What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda)

Moments that stretch you, or moments that you feel uncomfortable in, or you find yourself saying, "Oh [ __ ], you know, I shouldn't be here. I'm underqualified to be here." Those are the moments you should be seeking out, right? Like, those are the moments that stretch you and give you sort of like a new foundation.

So oftentimes, you know, you'll hear a career question like, "Do you feel like you're growing in your role?" and that's like a very ambiguous, in my opinion, way to ask this question. A much sharper way is like, "Hey, how many like, oh [ __ ] moments have you had in the last six months, year, two years, and what are they?"

I think if you ask yourself that question and the answer is, "It's been a really long time since I've been stretched in some meaningful way," or "I've felt like I'm underqualified to be there," then it may be worth kind of digging into.

Welcome to Lenny's podcast, where we interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products.

Today, my guest is Lane Shackleton. Lane is Chief Product Officer at Coda, where he's held the role for over eight years. Before that, he was Group Product Manager at YouTube, a Product Specialist at Google, and as you'll hear, he started his career as an Alaskan Mountain Guide and then as a manual reviewer of Google AdWords ads.

Lane is an incredibly deep thinker, very first-principles oriented, and has built an incredible product team and culture at Coda. In part, he's done that by studying the principles and rituals of great product leaders and great product teams.

In this conversation, Lane shares what he's learned, what he’s found great PMs and great teams do differently. He shares a bunch of his favorite rituals and principles, how you can implement them on your own team, plus a really clever and unique way of understanding if you're making progress in your career, plus so much more.

I could talk to Lane for hours, but we tried to keep this to under an hour and a half. With that, I bring you Lane Shackleton after a short word from our sponsors.

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Lane, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast!

So glad to be here. Thanks for having me!

It's absolutely my pleasure. I've always really admired the way that you write about product, the way you think about product, and it feels like Coda has one of the strongest and also the most thoughtful product teams out there. So I'm really excited to have you on here and learn from what you've learned over the years.

My first question is completely unrelated. I have to ask, your last name, Shackleton, any relation to a certain very famous Antarctic explorer?

Yeah, it's probably distant at best. I wish it was close. I wish I could claim him as my father or grandfather, but I definitely grew up with those stories and reading a lot about him. As a kid in high school, we read "Endurance," which is a great book if you haven't read it. It's an amazing story, basically, you know, very inspiring how he put people first and brought back all of his men from this journey to the South Pole. So I have taken a lot of lessons from that, but that's as close as I can come to the greatness of Ernest Shackleton.

Okay, so there's a connection. When I think of Shackleton, I also think of the ad that he ran for recruiting people to join his journey: low chance of survival, incredibly hard, some chance for glory if you succeed, something like that. It's a wonderful ad. I think I had a mug of that when I was a kid.

Yeah, amazing!

Okay, so on that same topic, I noticed maybe your first job was a mountain guide in Alaska. Was that inspired by this legacy? And also, why did you decide not to pursue that and get into product management, which is a completely different life?

Yeah, yeah, very different. Very different time. I didn't have kids back then. I think I was convinced at the time I wanted a career outside. I just loved spending time in the mountains and climbing things like that. To be honest, I wasn't the best guide. There were a lot of amazing guides out there that just had—they were almost invincible in terms of their ability to climb for 20, 30 hours. But I learned a lot from the experience.

Maybe the quick story on why I stopped guiding: I was on sort of a dream trip for mountain guides, which is we were flown to a remote portion of Southeast Alaska, about an hour-long flight, to a mountain called Fairweather, a beautiful 15,000-foot peak.

As part of climbing on glaciers, one of the things that you do for context is you're roped to another person. The reason that you do that is because if someone falls into a crevasse, you want to be able to stop them or pull them out.

So anyway, I was roped to a very nice client that I was guiding, and he fell pretty close to the top on our way down. Luckily, we were able to self-arrest and stop that fall, but I spent probably the next six hours walking down that mountain thinking the same thing over and over again, which is, "I really don't want to die, you know, roped to someone that I barely know and don't trust or love."

So that was sort of the last season that I guided, but tons of great memories and learnings, and I think it impacted my life in a pretty significant way.

Damn, software is much lower stakes, I guess. Just while we're on this topic, are there any parallels or big lessons, I don't know, if you learned from that experience that you bring to product?

One is just preparation. I think when you go climbing or when you guide climbing, you spend months and months preparing for usually a few days of climbing. So, you know, there's that kind of preparation. There's also just a million checklists. Before you go on an expedition, you may check a checklist of all your equipment and stuff like that a dozen times or more, so you kind of ensure redundancy across all your systems. That was definitely a parallel.

The other thing I think about a lot is just how to stay calm in challenging or scary scenarios. We had another instance where I had a client pull a big chunk of rock off and break both of their feet. I was like the junior guide on that particular instance, and the more senior guide looked at me, looked at the situation, and was like, "Okay, we're getting this guy out of here right now." You know, put him on his back, and we basically took turns carrying him out for a couple of miles.

I'll just never forget instances like that where the clarity of, you know, stay calm, assess the situation, prioritize, take action, you know, it's like that's sort of like a mini version of that when you're building software, I think. So experiences like that, I think, were, you know, even though I only did it for a handful of summers, were pretty profound.

Damn, what a very different life. That life path would have been pre-kids.

Oh man!

So you mentioned your writing. You mentioned that this is something you want to write about. Shifting to kind of the core topic of our chat, it's very clear that you spent a lot of time studying how great product managers operate and how great product teams operate. You've been doing a bunch of writing on the principles of great product management and also the rituals of great teams.

I want to spend a bunch of time trying to extract as much as I can from your learning so that listeners can learn essentially what are the principles of great product managers, what are the rituals of great teams, and generally how do the best teams operate?

My first question is just, why is this something that you started doing? What kind of pulled you into spending so much time and effort trying to understand how the best teams and people operate?

Yeah, I've been asking myself that question a little bit lately. You know, there's a few reasons. One reason is I just found myself giving a similar set of advice in one-on-ones, you know? And so I think anytime you find as a leader yourself kind of like repeating the same lessons, it should be a good flag to say, "Oh, I could probably scale this in some way."

And as you know, as soon as you write something down, you have to clarify your own thinking, and so it becomes very useful for that. I don't think I quite expected how useful it would be in that sense—like putting writing something down and then putting it out there. You know, you start to get feedback back of like where you might have been right or where you might not be right, and so for me, it's been a good learning experience there as well.

I think the second reason is I've always been pretty frustrated with career ladders. You know, most companies have career ladders with like 10 or 15 levels, and you know, as soon as they hit some scale, the levels—there's like levels between levels. I feel like I looked at the one at Google, and you know, you kind of like needed a PhD to decipher it and interpret like how to operate within it.

And so that's sort of like one piece of the construct. If you think more broadly, though, they aren't consistent across companies, right? So like now you're in a situation where you're like in your version of the rat race. And so I found that I basically wanted to have a broader set of principles that transcended level, right? So things that could be true when you are an IC PM starting your career and things that can also be true when you're the head of product or running a product team or things like that.

And so like that sort of one—I won't rant further on that, but that's I think that's one sort of piece of it. And then I think the last reason I'll mention is I was pretty inspired by a talk by this guy named Brett Victor, who's kind of like a prototyper thinker. You may have heard of his work. He has this talk called "Inventing on Principle," and in the early days of Coda, one of our first designers, this guy Jeremy Brittain, showed this talk to the company, and like my mind was blown, you know?

And I think it was one of those examples of someone developing a clear view of what principles they should operate with and then like following that principle, right? And it was just sort of a meta example of how important it is and how impactful it can be when you decide on a principle and then follow it. And so ever since then, I've been thinking like, you know, what are my principles as it pertains to like building software and other things?

So those are kind of like the three reasons that, you know, led me to start writing these things down.

Amazing! We're going to find that talk and link to it in the show notes. I want to ask about what principles you've come to, but I also want to understand how you actually ended up doing ladders and performance review stuff at Coda. Would it be better to talk about that later after we go through some of these things, or is there something you want to share first of just how you think about it?

When we were doing career ladders, first of all, we put it off for quite a bit of time, and that was based on the advice of a lot of other leaders that said like as soon as you introduce this, then the incentives sort of like flip from being company-focused to being individual-focused.

And so I think we—it was for a good bit of time. There came a time where we kind of decided, "Hey, look, we really do need to provide better guidance here about like what it means to grow and what it means to be great."

And so at about the same time we were doing the levels thing, I started writing down some of the principles that I've been publishing. One of the things that I think about a lot when talking about levels is just how to keep everyone oriented toward their team and their company, right? And I think that we've done a really good job of that over the years.

So levels aren't by any means at the forefront of any company discussion. In fact, we kind of don't use titles that much. You said that it's not specific to role. Do you mean like the same leveling attributes are the same for design and product and engineering?

We basically have five levels, and we call them role stages. They go from Apprentice to Principal. So Apprentice is kind of—rope analogy here is learns about rope. Practitioner is can tie basic knots, shown complex knots. You know, sort of given a problem, they can do it. Career is you can calculate rope strength; you know a lot about knots. Principal is basically invented nylon. So the bar is like really, really high for Principal in these levels, and I think that that is, you know, that's appropriate.

Like it should be as irrational that the bar is exceptionally high at the highest level of our role stages. I find it—it's a pretty good process to draw contrast, maybe a little bit of contrast with other companies. I think most other companies, especially large companies, have 10 to 15 levels. I think we've made a really conscious choice to have only five.

I think the other bit of contrast I would draw is basically role stages are not visible across the whole company. Like, you know, we're not showing levels of any individual PM or designer, and that's partially because we just don't want to put a big focus on it.

And then probably the biggest difference is we have a centralized compensation committee, and that's who decides compensation. So it's not the manager that drives your compensation. So those are some differences.

Super cool! I've never seen it done this way before. I think it's an awesome example of first-principle thinking, which I see a lot come out from your product team.

And then just to make sure I heard you right, these five stages are roughly the same across roles, so designers have the same kind of five, and they're described similarly?

That's right. They're described similarly at a high level, but then the specifics, like if you get into it, are a little bit different.

Okay, I'm going to ask about what the principles are or a few of them that you can share, but one other very tactical question: at what size of product team, say just PMs, did you start to develop this framework?

We were probably at 20 PMs and designers when we did that.

Awesome! Okay, so let me just ask, what are some of these principles you've kind of narrowed it on as principles of great product managers? Maybe it's helpful to start with a little higher-level context on the kind of unifying thesis.

I think the unifying thesis is the core job of a product person in general is to turn ambiguity into clarity. If you think about the job of a product leader or product manager, kind of like everything is ambiguous all the time. You know, it's like, what's my role on this team? What problem are we solving? Who's the target customer? You know, what prototype is going to solve this particular problem?

So it's like literally everything. And so if you're going to do the job well, you really need to get good at spotting ambiguity and kind of turning it into clarity, right? And so the obvious question that follows from that is like, okay, great, that sounds like a great Hallmark card, but you know, how do you actually do that?

And so I think the principles that I've been writing down are very personal. They're like my take on how to do this. So the first one that I wrote about was "systems, not goals."

One of the ways that I started this post—I'm a big fan of getting inspiration from outside of tech. And so one of the stories that I tell is basically the story of Jerry Seinfeld. If you haven't seen the documentary "Comedian," it's amazing. It's definitely worth watching.

But the story goes, you know, he's done Seinfeld, the show, and he's got all this material from the last like 15 years, and he comes in one day and he says, "Look, I'm going to throw away all my material, and I'm going to start fresh," right? And like this is like unheard of in comedy for someone to just like throw away all their old material and start fresh.

And you know, so the question is, like, what does he do next? The goal isn't that important. What's important here is like the system. So the system that he uses is he writes for an hour every morning. You know, he doesn't write for more if he doesn't want to, and then he goes and performs at night, right?

And so when you rinse and repeat that system, do it hundreds of times, that's how he builds up from five minutes to 15 minutes to 30 minutes of material. And so I think that, you know, I take a lot of inspiration from that, and I think product people can generally, which is instead of being obsessed with a goal, you know, be obsessed with the system that gets you there.

And so the phrase I sometimes use is, you know, "goals with good intentions don't work." And I think that a really—maybe to give a common example, a really common example is teams that are trying to like learn about customers or do research.

And you know, one thing I've observed is a team may have a goal like an OKR of talking to 10 customers this quarter, and they may or may not hit that OKR. And then if you watch closely, you know, the next quarter they may not have a goal of talking to customers anymore.

And so they sort of like learning is going up and down. And to draw contrast, that's just really different than a team that has some default on system for talking to customers. You know, every few times a week, they're talking to customers for whatever reason.

And the impact of that is like really hard to see until you understand that the latter team, you know, tends to have like really good product instincts or really good customer instincts. It's because they've just had this like sort of default on mindset of talking to customers.

In the early days of Coda, we actually did something similar. We had a time allotted on Fridays, and it was basically like it was on the calendar—a customer or a potential customer was coming in, and so you knew that it was going to happen, and you had to have something to show.

And so sometimes we'd be scrambling, you know, the three hours before to have a prototype ready for a customer. Sometimes we would have had something that we've been baking for a while, but the point is that it was default on, right?

And so like the way that we developed good customer instincts was not the goal; it was really just the sort of system behind it. So that's one that I'm kind of passionate about, and I think it also translates into a lot of the rituals that we talk a lot about.

There are so many directions I can go with this. I really like this one. It reminds me of something I did at Airbnb where we had lunch with a host every Friday with the team, and we had our community person find someone in San Francisco that's a host, and there's no agenda—just let's have lunch, meet the team, curious what you're doing.

And every Airbnb host is always so nice, and it's such a pleasant experience. It also makes me think about this book, "The Score Takes Care of Itself." Have you read that?

Where it's just like do the fundamentals, and you'll win. The other thing it reminds me of is I have this quote hanging in my office here from, I believe, it's from the Rick Rubin book, and the quote is, "The object isn't to make art; it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable."

I love it! I feel like you just changed art. Oh my God, it's so good! There's just like every section is like this quotable thing. I want to like—I need to hold on to this thing.

Yeah, he's got a great thing on listening. I think I really admire what he says about listening, and I think that a lot of PMs could take that lesson, which is, yeah, what is that? The way he talks about it is essentially you want to listen and absorb sort of every fragment of what that person is saying, including, you know, their body language and everything else, and try to turn off the side which is crafting your response or, you know, figuring out what you're going to say next or what the problem with their argument is or whatever.

You know, it's really quite hard to do, right? Because like your default mode is always sort of the next step of the conversation. But I think if you can really challenge yourself, like he says, to pause and really try to internalize sort of holistically what that person's saying, it's pretty powerful.

I was actually just reading that chapter, and the next chapter is about this idea of the beginner's mind. I don't know if you remember that.

We're going—I feel like we get people get sniped by Rick Rubin stuff, but anyway, I'm going to go down this thread. He talks about how AlphaZero or AlphaGo, the first AI thing that beat humans at Go, and how there's a move it made, move 37 in a game that was just like—the person the AI was playing walked out of the room. He's like, "I can't—I don't even know what just happened. This is out of anything I've ever imagined."

And it won, and the lesson there is it was training not on what we've learned, but it trained itself and figured things out from first principles and then came up with this thing we've never even comprehended.

And so it's a really good example of the power of coming from a beginner's mind and not being influenced by what's already been done.

Yeah, we do—we have like a walkthrough ritual that we do, where the prompt is essentially like sort of put yourself in the shoes of someone who knows nothing about this topic whatsoever and like kind of have a beginner's mind and then, you know, walk through with five or ten people watching you and let's, you know, let's sort of fix all the problems that we see.

Okay, so I want to talk about rituals. We're getting ahead of ourselves a little bit. Is there any other principles that you can share, either just on the high level or in depth, that you've come across? And I know people can go to your Substack and read this. And by the way, what's your Substack URL for people because I want to check it out?

Just lane.substack.com.

Sweet! We'll definitely link to it.

Yeah, any other principles?

I think the other one is "cathedrals, not bricks." And then the other one is "proactive, not reactive."

"Cathedrals, not bricks" I think is a kind of classic one. I think I had a moment of realization in talking to Shashir in a one-on-one when I was at YouTube, sort of bemoaning the fact that my team wasn't performing to the potential that I thought they had.

And he had a very sort of pointed and unexpected question, which is, "Do they know their cathedral? Do they have a cathedral?" And I'm sitting there like, "Man, what are you talking about? Like we're talking about performing as a team, and you know, you're asking me about cathedrals."

And then he sort of explained the cathedral story, which I can talk about, and that story was quite clarifying.

Yeah, do share!

The cathedral story is basically, you know, you walk up to three people; they're laying bricks. You ask the first person, "What are you doing?" They say, "Well, I take the bricks from over here and I put them, you know, on that stack over there." You ask the second person, "What are you doing?" They say, "Well, I, you know, take this little cement and I put it on top of the brick that that person lays."

You ask the third person, "What are you doing?" and they say, "Well, we're building a cathedral."

And the sort of core insight here is that you want your teams to feel like they're building a cathedral and not laying bricks. And I think it's really, really easy to do when PMs are really busy on a day-to-day to just like be one task after the other, really execution-oriented, and maybe not take the time to sort of help the team take a broader frame, open the aperture a little bit, and have a view of what the cathedral is.

And I think, you know, we've learned many times that one kind of unexpected bit of this is that everybody needs to see a different facet of the cathedral, right? So very often—and I've made this mistake before plenty of times—very often people will, you know, do a great write-up on vision or strategy or whatever it is, and the result is people can't quite see their version of what this like broader arc is or this broader cathedral is.

And so one of the things that we have tried to do when we go through big planning cycles is kind of show all the different sides of this. So instead of just having like a write-up, we may have a write-up, we may couple that with the metric, we may couple that with directional mocks and, you know, what the billboard might look like or how our homepage may change.

And really what we're trying to do is kind of take the mystery out of the set of like broader constraints or where we're headed. And so I think that that is a, you know, I think great product teams and great PM leaders tend to always orient their teams towards a broader cathedral as opposed to laying bricks.

Such a beautiful metaphor! Reminds me of this other quote I just looked up while you were chatting: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

Classic! That's Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Okay, something I was curious about as you were chatting also is for folks that want to develop their own principles and define how they want to think about product, is there anything you found to be useful in helping kind of emerge these into principles that you can come to? Is it just sitting around thinking? Is there anything else you've done that has helped you define these things?

Probably two things. One is reading really broadly. So I think not just reading kind of like PM-style literature. Like I said, I think I tend to get a lot of inspiration from outside of tech. I think that's one thing.

I think the other thing is, you know, in so far as you get the opportunity to mentor other people, think about like what you're saying to these people. You know, like think about, "Okay, this person came to me with this challenge. What was my response? Why was that my response? Am I giving that response a lot of times?"

Okay, maybe like this is a more deeply held belief. And so I think noticing those instances was helpful for me.

Are there any books or topics or areas that you found most inspirational? You talk about reading and studying other non-product tech.

I mean definitely like sports. I would say like sports is really interesting to me. Team sports have always been a huge fan of everything—team sports, storytelling. You know, go look at some of the best storytellers in the world, and they're actually up there on a stage telling stories.

There's a book called "Storyworthy" that I really like.

I was just going to mention that! That book is so good! Somebody mentioned this on the podcast, and as I read it, it's like the most useful practical book for how to tell stories.

So the insight is amazing. The insight, just in case your listeners are interested, the insight is basically the nugget of a great story is like five seconds of transformation. So if you just orient like everything else around that like moment of transformation, then you end up usually telling a reasonably good story.

And so we actually had—I had a conversation with the author right after I read that book because I was just like totally enamored with it, and then we ended up bringing him into Coda, and he gave a great talk. So yeah, big, big plug for Matthew Dicks.

The other thing that stuck with me also from that same— we're just going all kinds of tangents—from that same insight is, and I watch movies completely differently now, where basically the characters you meet at the beginning of the story, they're going to be completely opposite at the end of the story because of this transformation that takes place.

So I'm watching movies with my wife now, and I'm like, "Okay, she's very shy right now; she's going to be very extroverted by the end of this movie," or "They love each other," or "They're going to have a lot of problems."

Yeah, so interesting! Oh, that's such a good idea! Okay, I'm going to get this guy on hopefully.

And he's like the moth champion, basically, too.

Yeah, I mean, that's like what I would say is like as a maybe a principal version of this, you know, the way that you learn or the way that everyone, including me, learns new things is like you go seek out the best at that given craft.

So in this case, you go to the moth story slam, or you go see some like really good stories. Like if you ever watch these on YouTube, and then you just kind of like unpack what they're doing and how they're doing it.

And then obviously, I think the other way to learn quickly is to like throw yourself in the deep end. So in so far as you can put yourself in situations that are uncomfortable or having, you know, force you to do things like tell a story or force you to come up with a clear strategy, you should always opt into those, especially, you know, early in your career.

The first thing you said—that's basically the whole premise of this podcast: find the best at all these things and learn from them, extract and share, and the world is much better for it. You know, the podcast is an amazing resource you've done. You've done something very special.

Oh, I appreciate it! This podcast episode is already very special.

The point you just made reminds me of something that I heard you talk about, which is kind of this "oh [ __ ]" moment. I don't know if it's related to what you shared of just giving people a sense of whether they're making progress in their career. Can you talk about that?

Sure! Yeah, I think I picked this up originally from Seth Godin, the author, and it just like totally stuck with me. The basic kind of thesis is that moments that stretch you or moments that you feel uncomfortable in, or you find yourself saying like, "Oh [ __ ], you know, I shouldn't be here. I'm underqualified to be here." Those are the moments you should be seeking out, right?

Like those are the moments that stretch you and give you sort of like a new foundation. And so I have found that they turn out to be a pretty good way to calibrate whether someone is growing in their career.

So oftentimes, you know, you'll hear like a career question like, "Do you feel like you're growing in your role?" and that's like a very ambiguous, in my opinion, way to ask this question.

And like a much sharper way is like, "Hey, how many like, oh [ __ ] moments have you had in the last like six months, year, two years, and what are they?"

And like I think if you ask yourself that question and the answer is, "It's been a really long time since I've been like stretched in some meaningful way," or "I've felt, you know, like I'm underqualified to be there," then it may be worth kind of like digging into that.

That is so good! Makes me think about this podcast where I never wanted to do podcasts. I'm like, "I'm not a podcast person. I don't like—I just want to sit there and type out newsletters."

How cool is that? And I'm like, "No, I got to do it because it's hard." And I'm glad I did it. It also reminds me of this quote that I love that I always think back to: "The cave you fear contains the treasure you seek."

Nice! That reminds me of—have you read the book "The Obstacle Is the Way"?

No, say more!

It's a great book by Ryan Holiday, and the kind of core thesis is it's a book a bit about stoicism, but the core idea is essentially, you know, instead of running away from obstacles, you should be running toward them. And that's, you know, where you experience like either the most growth or the most sort of profound moments of your life.

And he gives a lot of examples in that book of people throughout history who sort of made that choice. And I think he's also given that talk to like hundreds of sports teams, so it's a good book worth reading.

It's so hard! It's so hard to do hard things, man! God damn it!

So we've been talking about principles of great product managers. You also spent a lot of time looking at the rituals of great product teams, and I know you're working on this handbook that I'm excited to learn more about. Can you just talk about, I guess, one where this idea came from of studying rituals at great teams and also just how do you actually go about learning about these rituals? I know you have this really interesting process.

Yeah, I mean in general, I'm a big believer in, you know, good design and good product starts with noticing. And I think Tony Fidel has a great talk on this. So I think a bunch of us that are really obsessed with rituals, we just honestly try to be great at noticing.

So, you know, see something happening with a customer, ask a few questions, get introduced to their team, hear about something interesting from a non-customer, ask for an intro, you know, end up kind of like just probing and asking a lot of questions.

And then in many cases, you know, nowadays with Coda, we're building new rituals alongside people. So someone has a creative idea about how to implement something, and we're, you know, we're like partners or collaborators with them on that, which is honestly incredibly fun to just like see people's creativity expressed in a tool and then, you know, by extension, kind of the social construct that they exist in.

So that's a little bit about how we got started in that whole process. And then, of course, Shashir is writing a book called "Rituals of Great Teams," so we've been kind of cataloging those. We've been hosting a bunch of rituals dinners where we basically get people together for a dinner, and we usually have, you know, three or four presenters at those dinners.

And, you know, it's just a great chance to learn and think about, you know, how the engine runs in a lot of these companies.

What are some rituals that you've learned from these dinners and this research you've done that have really stuck with you?

There are so many; it's like it's hard to choose. Maybe I'll choose two that are top of mind. One is Dar's Shaw has this ritual from HubSpot called flash tags. Have you heard of this?

No!

So, yeah, we've all probably been in the situation where, you know, someone gives you feedback, and you either like under-interpret it or over-interpret it. And as an organization, you know, I think the kind of core principle here is like you want to be calibrated on how much to pay attention to a bit of feedback.

And so he outlines four flash tags. He presented this in one of our dinners, and I absolutely love the phrase. And of these is like someone who's given a lot of feedback on product stuff in their career.

So that ranges from, I think it's FY, suggestion, recommendation, plea. So FY is basically like, "I had a thought, you know, take it or leave it," kind of thing. Suggestion is—and he uses this like hill-dying metaphor—so is this a hill I'm going to die on?

And FYI is like, you know, there's no hill in sight. Suggestion is like, "There's a hill I'm not going to die on it. Like, you know, this is what I would do if I were you. You can take it or leave it."

Recommendation is like, "I'm climbing the hill. I'm not going to die here, but like I've thought about this a lot, so like don't ignore this." You know, and then the fourth one, plea, is, you know, hopefully rarely used in the organization. It's like, "I don't like dying on hills; that's not what we do here. But, you know, this is a pretty good candidate for it. Like you should really trust me."

And so we have ended up using that. I was actually just at an offsite, and someone gave a lightning talk to our team on how valuable this has been just to calibrate. You know, "Hey, we got 100 pieces of feedback, and there's like one plea. Okay, let's spend our time on that."

You know, or, you know, there's a whole bunch of FYIs. I think we're fine; let's keep going. No worries.

That's amazing! It's interesting; none of them are just "just do it this way." I imagine it's very intentional.

Yeah, I think it's honestly a sign of a really experienced leader, you know, to know that scale. But every time I look at the scale and I'm sort of weighing where I am between, you know, suggestion and recommendation, I have to kind of like giggle to myself.

And how do you actually use it? In the feedback, do you like put a hashtag plea kind of thing?

The way it gets used in Coda and the way I think other companies have made a ritual is like you'll have a feedback table, and you know, you'll write your feedback, and then there'll just be like a little select list, and you can select between those four.

And usually what people do is they include the description so you can kind of like, as you're choosing it, think, you know, am I really—do I really feel that strongly about this? And honestly, it's just good hygiene.

You know, otherwise, every bit of feedback is taken the same, which is just fundamentally like the impact of that is it slows everything down because now you're looking at like a list of pieces—100 pieces of feedback—and you're going like, "Oh man, we got to address all this feedback," whereas, you know, as soon as you distinguish between what's most important, it's much easier to sort through that.

What about if it's in person? Do you say, "This is a plea," or "This is an FYI"?

Oh, I've definitely heard that in many meetings, like, "Are you making a recommendation, or are you making a plea?" And making the person think through that choice, I think, is just a very helpful shared language.

I imagine one of the other benefits of this is I think most leaders that rise up the ranks eventually realize anything they say in a meeting is going to be like taken really seriously, and the team's going to rush back and be like, "Oh, told us to change this thing."

So I imagine it helps you just make it clear, "No, you don't need to actually change this; just my thoughts."

Yeah, exactly!

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What stands out as really interesting, either more recently you've learned or something you're just like, "Oh wow, that was genius"?

I guess one that I get asked about a lot on our team is called Catalyst. And I guess maybe to set some context on this one, in most product teams, the review forum is just like a really important part of the product development process.

And the kind of like core insight for, you know, most review forums or, you know, product reviews or decision forums is that they generally suffer from two problems that are like kind of hard to spot unless you've sat through, you know, hundreds of them.

The first is they have standing attendees, and the second is they're normally single-threaded, meaning they're normally like one topic at a time. So maybe I'll talk about both of those because I think they're not exactly intuitive.

So when you think about what happens in a standing meeting with a standing set of attendees, you either have the situation where you have like too many people in the meeting or you have not enough people in the meeting, and both of those can cause problems, right?

So like if you've ever been in a meeting—I certainly have—where it's like, "Hey, do we have the salesperson who knows most about this, or do we have the engineer who's actually implementing this here?" Oh great, they're not here. They're not like a part of the standing set of attendees.

You either like have to reschedule the meeting, or worse, you just like do the discussion without the person who's like most knowledgeable, which seems, you know, crazy in retrospect.

The second problem is single-threaded, so like one topic at a time. So if you think about, you know, if a product development process is like, you know, somewhat of a chaotic assembly line for a second, you know, your review or your decision forum ends up being a big-time bottleneck in many cases.

And like obviously, you know, you want to be in a situation where product people have a lot of autonomy and they can make, you know, most of the decisions themselves. And I'm a big believer in kind of like decentralized leadership and all of that.

But there are things that cut across the company that like need to get reviewed by a broader set of stakeholders. And so what happens when those things are single-threaded is, you know, either the meeting is like really long, so it's like a three-hour review meeting once a week, and by the end, everyone is like, you know, about to fall asleep, or it's really short, and it's like really hard to get on the calendar.

You're like, "Oh, can we get on the calendar in two weeks?" And the downside of both—like the downside of the, you know, not being able to get on the calendar is that now you've like just slowed down the whole velocity of the company because the throughput of your review meeting is really slow.

So we built Catalyst to really solve those two problems. And so the way it works is it's essentially three one-hour blocks throughout the week, and the assumption is that the whole company is free, so you can get anyone in the company for those three hours.

And each topic has essentially four roles: driver, maker, brain trust, and interested. It's a very transparent system, so like a salesperson can say, "Oh, I'm interested in this product development, you know, review. I'm just going to mark myself as interested."

And then the driver is like the person who's actually going to like drive the meeting, drive the decision, drive the outcome, things like that. And basically, this is all centralized in like one doc.

And what happens is the day before that hold that's on the calendar gets removed, and then you have specific topics that get added. So there may be like three topics going all at the same time because they don't have overlapping attendees.

And you know, the impact of this, I think if you really watch it in progress, is huge. Like you basically have many topics running all at the same time, so the throughput is much better, and you have the right attendees every single time, and you have like a clear set of drivers and roles in these meetings.

So that means that like we can review work much, much faster with the right people, and ideally that results in, you know, more value to our customers, more things getting shipped, just a higher velocity organization. So that's one that we get asked about a lot, and actually a couple weeks ago, we spent a while kind of remaking the template for that one.

I love that ritual! You actually wrote even in more depth in the post that we worked together on on how Coda builds product, which we'll link to if folks want to try this out, and you link to actual templates people can actually use at their companies.

Yeah, when someone's listening to this and they're like, "Oh wow, this is extremely cool," how easy is it, do you find, for people to take a ritual from a company and implement it? Like how much of that is cultural and it's hard to transplant, or do you find people can take this Catalyst idea, plug and play at a lot of companies?

Yeah, I think it depends a lot on what your role in the company is. Like, you know, if you're—maybe to say the extremes for a second—if you're like a brand new PM to an organization, you probably shouldn't go try to like remake the whole review product review cycle that like the head of product is really passionate about and has crafted.

But, you know, you can probably take a, you know, a decision template or some interesting ritual that has facilitated a team, you know, in the past and use it with your team.

Another one of my favorites there is $100 voting. We use that a lot in the context of planning, and I find that like creative rituals like that are easy to pick up for teams because oftentimes it's like, "Okay, maybe I'll describe the ritual real quick."

So, yeah, I was going to ask! The ritual is essentially you can take any set of, you know, problems or solutions or themes or, you know, whatever you want to get people's input on, and you put those into a table.

And then people can basically vote with their dollars, and usually you allocate $100. And so people will go through and say like, "I want to allocate $10 to this and $20 to this and $50 to this because I think it's really important."

And I have found that especially in planning processes, little rituals like this are great at kind of like getting the elephant in the room out. So it's like, "Oh wow, we have like a huge spread on this one particular, you know, problem. We think it's a huge problem; I don't think it's a problem at all. Let's talk about it."

You know, and so I think a lot of, you know, if going back to the thesis of turning ambiguity into clarity, you know, a lot of this is like we're trying to get the ambiguous stuff out there so that we can make it more clear.

And so I use that as an example because you can be a, you know, a brand new PM, run a brainstorm, run a planning session like that, and you're probably going to get great feedback, right? Like people are probably going to go, "Oh, this is kind of cool. I've never done this before."

Now, to go to the other side of the spectrum, you know, we help a lot of companies that want to remake a whole process. They want to remake like a review system like Catalyst, or they want to remake, you know, their decision kind of like rituals.

And so in that sense, we're usually talking to like a head of product or director of product or VP of product and someone who tends to have a lot more agency over, you know, the way that the team works.

Coda is interesting in that it feels like you have pretty stable processes for planning and reviews. I find most companies just like every six months rethink a lot of these things. I guess that's probably a sign that you found something that's really good and works, and you don't have to redo it.

How much are you radically changing the way you operate versus working in similar ways? Is there like a—how do you think about that percentage-wise?

People are always coming up with new creative ways to kind of like make their teams run better, make decisions go smoother, and we're kind of continuously adopting those. But there's definitely a backbone of the system.

Like the backbone of the system is Catalyst and tag-ups and the concept called Bullpen. And then, you know, there'll be a lot of iteration on top of that. And even those systems went through a lot of iteration.

Like I talked about how the calendar hold got removed and then like individual topics got added. I mean that took us launching like automations and the ability to add things to the calendar in order for that whole process to really work.

So in the years prior to us launching that, you know, we kind of did it very manually. So I think there's still a lot of creativity that I see every day.

So I'll give one quick example. One of our PM leads on core product, this guy Nathan, you know, he basically saw that a lot of decisions had a lot of different stakeholders because like he's in the core product, and now he's leading the core product team.

So he's trying to figure out what guidance do I give to each of these PMs on like who to involve in these decisions because like every one of these with core product feels like they impact everybody.

And so a very simple thing that he did, you know, probably in the last six months was he had a table of all the upcoming decisions, and then at a tag-up, which I can explain if you want, but basically with a small set of stakeholders, he had all the upcoming decisions, and then he let people hit a little reaction and say, "Oh, I want, you know, I don't need to be involved; just notify me of the decision after," or "Have some opinions, but you can keep going," or "No, I really want to be like heavily involved in this decision."

And it was like such a pro move, you know? It was like such a—I've been through a million of these. I don't want to treat every one of them the same because if I do, it's going to slow down the velocity of this whole organization.

And so instead, you know, the majority of those, Shashir or I or Oliver, the head of engineering, will say, "I may have some opinions, but keep going." Like that's kind of like often the default.

And then there are plenty where we say like, "Just notify us of the decision after." And in doing that, Nathan can now give better guidance to the PMs on his team and say like, "Hey, you don't really need to involve like as wide a group as you think, so just like keep going and, you know, check in later."

So I think those type of little iterations are usually based on a really good insight.

Sounds like a dream coming true for a platform team to reduce how many people have to be involved in all your planning and decision-making and that process, which you call it tag-up. Maybe just briefly explain it, and then I want to talk about this handbook you're working on, which is going to, I think, cover a lot of these things.

Tag-up is based on this insight that a lot of work and project work tends to get discussed in one-on-ones, and actually that's like an anti-pattern. It's a pattern you should try to avoid.

So if you're talking to your manager about product work, what's not happening in that moment is your engineering lead and your design lead, they're not hearing that. And so you end up with this like big game of telephone where, you know, you'll have a conversation with your manager in one-on-one, they'll go back and translate to their engineering and design lead.

And of course, like the fidelity of, you know, the game of telephone, something is lost in all of those transmissions. And so the core idea is kind of have a group one-on-one with the key stakeholders.

And so we have this concept of Brain Trust. It's kind of modeled off after Pixar's Brain Trust. And so we'll have a tag-up with a small set of people from a given team, or sometimes we have kind of larger groups, and then they meet with their brain trust, and it's once a week.

And it's really the—it's sort of the same mindset of a one-on-one. It's like their time, so anything that they need to unblock a decision or to like make progress, they should use that time for.

And they often start by like reviewing OKRs and metrics and things like that, but then we generally get into a table of topics. Anyone can add a topic, you know, those topics are upvoted, so people will react, and then like the table will sort itself.

And then we'll say, "Okay, this is clearly the topic on people's mind." And that's like a version of—we call it Dory, which I can talk about, but essentially the kind of principle is you should discuss that project work with the whole group there, right?

Like with the whole triad there, and oftentimes with the salesperson there and with the marketer there and like with everybody else. So I found that that is just a really good practice to try to sort of move a lot of that work out of one-on-ones and into a small group setting.

Awesome! Okay, so you're working on a handbook that's collecting a lot of these rituals. Talk about that, and then when can people maybe look for it?

One of the realizations I had the other day, probably like a month or two ago when we started working on this thing, was someone—I was talking to someone about Catalyst and a couple other concepts, and they're like, "I get it. I'm sold. Let me—I want to implement some of these things. Where do I look?"

And so I found myself sending them a bunch of links to individual templates. So that was kind of like that cued us into the fact that we needed to have like a better kind of core handbook for teams that wanted to adopt some of these rituals and also learn from all the rituals that we have learned from.

And I feel like very fortunate to have partnered with so many customers on. And so what we did was started writing this handbook, and it's going to come out hopefully by the time this recording is done.

And in it, you know, we'll talk about, you know, everything from rituals like Catalyst to decision rituals to a lot of like planning and strategy and roadmaps, that kind of stuff, and trying to pull out the most interesting patterns and also give people a pretty practical view of like how to implement these things.

I think that's what has been lacking sometimes.

Amazing! We'll definitely link to that. Hopefully, it's live by the time this goes up. We'll make it happen. I know also you said Shashir is working on a book that's related and basically rituals of great teams.

And Shashir was on the podcast and talked a lot about some of these other—he talked about Dory, so we don't have to get into that. If people want to learn about Dory, they can watch that episode. It's one of the earliest episodes, actually one of the most popular.

Yeah, I remember that!

Okay, cool! So I have a bunch of random questions now. I'm just going to go in a few different directions. One is you wrote this post that you call "Learn by Making, Not Talking." Is that another principle, by the way? Is that amongst your many principles?

Okay, awesome! So in that post, which we'll link to, you show the story of how you and the YouTube team came up with skippable ads, which I didn't realize was such a controversial—but thinking about it, obviously, like letting people skip ads, I could see why people were not excited about that.

Could you just tell that story and basically it's like the story of how skippable ads on YouTube came about?

Yeah, so I moved over to YouTube shortly after the acquisition. An amazing, like tight-knit team. It definitely felt like the Wild West. We were getting sued by Viacom for a billion dollars when that was a lot of money. No advertiser wanted to talk to us.

It was essentially viewed as like a site of cat videos and dogs on skateboards and things like that. And then the—I guess the other context of the sales team was like very bent, and all they wanted to sell was the homepage.

And for good reason, like that was where you made your money as a salesperson. And so, you know, I had just been sponsored by Shashir to become a PM. It's a longer story that I'll leave out for now; we can go into it.

But, you know, on day one of being a PM, Shashir's like, "Great, you're the new guy. You get the project that nobody else wants," and that's called skippable ads.

And you know, we've got this crazy idea that we can align the incentives of advertisers and viewers and creatives in this like really clever way by putting a skip button on the ad and then charging people for views.

And the latter part we hadn't quite cemented yet, but it was sort of a—it was like part of the core idea. And so the thing I write about in this post is like as a new PM, this feels like a really consequential decision, right?

It's like we've got this like new product idea; nobody really wants it. Like advertisers don't want it; the sales team doesn't want it, and it's like a very unproven thesis.

And so the thing I write about is like these are the types of things that you can debate like months or years, you know? And I was sitting in a one-on-one with this guy named Phil Fary, who's an amazing product leader and was my boss at the time.

And you know, we're trying to figure out what to do and how to handle all the different dynamics, and he just kind of like stops and he's like, "You know what? Just test the extremes. Start the experiment tomorrow. Like then we'll figure it out essentially."

And I think his point was like, "Look, we can debate this forever, so like I would rather us see the upper and lower bounds of like how good this could be or how bad this is going to be like immediately."

And so, you know, we launched a set of experiments. This guy Jamie Karn, who's still there, tiny little skip button, you know, on one experiment, giant skip button that covered the entire player on the other side of the experiment.

And within a few weeks, I think we had developed some conviction, you know, based on some very dire data that we were onto something.

And so the lesson that I took, you know, this is many years ago, and I've seen this proven out hundreds of times since, is you know, stop talking about it and like go make something. Go run an experiment. Go make a prototype. You know, go write a doc. Go make a mock. Just don't talk about it.

And I found that people, you know, also as a leader, people really follow that concept. And I also found that it's like it transcends level. You know, like I'm not talking just to IC PMs; I'm talking to like heads of product and CPOs and CEOs to some degree.

Like, you know, you should always be out there trying to learn by expressing your ideas and putting them out there, and that's much more valuable in many cases than, you know, pontificating about it or having endless, you know, circular discussions on it.

Makes me think a little bit about Twitter, where they spent years just thinking about the edit button or all these different changes. They're so scared. They did so much research, and then now just like they're changing things left and right. Everything's fine. It shows you that you don't have to be so delicate.

Yeah, it's almost never as bad as you think it's going to be.

So, yeah, it's just a question of how much better it can be oftentimes. You mentioned in your early career, we talked about your Alaska guide phase. Something else I saw is that you are on the AdWords approval team. You're basically reviewing ads people submitted to run on AdWords, and that's kind of how you started in tech.

So I guess first of all, is that true? And then second of all, how did you graduate from that phase and become this Chief Product Officer of one of the fastest-growing, most interesting companies in the world?

That was a really memorable time. There was an amazing cohort of people that started in tech. I think there were like two or three hundred of us at that time, and then eventually thousands that started in Sheryl Sandberg's organization.

I guess maybe some quick context: before running ads on google.com at that time, you had to have them manually approved by a human before that was like handled by machine learning and, you know, outsourced to other countries.

And so there was this process where basically an ad would show up on your screen; you would mark it family safe, non-family safe, porn, and then you would, you know, based on that, it would either run or it wouldn't.

And actually, funny enough, some of my most successful friends were terrible at the approval bin. Like they failed the rote task of approving ads; they just like couldn't handle it, and they went on to be like really, really successful.

So after working on ad approvals at that time, I moved to chat support. It was basically like when AdWords was launching chat support. I remember very fondly having two chats, chatting with two advertisers at once.

I moved on to phone support. That was eight hours a day of talking to AdWords customers. Really a total roller coaster ride. It was basically like one minute you would pick up the phone, and it would be someone from a Fortune 100 company trying to spend like millions of dollars on AdWords.

And then like the next minute, you would be on the phone with like a psychic or a taxi driver that was like warring with their compatriots over some really specific keyword.

I think there were kind of like two lessons that I would draw from this. One is I had a mentor at the time, and his advice when I was starting my career was basically like you have to get customer-facing from the very beginning because you're going to end up serving a customer your whole career.

Like even when you're the CEO of a company, you're going to be serving a customer, so you better get like really good at being in any customer scenario and being able to handle it, you know?

And so I think that turned out to be insanely good advice, and if I think about, you know, something that a piece of advice that I give out to people who are earlier in their career, I've definitely recycled that advice.

I think the other thing that I took away from that experience was it's just a great lesson in when people don't actually care about your product. So in AdWords' case, people did not care about AdWords.

Like you were like the expert on it, and you're trying to tell them about ad groups and like how this ad format works and blah, and like most of the time, people are like, "Dude, I'm a small business owner. I'm trying to like get people to come to my auto mechanic store," or "I'm trying to get people to come to like my taxi service," or whatever it was.

I don't care, you know? And so like your product had to kind of get out of the way and really just drive impact for the customer. You know, it was like they just want more phone calls or they want more people in the store.

So those are, I think, two kind of like pieces that I think about from those days still. And then I worked in a variety of other roles. I worked in a role called Product Specialist, which is an awesome role back when there were like 15 product specialists at Google.

And that was, for me, that was an amazing time because I had—I was getting to sit on like seven or eight different core teams, core product teams. And in my observation, most people these days, most PMs don't get to sit on other people's core teams.

And so I kind of had these like three or four years of just, you know, I kind of call it like a master class in PM because I was getting to watch like what was working for some PMs and what wasn't working for other PMs and just kind of like taking notes behind the scenes.

So that was a really influential role, and then, yeah, went on to various PM roles at Google and YouTube.

Coming back to noticing, it comes up again and again in our chat. This is so interesting because it feels like you basically came from the mailroom of tech to the top of the product field, and so I think there's a lot of inspiration people can take from this journey.

One quick question is how long was that journey from not being a PM, like from, I guess, being at a tech company to getting a first PM role, just to give people a sense?

Let's see. I probably worked for at least four or five years before being able to move to PM, and that was, I think that was like a slightly harrowing journey because at the time, you had to have a computer science degree at Google, right?

Cool! So I think that's one takeaway too is give it time. It's not going to happen—there's a lot of people that are just like, "I need to become a PM immediately."

Totally! And I think that's a good example of like it's not going to happen overnight.

Coming back to your two lessons, I think they're really interesting, and I'm curious if there's anything else that comes to mind of what you found was essential to you succeeding in this path.

So the first lesson you shared is being customer-facing, and in this case, like being in retail as customer-facing is your advice like get in a tech company and work on something customers use, or is even like working at Starbucks or, you know, a big grommet, does that count?

Yeah, I mean, I think maybe to relate it to what you just said, if I were to give advice to someone who really, you know, aspires to be a PM or trying to get into PM, like I think in many cases, if you're in a customer-facing role, you are the expert on the customer, and that is like really, really valuable in tech organizations.

And oftentimes, it's kind of undervalued. And so I think people who are who want to move into PM roles who are sort of not currently in PM roles can often leverage that experience and that knowledge of the customer in ways that are, you know, pretty profound for the organization, pretty insightful for the organization if they really are creative about it.

And then I think the other thing is regardless of like where you are in the organization, you're always serving a customer. You can't just like talk to one big enterprise customer, and you can't just talk to the smallest customer.

You kind of have to like have a diverse and continuous stream of customer interaction in order to have good intuitions about what to do next. And you know, your engineers aren't going to really trust you unless you have good intuitions about like where the customer is headed and what they want and stuff like that.

And so the stakes, I think, are pretty high, and it's, you know, the good news is it's like easier than ever with all these tools to really get into, you know, the mindset of a customer.

Lesson touches on something a previous guest talked about, Paige Castello, where she was like the often the youngest person in the room and built a lot of respect, and people really trusted her over time.

And her lesson was "Know Thy Customer." If you know the most about what they need and you can show like, "Here's what I've heard this again and again," people just like, "Oh, Lane, tell us more," and they bring you into conversation because you're providing value. You're not just there sharing opinions. Everyone's got opinions.

I mean, that's basically how both me and I had a friend named Bill Frel who transitioned into PM at the same time, and that's essentially how we got, you know, the try at being a PM inside of Google is like we knew the customer really, really well, and we were often in conversations, you know, sort of bridging the gap from here's what the customer thinks to, you know, here's what I think they're really saying or here's what I think we should build based on, you know, what they said.

The other thing I wanted to mention, you talked about the product and how a lot of customers don't care about the product; they just care about just any of this thing done.

Reminds me at Airbnb, we hired this guy Chip Connelly, who was a hotelier. He created the Ri Hotel chain and just like his steep in hospitality, and he came to Airbnb and started doing this worldwide tour talking to hosts, and he's just like, "Guys, when you talk about product, like you're like telling hosts, 'Hey, the product's going to be updated. We're going to launch all these features.' Like they don't—like they think their home is the product of Airbnb. They don't understand what you're talking about when you're talking about the online experience in the website."

Like that—that's the last thing they think about. It's the experience of someone traveling on Airbnb and staying in their home.

So I think it's a really good reminder of like most people don't care about the product; they just have a problem, and you just happen to be this website that'll help them solve it.

You know, I think most people can be like way more concise with their communication. Like even internally, people don't care. You know, like you should assume—you should assume that people don't care, or, you know, if you're talking to customers, writing a blog post for customers, like you should assume that they don't care.

When you start with that assumption, you really force yourself to be a little bit sharper in your, you know, your communication.

So, and one final question before we get to our very exciting lightning round. I heard a story that at Coda, there's this moment called Tim Ferriss Day that drove a lot of traffic. Can you share that story? Does that ring a bell?

Sure! Yeah, there's lots of memorable days at Coda. One of them was Tim Ferriss Day. So I guess maybe for context, we had built this kind of like publisher, very nent publisher motion where we were going out and helping people, you know, publish their rituals, and this is what you see in the gallery—the Coda gallery.

And, you know, a lot of what we talked about today. But we had this one person on that team, this guy Al Chen, Tim Ferriss fan, and also I think had been really tenacious with like the people around Tim Ferriss.

And basically finally got an end to him and like figured out a really neat way to implement one of his rituals in Coda. And so none of us really knew this, but like this is all happening.

And anyway, we wake up one morning, and traffic is like just like spiking through the roof. Signups are spiking. No one knows what's going on. Like I'm convinced this is all spam. I'm like, "Something's wrong with our data," or like, you know, something's going haywire.

At the time, we were also in the China Basin office, and the fire alarm went off. And so like now we're like outside on our laptops. We were like in a war room trying to figure out what was happening, and now we're outside trying to figure out what's going on.

So anyway, to make a long story short, data scientists investigate, and you know, we eventually figure out that we had been featured in Tim Ferriss' email newsletter.

And you know, I think early on you hear this lesson or this adage of like first-time founder build a great product, second-time founder build great distribution. I think that was like one of those early big cues to think about, you know, the importance of content distribution and the importance of these publishing flywheels.

And it definitely made us double down. We're like, "Okay, if we can do this with Tim Ferriss, like what, you know, what's next?" And we definitely spent a few months trying to reach that, you know, that high-water mark that was set that day in traffic and sign-ups.

So it was a fun, memorable day, and people for like the subsequent one or two years, you know, would refer to it as Tim Ferriss Day.

So funny! I bet Tim Ferriss had no idea what he did.

No idea! And I'm hoping you have a Lenny's podcast day once this comes out. Everyone's going to be freaking out, "What is going on here?"

Is there anything else you wanted to share before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

Maybe we're talking really briefly about two-way write-ups?

Yeah, let's do it! I had that in my notes, but I skipped it, so I'm glad you mentioned it.

Cool! Yeah, I think—I mean, this is a concept that I wrote a bunch about, and I often now get asked about. And I guess the maybe the historical view of this, I got really obsessed with the history of like how work gets discussed and decided upon and kind of broke it down into like three phases.

And so the first phase was the 1980s. We had PowerPoint, you know? It was like this amazing tool. You could like manipulate shapes on a screen, and we were all like using fancy clip art, and it was really fun.

But we've all had the experience of

No more PowerPoint at Amazon, and what that did was kind of start in earnest their six-pager ritual. You can read all about this in the book *Working Backwards*, which is a really good book by Colin Brier.

So that started, I think, what was kind of like what I'll call the one-way write-up phase. This is where you're writing down your ideas and expressing them clearly in prose, so you have to be really clear. That was a big step up from always presenting work and deciding on work by presentations.

Then, kind of the thesis is that we're like in the midst of a new phase, which is essentially two-way write-ups. That's where it's more conversational, and feedback and discussion are actually part of the content itself.

So that's kind of like the broader historical arc. But if you think about it, PMs and product people are always at the brunt; they sort of feel this the most because they're the ones that are driving decisions and really the ones that are driving discussions oftentimes in companies.

I think the problem with one-way write-ups, I felt very deeply at Google and YouTube. Just to name a few, the first issue is you would always be trying to figure out who has read your write-up. I have many memories of sending a write-up out at 11:30 p.m. and then waiting patiently for the avatar of the SVP in my area to show up. That was a sign that they had read it, which is totally insane if you think about that behavior.

The second issue is that you end up having a lot of the discussion in the comments itself. This is a space that's really built for grammar and spell-checking, and you're having these really meaningful discussions in this kind of 100-pixel right margin. Part of that, I think, is that there are all these questions being raised, and you have no idea what the most important question is.

So if you're facilitating those discussions in one-way write-ups, you're often going through the comments in the 20 minutes before that session, trying to figure out which one of these you want to address.

Another behavior you often see in one-way write-ups is a mega comment thread on the title of the document. People will say things like, "I don't think we should do this," and you'll get into a 30-comment thread on the title because that's the best place to put your overall thoughts. I saw this pattern all the time.

If you live that life, I think the world of two-way write-ups, and the way that I think a lot of our customers are doing it, is quite a bit better. You can do this on other tools besides Koda too.

The alternative to one-way write-ups is having a "done reading" button at the end of a write-up. Now you can say, "Oh, these are all the people that have read this." I think you see a pattern in some of our customers where, if it's a particularly long write-up, you'll have three "done reading" buttons so you can kind of see where everyone has gotten to.

The second thing is making sure that you're actually addressing the most important question. Instead of pulling questions out of the comments and trying to figure out which one to address, just put those in a table and let people upload those. That's what we call "Dory."

Then, I think probably the most valuable is sentiment or pulse, which is how do you feel overall about this particular proposal? If you think about the contrast between a comment thread on the title and seeing a list of all the sentiment—how everybody feels about this proposal—being inclusive to the entire audience is just wildly different.

In my particular experience, I'll give you one example. I wrote this proposal a couple of years ago, and I thought it was going to sail through with no problem. I thought I was going to get four out of five and five out of five smiley faces from everybody—that's sort of how the sentiment table works.

One of the lead designers basically said one smiley face: "We shouldn't do this." I was like, "Oh man, this particular person is not really vocal in meetings," so I would not have heard that feedback. It was very unlikely I would have heard that feedback unless they had a sentiment table—a place to add that.

So I think the punchline on all of this is I really authentically believe that this is where we're headed. I hope that a lot of PMs and product teams adopt this in general. I'm glad that we touched on it, and there's a template or an explanation of this that you wrote up that we'll link to.

Great! Is there anything else that you think we should touch on that we haven't?

Yeah, I think one thing we've discussed before is just about strategy and planning. It may be useful to touch on a couple of insights there. I think there are two insights in the strategy and planning thing, and this is again in the handbook that we're writing.

The first insight I see a lot is this idea that OKRs are not actually strategy. The way that we plan and the way that our customers plan, the key point is it's critical to disconnect strategy discussions from OKR discussions. It sounds really obvious, but I think it's a very common mistake.

A really simple question to ask yourself is: Do we have a separate strategy process or strategy ritual that is distinct from OKR setting, metric setting, and goal setting? I have found that you can pick whatever strategy framework works for you, but I do think it's quite important to pull those two things apart.

The other rule we live by on the planning side is what we call the 10% planning rule. This essentially ensures that you're not planning for more than 10% of a given time period for that execution period.

This is a really easy mistake to make. This is a hard-fought rule because we've made that mistake before. You end up getting bogged down in planning or saying, "Planning felt rushed, so we need to make it three weeks instead of one week," or whatever.

The byproduct of that over time is that you end up planning way too much. Oftentimes, you really don't know what's ahead until you've launched or learned something. So I think that's a pretty good rule to follow.

I love that rule! I found the same heuristic: 10%. If you're planning for a week, plan for half a day. If you're planning for a month, maybe plan for three days.

With that, we reached our very exciting lightning round! Are you ready?

I'm ready!

What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

One that comes to mind is *Turning the Flywheel*. It's a little manuscript book Jim Collins wrote. It's a very succinct and fast read about how flywheels work.

We talked about *Storyworthy*; I recommend that book a lot. *Good Strategy, Bad Strategy*—I love that book. It's a very simple framework that I've reused a bunch.

Maybe outside of tech, *Waking Up* is a book by Sam Harris on mindfulness that I really like. An old one that I really like is *The Inner Game of Tennis* by Timothy Gallwey, which is a classic.

Amazing! On *Good Strategy, Bad Strategy*, I'm working on getting Richard Rumelt on the podcast. I've talked with his agent, and they seem to be excited, so hopefully that actually happens.

You inspired me to try to get the *Storyworthy* guy on too!

Yeah, what a cast of characters we're going to get on here!

Next question: What is a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoy?

It's a little hard with three kids and a job these days to watch a lot of TV. I would say I really enjoyed *The Last Dance*. I love any sports documentary.

Have you seen *Underrated*, Steph Curry's new documentary?

No, I haven't! I gotta watch that.

It's really good. I've been rewatching *Arrested Development*. That's also just a timeless classic.

I love that! Michael Cera is in the Barbie movie—not to give any spoilers, but that was a funny surprise.

Next question: What is a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates?

There are two I really like. One is, "Teach me something that I don't already know." I think it's an awesome way of seeing if someone's going to lean in and really figure out what you don't know. How passionate they are about pitching what they do know is really fun.

Shashir and I have been asking a version of the teleporter question and evolving it for many years now, so I like that question quite a bit.

Shashir shared that question in his episode, and we make TikTok clips out of some of these conversations. That clip just went crazy; people love it! It's the most viewed clip, I think, on TikTok—just asking what you would answer to that question.

So we'll try to link to it in the show notes if you want to watch just that one interview question. I think you maybe gave it away, so maybe that's why you're evolving it.

Yeah, I know! If we screen you, I also wrote a post about my favorite reference check question, which I think is...

I would love to learn other people's favorite reference check questions!

References check? Oh man, that's its own podcast! I'd love to do a podcast just on that. That is such an important skill.

The first question you mentioned—asking people to teach you something—I heard the best version of that in a previous episode where Maya, the head of product for Spotify Podcasts, asks, "What would your podcast be if you were to start a podcast?"

I like that!

Yeah, so feel free to steal it!

I do! I sometimes do a version of making them explain it two different ways. I make the candidate explain it two different ways, saying, "Okay, now you have to explain that to your grandparent."

Then, you just told me about sewing or some hobby of yours—now sell it in its most technical form to someone who knows everything about this particular topic. It's kind of fun to see the range that people can operate in.

Awesome! What is a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you really love, either digital or physical? Anything that comes to mind?

A few! I'm becoming a real sleep nerd, so those eye masks that sort of cup around your eyes—I love those.

In the tech world, like ChatGPT, there's a product I got really obsessed with during the pandemic called Swing Vision. It basically cuts up your match into different segments, like all your forehands or all the longest rallies. It uses AI to do that.

There's a corresponding meditation app to the book *Waking Up* that I really like. That one's a very good one.

You live not so far from each other, so we gotta play some tennis, and I can check out this very cool product!

Yeah, all right, you're on! That'll be our sequel—just our game.

Next question: What is a favorite life motto that you either repeat to yourself often or like to share with people around you, maybe even your kids?

I don't know if it's a motto as much as it's just a way of being. Essentially, the present moment is all that we have. Realizing that our attention is often on the past or the future, in many ways, the present is where it should be always.

I think about that a lot. More broadly, I had a mentor who roughly said a version of "make things happen." I really try to apply that to anything I do—whether that's work, life, or sports. I try to be the person who creates momentum and positive change and progress. I think that's a good motto to live by.

Beautiful! What is the most valuable lesson that your mom or dad taught you?

My mom's a psychologist and a professional counselor, so certainly active listening. The tech version of that, or the modern version, is steel-manning someone's argument—being able to repeat back to someone what they said in a better, clearer form.

She's an amazing woman and taught me a lot about listening.

Final question: You were a guide in Alaska helping people climb. If someone were to pursue climbing, is there a tip or a lesson or something that you think people should know to get better at this or to know before they go down this route?

There's kind of a saying: "The safest climber is the one who knows when to come down." Essentially, there are many times you have to put your ego in check and come off a mountain or come out of a climb because it's not as safe as you thought it was.

I think that's one. The other is, it's probably not a one-way door. In many ways, you can do climbing and some of these outdoor pursuits on the side, or you can always come back from them. So it's maybe not as big of a choice as some people think it is.

Lane, I said at the top of this episode that Koda has one of the most thoughtful product teams out there, and I think it'll be clear to people after listening to this why that's the case and where it trickles down from. Thank you so much for being here!

Two final questions: Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and ask you any other questions? And how can listeners be useful to you?

I'm on LinkedIn and Twitter, and I have a Substack. We'll be releasing that handbook for product teams, which I will probably post on Substack.

In terms of being useful to me, give Koda a try! Give us feedback. I love hearing from product people all over. It's one of the bright spots in my day to hear all the creative rituals that come from this community you've created—a legendary community of people. They always give very thoughtful feedback, so I'm very open to all of that.

Thanks for having me!

Awesome, Lane! Thank you again so much for being here.

Thanks! Bye everyone!

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