 00:33:11,975
we have a list of all the tasks
that we need to talk about.

687
00:33:11,975 --> 00:33:15,068
And that's a really great way that we
can take something that needs design,

688
00:33:15,068 --> 00:33:16,821
then designing, then becomes design PM.

689
00:33:16,821 --> 00:33:21,045
And then say okay, I think we've made
a decision on this, it's ready to go for

690
00:33:21,045 --> 00:33:23,440
dev, something like that.

691
00:33:23,440 --> 00:33:25,380
Great.
Now I'll just keep rolling so

692
00:33:25,380 --> 00:33:27,630
that we can catch up on time a little bit.

693
00:33:27,630 --> 00:33:31,824
The next one is cadence, and
cadence is really just another word for

694
00:33:31,824 --> 00:33:36,696
the rituals or repeated patterns, or
even just how do you run your processes?

695
00:33:36,696 --> 00:33:39,448
And a very important part of
cadence is running meetings.

696
00:33:39,448 --> 00:33:43,019
And no matter how much you dislike
meetings or what kind of team you work on,

697
00:33:43,019 --> 00:33:46,090
they're gonna meet at least once a week or
something like that.

698
00:33:46,090 --> 00:33:48,554
And I think the more effective
that you make your meetings,

699
00:33:48,554 --> 00:33:51,620
the less people hate your meetings,
the more value you can get from them.

700
00:33:51,620 --> 00:33:54,705
And so I like to say the more intentional
you can design your meetings,

701
00:33:54,705 --> 00:33:56,180
the more value you get from them.

702
00:33:56,180 --> 00:34:00,341
And so this is again another example of a
ritual that I have in almost every meeting

703
00:34:00,341 --> 00:34:00,962
that I run.

704
00:34:00,962 --> 00:34:04,104
And again, you don't have to use Coda,
you can use email slides,

705
00:34:04,104 --> 00:34:07,070
people use all kinds of
things to run their meetings.

706
00:34:07,070 --> 00:34:09,650
But in particular, again,
I use Coda for everything.

707
00:34:09,650 --> 00:34:14,365
This is a very simple topic tracker,
and so the idea is every time you

708
00:34:14,365 --> 00:34:18,686
come in here, you can add a row,
somebody can say add a topic.

709
00:34:18,686 --> 00:34:22,622
And it's added to today's date, and

710
00:34:22,622 --> 00:34:27,600
I can say,
are we feeling good about the lunch?

711
00:34:27,600 --> 00:34:31,148
And so what I've done in this is just
basically created a way so that it's not

712
00:34:31,148 --> 00:34:34,654
the loudest person in the room is
the one who's talking about everything.

713
00:34:34,654 --> 00:34:36,268
But rather, there's a process,

714
00:34:36,268 --> 00:34:39,530
there's a little bit of a system
of adding a question in here.

715
00:34:39,530 --> 00:34:41,168
And it seems like a little
bit of overkill, but

716
00:34:41,168 --> 00:34:42,750
there's a lot of other benefits as well.

717
00:34:42,750 --> 00:34:45,836
So for example, once we actually
start talking about this topic,

718
00:34:45,836 --> 00:34:47,160
we can add notes here.

719
00:34:47,160 --> 00:34:49,650
So we can say this is a great idea.

720
00:34:49,650 --> 00:34:54,250
And you'll do this in every meeting echoed
as we take the notes for the topic itself.

721
00:34:54,250 --> 00:34:57,024
And then when we're done with the topic,
we can actually mark it as done and

722
00:34:57,024 --> 00:34:57,860
then it goes away.

723
00:34:57,860 --> 00:35:00,311
And so again, you just have this
running list, every time we meet,

724
00:35:00,311 --> 00:35:02,010
we just talked about these topics.

725
00:35:02,010 --> 00:35:04,079
And the last thing that
I've added here is voting.

726
00:35:04,079 --> 00:35:06,479
And again, this is a great thing
that we love doing at Coda,

727
00:35:06,479 --> 00:35:08,210
is people can come in and vote.

728
00:35:08,210 --> 00:35:11,160
And so if I vote on this topic,
that means it's gonna rise to the top and

729
00:35:11,160 --> 00:35:13,030
everybody in the team has a vote.

730
00:35:13,030 --> 00:35:14,425
And so again,
you don't sit in a meeting and

731
00:35:14,425 --> 00:35:16,651
talk about what one person wants to
talk about, you sit in a meeting and

732
00:35:16,651 --> 00:35:19,290
talk about the most number of people
in the room want to talk about.

733
00:35:19,290 --> 00:35:22,853
And so in this way, many companies'
PM set the agenda of the meeting, but

734
00:35:22,853 --> 00:35:26,590
here you can kind of create a process by
which that's all made transparent and

735
00:35:26,590 --> 00:35:27,660
democratic.

736
00:35:27,660 --> 00:35:30,539
And so everybody in the room can set
the agenda of whatever they really wanna

737
00:35:30,539 --> 00:35:31,480
talk about.

738
00:35:31,480 --> 00:35:34,922
And so again, if there's no votes,
we can sort them by, for

739
00:35:34,922 --> 00:35:39,513
example, let's see, what I have in here
is, it's sorted by ascending order,

740
00:35:39,513 --> 00:35:42,027
what questions are added first, and so on.

741
00:35:42,027 --> 00:35:45,389
But yeah, voting is a way to kind of say,
let's talk about the things that's most

742
00:35:45,389 --> 00:35:48,040
important, not the first
person to speak up.

743
00:35:48,040 --> 00:35:48,786
And then lastly,

744
00:35:48,786 --> 00:35:52,270
I think one very common thing that
you'll see in many teams is reflecting.

745
00:35:52,270 --> 00:35:54,833
It's really important to
at least every quarter,

746
00:35:54,833 --> 00:35:58,060
or when a project is over to go back,
and say, what can we learn?

747
00:35:58,060 --> 00:35:59,800
How can we do things better?

748
00:35:59,800 --> 00:36:03,544
And really, there's a lot of tools for
this, again, we use Coda for this as well.

749
00:36:03,544 --> 00:36:07,676
But one very simple example of this,
you might find much more interesting ones.

750
00:36:07,676 --> 00:36:10,127
But I built a really simple form for
this exercise,

751
00:36:10,127 --> 00:36:12,866
an exercise that we do call start,
stop, and continue.

752
00:36:12,866 --> 00:36:18,814
And so you could see, I come in here,
and I say start, I don't know,

753
00:36:18,814 --> 00:36:24,988
meeting less often, or I guess,
stop meeting every day as an example.

754
00:36:24,988 --> 00:36:28,310
And I've made this as a form
because I want it to be anonymous.

755
00:36:28,310 --> 00:36:31,559
I don't want people to know unlike
the previous examples, who has added it.

756
00:36:31,559 --> 00:36:34,863
And I think sometimes that can
make you feel more open and

757
00:36:34,863 --> 00:36:39,500
more sort of just able to say what's on
your mind without feeling like there's

758
00:36:39,500 --> 00:36:42,660
some kind of accountability or something.

759
00:36:42,660 --> 00:36:44,020
And so, I could press Submit.

760
00:36:44,020 --> 00:36:47,778
And then down here I have all the feedback
that's been submitted so far.

761
00:36:47,778 --> 00:36:48,910
And at the end of the meeting,

762
00:36:48,910 --> 00:36:51,903
you can imagine after people actually
taking the time to write the questions,

763
00:36:51,903 --> 00:36:55,460
we can then say, okay, what are the things
that people think we should start doing?

764
00:36:55,460 --> 00:36:57,690
I like that one, and other people come in,
and like them as well.

765
00:36:57,690 --> 00:37:01,029
And then, this could actually lead to
a really good discussion around what

766
00:37:01,029 --> 00:37:04,262
are some things we could do differently
as we keep going on this project,

767
00:37:04,262 --> 00:37:06,580
as we work on our next project?

768
00:37:06,580 --> 00:37:08,046
Let's see about time.

769
00:37:08,046 --> 00:37:12,991
Looks like there's no questions in here so
far, so I'll keep going with one more

770
00:37:12,991 --> 00:37:17,170
of these pages, and then we can
kind of make time for questions.

771
00:37:17,170 --> 00:37:20,800
So one last thing I wanted to show
is I think every team has rituals.

772
00:37:20,800 --> 00:37:22,517
You don't have to just follow my rituals.

773
00:37:22,517 --> 00:37:26,165
I think if you become a student of rituals
or if you start to see what other people

774
00:37:26,165 --> 00:37:30,147
are doing, you really see there's a lot of
rituals out there that you can learn from,

775
00:37:30,147 --> 00:37:32,380
that you can adapt more so
than just replicate.

776
00:37:32,380 --> 00:37:34,860
You can adapt them to your own context.

777
00:37:34,860 --> 00:37:37,383
But one thing that I really love about
Coda is we have this thing called

778
00:37:37,383 --> 00:37:38,650
doc [INAUDIBLE].

779
00:37:38,650 --> 00:37:43,624
And so, you can actually
just go to docgallery.com,

780
00:37:43,624 --> 00:37:48,600
it will give you a list of
different docs like this one,

781
00:37:48,600 --> 00:37:51,966
where you can see this is from Figma.

782
00:37:51,966 --> 00:37:54,543
The VP of product of Figma has talked
about how they used to have a start

783
00:37:54,543 --> 00:37:56,418
meeting at Figma that
wasn't running very well.

784
00:37:56,418 --> 00:37:57,372
And then the doc stock,

785
00:37:57,372 --> 00:38:01,190
all those things, he's written a pretty
thoughtful blog post here about it.

786
00:38:01,190 --> 00:38:04,160
But unlike a different blog post, it's
actually comes with almost a template.

787
00:38:04,160 --> 00:38:06,777
So you can actually just copy this
doc by clicking this button and

788
00:38:06,777 --> 00:38:07,851
create your own version.

789
00:38:07,851 --> 00:38:10,567
And this is an attractive,
you can for example,

790
00:38:10,567 --> 00:38:13,094
interact with his doc
to see what it's like.

791
00:38:13,094 --> 00:38:17,650
But so this is a great resource, if you
just go to docgallery.com to see what you

792
00:38:17,650 --> 00:38:20,577
can learn from different teams and
their rituals.

793
00:38:20,577 --> 00:38:24,133
And I just put together a quick collection
in here of my favorite other rituals

794
00:38:24,133 --> 00:38:26,771
that I didn't really get to
talk about that you do as a PM.

795
00:38:26,771 --> 00:38:29,313
So user research is a really
common example, and

796
00:38:29,313 --> 00:38:32,545
a friend of mine actually at Baghdad,
put together this doc.

797
00:38:32,545 --> 00:38:36,073
And then there's a bunch of things here
even about your personal productivity, how

798
00:38:36,073 --> 00:38:39,563
to run a good off site, and then maybe how
to collect good feedback from customers.

799
00:38:39,563 --> 00:38:42,334
People have put in a lot of thought
into designing these rituals.

800
00:38:42,334 --> 00:38:45,960
And so you can really learn a lot from
watching other people do the rituals.

801
00:38:47,060 --> 00:38:50,860
I did create a page for Q&A, but I think
people are just using the hop in one.

802
00:38:50,860 --> 00:38:55,359
So let's just stick to using that if ever
you can add your question again there.

803
00:38:55,359 --> 00:38:57,609
And I just wanna plug again and
maybe I'll copy and

804
00:38:57,609 --> 00:39:00,580
paste this link into the chat
in case people are interested.

805
00:39:00,580 --> 00:39:03,000
There's the Treehouse course Coda.

806
00:39:03,000 --> 00:39:07,310
Happy to answer any more questions
about Coda, as well as about any topic.

807
00:39:07,310 --> 00:39:12,779
Let me stop sharing my screen so
that you can just focus on the Q&A.

808
00:39:12,779 --> 00:39:16,180
And thanks, everybody for
joining and adding questions.

809
00:39:16,180 --> 00:39:18,546
Cool, so let's see.

810
00:39:18,546 --> 00:39:21,468
Got Mason's question,
question, and question.

811
00:39:21,468 --> 00:39:24,829
So Mason has another question,
I'm going bottom to top.

812
00:39:24,829 --> 00:39:28,263
Is the cadence meant to be used
at meetings that are specifically

813
00:39:28,263 --> 00:39:30,179
geared to the feature in question?

814
00:39:30,179 --> 00:39:34,414
I think cadence can be at different
levels, you can build your team or

815
00:39:34,414 --> 00:39:37,126
your company cadence for your own purpose.

816
00:39:37,126 --> 00:39:41,704
So as an example, at Coda, we have
about 100 people here at Coda and so

817
00:39:41,704 --> 00:39:43,969
we have project cadence meetings.

818
00:39:43,969 --> 00:39:46,759
So every Monday for example, I meet
with every project that I work on and

819
00:39:46,759 --> 00:39:48,520
talk about our goals for the week.

820
00:39:48,520 --> 00:39:50,348
But we also have company cadence meeting,

821
00:39:50,348 --> 00:39:53,110
so we talk about as a company
every Friday, what got done.

822
00:39:53,110 --> 00:39:56,508
We used to do this meeting twice a week,
but then, as the company kept getting

823
00:39:56,508 --> 00:39:59,486
larger, we felt like we were spending
a lot of time meetings, and so

824
00:39:59,486 --> 00:40:01,137
we've really adapted our cadence.

825
00:40:01,137 --> 00:40:04,390
But you can really think about what
cadence you want that works for you.

826
00:40:04,390 --> 00:40:08,887
As another example, we have the PMT
My Coda has a bi-weekly meeting, so

827
00:40:08,887 --> 00:40:12,850
we meet Every Tuesday and
Thursday, and we spend.

828
00:40:12,850 --> 00:40:15,488
Thursday is actually just doing
a sentiment, like I just showed you,

829
00:40:15,488 --> 00:40:18,141
where everybody just shares what's
going on, how are they feeling.

830
00:40:18,141 --> 00:40:22,056
And just make time to discuss
what's helpful to each person.

831
00:40:22,056 --> 00:40:24,973
And then on Tuesday, we use actually
the topic tracker that I showed you,

832
00:40:24,973 --> 00:40:28,186
where people can just make time to get
feedback from other PMs on their projects.

833
00:40:28,186 --> 00:40:31,616
And so they spend 30 minutes, people say,
hey, I'm working on this project and

834
00:40:31,616 --> 00:40:32,351
they add a topic.

835
00:40:32,351 --> 00:40:33,919
And then other people can vote on it and

836
00:40:33,919 --> 00:40:37,260
then they can just spend that 30 minute
time to get feedback from other people.

837
00:40:37,260 --> 00:40:40,833
So you can really design that
cadence around the specific team or

838
00:40:40,833 --> 00:40:42,301
company that you work at.

839
00:40:42,301 --> 00:40:45,856
For example, if you work in a small
startup, then your project cadence and

840
00:40:45,856 --> 00:40:48,010
your company cadence
might be very similar.

841
00:40:48,010 --> 00:40:52,432
So just looking at particular contexts and
just be intentional about that.

842
00:40:52,432 --> 00:40:54,143
Hi, are there YouTube tutorials of this?

843
00:40:54,143 --> 00:40:55,283
I'm guessing it's about Coda.

844
00:40:55,283 --> 00:40:58,431
Yes, there are a lot of YouTube tutorials.

845
00:40:58,431 --> 00:41:02,543
Like I said, we have a Treehouse course
that Gil developed, but we also have

846
00:41:02,543 --> 00:41:07,191
a treasure trove of learning content that
our learning designers at Coda have built.

847
00:41:07,191 --> 00:41:12,071
So in particular, Maria is this awesome
educators work Coda for the last three or

848
00:41:12,071 --> 00:41:12,731
so years.

849
00:41:12,731 --> 00:41:17,158
And she gets a lot of compliments and
I think she has her own fan following, but

850
00:41:17,158 --> 00:41:20,498
she's put together a lot of
really awesome videos short,

851
00:41:20,498 --> 00:41:22,160
long of how to get into Coda.

852
00:41:22,160 --> 00:41:25,089
I think probably the best place,
let me just make sure this link works.

853
00:41:25,089 --> 00:41:29,002
Is just to go to coda.io/learn and
that's gonna bring you to a doc,

854
00:41:29,002 --> 00:41:30,901
that's like your learning doc.

855
00:41:30,901 --> 00:41:32,702
And you can make your
own copy of this doc.

856
00:41:32,702 --> 00:41:40,181
And that's a very structured, actually
let me share my screen really quickly.

857
00:41:40,181 --> 00:41:42,171
This is the quota learn doc.

858
00:41:42,171 --> 00:41:45,207
And this is what it says,
it's got the YouTube video right here.

859
00:41:45,207 --> 00:41:48,956
But then in here, you actually have
a bunch of YouTube videos and it's just

860
00:41:48,956 --> 00:41:53,261
structures like, there's 20 or so short
videos here that you can learn and watch.

861
00:41:53,261 --> 00:41:56,341
And so, this is a very simple
handheld kind of guide.

862
00:41:56,341 --> 00:42:00,218
Yeah, we love using video as a way of
helping people learn how to do more

863
00:42:00,218 --> 00:42:00,892
with Coda.

864
00:42:00,892 --> 00:42:04,051
So if that's something you're
interested in, that's awesome.

865
00:42:04,051 --> 00:42:06,578
But here's the most undervalued yet
important skill.

866
00:42:06,578 --> 00:42:07,855
Yeah, that's a good question.

867
00:42:07,855 --> 00:42:10,917
I think, personally something that
I've really learned over the last

868
00:42:10,917 --> 00:42:14,642
couple of yours that I didn't even realize
beforehand, was this idea of alignment and

869
00:42:14,642 --> 00:42:16,702
that's something we think
a lot about at Coda.

870
00:42:16,702 --> 00:42:21,066
So alignment is, for example, like the
visual that my manager gave me was imagine

871
00:42:21,066 --> 00:42:25,261
15 people paddleboarding,
everybody's going in different directions.

872
00:42:25,261 --> 00:42:29,221
People are moving very slowly, versus
imagine 15 people sitting in a rowing

873
00:42:29,221 --> 00:42:33,192
boat and everybody's rowing in the same
direction, you can go so fast so far.

874
00:42:33,192 --> 00:42:36,227
And so I think that idea of
convincing people over time,

875
00:42:36,227 --> 00:42:40,426
not just like the viewer idea, but over
time convincing people to all agree on

876
00:42:40,426 --> 00:42:42,710
some idea whether it's your idea or not.

877
00:42:42,710 --> 00:42:47,310
That's a very interesting process and then
I can have a lot of impact on any team is,

878
00:42:47,310 --> 00:42:51,602
everyday at Coda I really feel like
we're all pushing in the same direction.

879
00:42:51,602 --> 00:42:55,442
And so if I go to a meeting at Coda,
I really can often see that, what that

880
00:42:55,442 --> 00:42:59,606
person is working on is in some way
multiplying the effect of what I'm doing.

881
00:42:59,606 --> 00:43:01,232
Is in some way pushing me forward.

882
00:43:01,232 --> 00:43:04,473
Again, when you when you feel like you're
a part of a team that's very well aligned

883
00:43:04,473 --> 00:43:06,294
in that way,
that's a really awesome skill.

884
00:43:06,294 --> 00:43:08,571
And I think that's
a really awesome feeling.

885
00:43:08,571 --> 00:43:12,997
And I think that's a skill that PMs really
should be thinking about and can develop,

886
00:43:12,997 --> 00:43:17,049
is to be the people who are responsible
for building alignment in your company

887
00:43:17,049 --> 00:43:19,941
to make sure everybody's
seeing things the same way.

888
00:43:19,941 --> 00:43:23,571
Even if they don't fully agree,
everybody's committed to following

889
00:43:23,571 --> 00:43:27,624
the strategy that the team has decided
on because that's how you're going to be

890
00:43:27,624 --> 00:43:30,905
the most effective,
instead of stretching yourself too thin.

891
00:43:30,905 --> 00:43:34,470
And then knowing your product and
engineering team can't build everything.

892
00:43:34,470 --> 00:43:36,543
How do you make hard scoping choices a PM?

893
00:43:36,543 --> 00:43:37,551
I think that's a great question.

894
00:43:37,551 --> 00:43:41,787
So I mean obviously this is probably the
most difficult thing that PMs do and so

895
00:43:41,787 --> 00:43:44,862
there's a lot that other
people have written about it.

896
00:43:44,862 --> 00:43:46,341
I would encourage you to read it.

897
00:43:46,341 --> 00:43:49,888
I think some things that I can share
from my own experience that are unique,

898
00:43:49,888 --> 00:43:51,013
especially in Coda is,

899
00:43:51,013 --> 00:43:53,962
we take a very democratic
perspective as I said to doing this.

900
00:43:53,962 --> 00:43:57,039
And so, usually what we do is
we'll have a planning process or

901
00:43:57,039 --> 00:43:59,891
recorder, we have a list of
things that we wanna work on.

902
00:43:59,891 --> 00:44:03,439
But then we use our tool in the ways that
I showed you like sentiment and so on,

903
00:44:03,439 --> 00:44:05,553
to get feedback from
a large group of people.

904
00:44:05,553 --> 00:44:08,270
The team that I work on is probably
about 30 people at this point.

905
00:44:08,270 --> 00:44:11,464
And we still feel like we can have
an effective discussion with 30 people

906
00:44:11,464 --> 00:44:15,070
because we use asynchronous tools like the
ones I showed you to collect input to make

907
00:44:15,070 --> 00:44:16,841
sure everybody's voices being heard.

908
00:44:16,841 --> 00:44:20,050
And you can build some pretty
advanced things in Coda.

909
00:44:20,050 --> 00:44:23,402
Sometimes what I do is this, it's an
example that you might have seen an Excel

910
00:44:23,402 --> 00:44:25,532
and so on, but
you make it really nicely in Coda.

911
00:44:25,532 --> 00:44:28,285
Is like a funding tracker,
everybody gets $100.

912
00:44:28,285 --> 00:44:30,033
They can spend it on a new
feature they want, and

913
00:44:30,033 --> 00:44:31,750
different features cost different amounts.

914
00:44:31,750 --> 00:44:34,941
And so that kind of indicates how big
your features are more expensive.

915
00:44:34,941 --> 00:44:39,208
And then people, you can also invite
people outside of your team, for example,

916
00:44:39,208 --> 00:44:43,540
sales or customer support, and give them
all these $100 of Monopoly money and

917
00:44:43,540 --> 00:44:46,461
have them allocate the budget
to different projects.

918
00:44:46,461 --> 00:44:50,121
And that's how, as an example,
you can get input from a lot of people.

919
00:44:50,121 --> 00:44:52,270
And that's often how
we make our decisions.

920
00:44:52,270 --> 00:44:56,464
Obviously, we know that people,
for example engineers may not be,

921
00:44:56,464 --> 00:44:59,935
like I said earlier,
talking to customers all the time,

922
00:44:59,935 --> 00:45:03,432
but as a PM your goal is to still
help them fill in that gap.

923
00:45:03,432 --> 00:45:07,107
So if they're not aware of what
customers are talking about, as a PM,

924
00:45:07,107 --> 00:45:11,218
you're gonna tell them that and then hope
that they will still come to some kind

925
00:45:11,218 --> 00:45:14,709
of conclusion that's not just
based on their own experience, but

926
00:45:14,709 --> 00:45:18,176
is focused on what's the best thing for
the team to be working on.

927
00:45:18,176 --> 00:45:21,633
Be checking the depth on a daily basis
when they're working on a feature or

928
00:45:21,633 --> 00:45:25,328
do you find that you get better results
we let them run and check last week them?

929
00:45:25,328 --> 00:45:26,530
That's a great question.

930
00:45:26,530 --> 00:45:30,232
I personally think there's
no right answer to that one.

931
00:45:30,232 --> 00:45:34,423
I think every project that I do, so
one of the rituals that I have is,

932
00:45:34,423 --> 00:45:37,822
every project that I start
on I have a project kickoff.

933
00:45:37,822 --> 00:45:39,809
And so once we've gone through
the planning process and

934
00:45:39,809 --> 00:45:41,839
everything we've decided that
the project consists and

935
00:45:41,839 --> 00:45:45,110
these are the people that are working on
it, I'm gonna have a kickoff meeting.

936
00:45:45,110 --> 00:45:48,512
And one of the things that I love to
ask them that kickoff meeting is,

937
00:45:48,512 --> 00:45:52,710
what's everybody's preferred cadence
in terms of meetings, slack, and so on.

938
00:45:52,710 --> 00:45:56,545
And so I've had projects where engineers
tell me that I would prefer to

939
00:45:56,545 --> 00:45:57,461
meet every day.

940
00:45:57,461 --> 00:46:01,071
For example, before COVID, we had a team
where people had already started to move

941
00:46:01,071 --> 00:46:04,418
remotely and we had a team where all four
of us were working on this project and

942
00:46:04,418 --> 00:46:06,122
everybody was in a different office.

943
00:46:06,122 --> 00:46:08,096
And in particular,
two of them were working from home.

944
00:46:08,096 --> 00:46:08,883
And so they said,

945
00:46:08,883 --> 00:46:12,085
it can feel pretty lonely to be working
on a project called the anti Nazi,

946
00:46:12,085 --> 00:46:15,511
the people I'm working with because
I'm no longer working from the office.

947
00:46:15,511 --> 00:46:18,077
And so I would actually like
to do a daily stand up and so

948
00:46:18,077 --> 00:46:19,739
we ended up doing a daily stand up.

949
00:46:19,739 --> 00:46:23,293
While there are definitely other
projects people are like, I have kids,

950
00:46:23,293 --> 00:46:25,428
I work odd hours, and
so the once that week.

951
00:46:25,428 --> 00:46:28,641
I think most projects we do,
we do keep the once a week meeting.

952
00:46:28,641 --> 00:46:31,098
And so the once a week is just right for
me and

953
00:46:31,098 --> 00:46:33,501
I don't want it any more often than that.

954
00:46:33,501 --> 00:46:38,327
And so we'll end up adjusting to
the group and decide accordingly.

955
00:46:38,327 --> 00:46:40,787
Do you also have rituals on talking to
customers or getting feedback on them?

956
00:46:40,787 --> 00:46:43,175
Yes, I think there's a lot
of great rituals for

957
00:46:43,175 --> 00:46:44,978
getting feedback from customers.

958
00:46:44,978 --> 00:46:48,832
Let me show you one really good example.

959
00:46:48,832 --> 00:46:51,613
I think this is one of the examples
that I linked to in the doc.

960
00:46:51,613 --> 00:46:55,261
But I found this really inspiring,
and so here we go.

961
00:46:55,261 --> 00:46:59,002
So there is an email app called Superhuman
that you may or may not have heard of.

962
00:46:59,002 --> 00:47:02,929
But the founder of Superhuman wrote a blog
post a few years ago about how they built

963
00:47:02,929 --> 00:47:05,961
an engine to measure the product
market fit of their product.

964
00:47:05,961 --> 00:47:09,101
And there's a lot here, don't think
I'll be able to summarize in a minute.

965
00:47:09,101 --> 00:47:12,406
But one thing that they ended up doing is
they ran a survey that they would send,

966
00:47:12,406 --> 00:47:13,921
it's like a four question survey.

967
00:47:13,921 --> 00:47:17,598
They would send it to their customers,
a random sample of customers, and

968
00:47:17,598 --> 00:47:18,978
they would ask questions.

969
00:47:18,978 --> 00:47:21,725
I think the questions were here.

970
00:47:21,725 --> 00:47:23,654
So do how can we improve Superhuman for
you?

971
00:47:23,654 --> 00:47:26,191
What type of person do you think
would benefit from Superhuman?

972
00:47:26,191 --> 00:47:29,744
And so on, but I think the biggest
question to them was famous for is,

973
00:47:29,744 --> 00:47:32,700
how would you feel if you could
no longer use Superhuman?

974
00:47:32,700 --> 00:47:34,551
Very disappointed, this is the question.

975
00:47:34,551 --> 00:47:36,638
So how would you feel if you
could only use Superhuman?

976
00:47:36,638 --> 00:47:39,869
And then they had these three options,
very disappointed, somewhat disappointed,

977
00:47:39,869 --> 00:47:40,629
not disappointed.

978
00:47:40,629 --> 00:47:43,301
And so again, they put a lot of
thought into what they this out.

979
00:47:43,301 --> 00:47:46,919
What they do to analyze this thought.

980
00:47:46,919 --> 00:47:49,894
But I think one thing that's really
awesome is the amount of thought that went

981
00:47:49,894 --> 00:47:51,794
into this and
how it was the right thing for them.

982
00:47:51,794 --> 00:47:54,446
And you can obviously build,
for whatever you are imagining,

983
00:47:54,446 --> 00:47:55,696
whether it's in Coda or not,

984
00:47:55,696 --> 00:47:58,961
you can build the right tools are just
there to help you through that process.

985
00:47:58,961 --> 00:48:03,620
But you can really build the right process
that can kinda show you that feedback.

986
00:48:03,620 --> 00:48:07,533
Another thing that we use very often
is user testing or user interviews.

987
00:48:07,533 --> 00:48:11,460
And so again, I have some rituals
that I use for those too,

988
00:48:11,460 --> 00:48:14,841
happy to answer more if
there's more questions.

989
00:48:14,841 --> 00:48:19,315
I think we're almost out of time,
but I did put in my Twitter and

990
00:48:19,315 --> 00:48:21,521
my LinkedIn links in the talk.

991
00:48:21,521 --> 00:48:24,891
So happy to give people that again.

992
00:48:24,891 --> 00:48:30,341
Feel free to send me a DM or something and
I'm happy to answer any questions.

993
00:48:30,341 --> 00:48:31,814
That's my Twitter.

994
00:48:31,814 --> 00:48:35,401
And really appreciate all of you
joining and thank you for your time.

995
00:48:35,401 --> 00:48:36,090
Hope that was helpful.