Coda on Product Cadence

I. Session Takeaways

Date: March 2024

Session Overview

The session covered four topics (outlined below). Shishir's full deck can be found here.

1. Great People: Frameworks for evaluate people
2. Great Decisions: Creating a great decision making culture
3. Great Culture: Creating golden rituals to drive culture
4. Designing an Operating System: Systems for maintaining speed as a team

A. Great People: PHSE

• Shishir measures individual performance using the PHSE (Problem, Solution, How, Execution) framework
  • Problem: The defined problem space / or product area
  • Solution: The proposed solution to solve the problem
  • How: The plan for how the solution gets implemented
  • Execution: The actual work getting done 
• The PHSE framework looks at an employee's ability to operate at each of these levels. For example:
  • Junior PM: The problem, solution, and how will be defined. They are responsible for executing
  • Next level up: Only the problem and solution are defined. They must figure out the how and also execute
  • Next level up: Only the problem is defined. They must figure everything else out
  • Next level up: Nothing is defined for them. They are handed a space and must figure out PSHE
• Shishir encourages you to do the evaluation leveraging peer feedback vs. just direct manager for PHSE

Shishir on PHSE

“So you're a junior PM, you come in, we hand you a problem, we hand you a solution, we hand you a how. We say, talk to this person, hold this meeting, write this document, whatever that might be.

Your job is just executing. Just follow those instructions.  At some point we hand you a problem, we hand you a solution, it's your job to figure out the how. You gotta figure out what the milestones are, figure out how to run the team, figure out what the cadence is, figure out what the rituals are. At some point, we hand you a problem and you've got to come up with a creative solution to the problem.

And at the top of this pyramid, we hand you a space and you tell us the problems. You go off and figure out that, you know, I know you told me to work on retention, but I decided activation is actually the issue. Or I know you told me to work on quality, but I actually think our problem is on our marketing team."

Or whatever it might be, it's your job to figure out what the problems are. And that's how we stack PMs.” 

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• PHSE can be applied across multiple disciplines and is a great predictor of future performance. A sales rep may be attaining 150% of quota but at the end of the day they might not be the best sales rep on your team as their metrics may be influenced by their territory, outlier deals etc. and therefore inconsistent. PHSE is objective.

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Shishir on applying PHSE to sales

“I asked if the rep with the highest quota attainment was their best rep. And they all snickered and said, no, that's silly. They just got handed the easy region, they got handed the easy customer, the easy product. Like, that's not the best person.

I said, okay, so who's the best person? They said, well, obviously Susie's the best person. Everybody knows Susie's the best person. Like, oh, really, why? Well, Susie can sell anything. She can sell a product that works, a product that doesn't work, a segment that's growing, a segment that's shrinking. Big company, small company, whatever it is, Susie figures out the space, understands the problems, finds solutions to them, designs a system for implementing those solutions, and then delivers with great execution, and that's the best salesperson.” 

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PHSE and Levels

• Shishir has a love-hate relationship with levels. At Google, level correlated with two attributes: 1) number of grants and 2) age. He tried to avoid levels at Coda for as long as possible. He introduced levels ~2 years ago when they had 250-300 people. At Coda, everyone starts at level 2 and nobody gets to level 5.
• They use the PHSE framework to calibrate at hiring, for performance reviews, and within the levels process

Shishir’s tactic for rewarding great work, not management

• In most companies, the reward for great work is management. One of the main reasons for this is managers do not want their direct reports to get paid more than them. As a result, great ICs that do not want to become part of management do not get rewarded
• At Coda, they do not let managers see their reports’ compensation. Instead, Coda manages compensation with a compensation committee. This means that great ICs can be paid more than their manager, and that is OK. This rewards great work as opposed to management.

Shishir on compensation tactics to reward great people, not managers

“If you want to not have management be the reward for employees, which in most companies, it is. The reason this is a hot topic isn't because people really want to be managers, because they love managing. It's because they want to be managed a team so they get paid more. I have one important thing that I would do. Don't let managers see their employees compensation…The primary reason I do it that way, is you want inversions. You regularly want people that are paid more than their bosses. If you want a company where being an IC isn't seen as a dead end.”

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B. Great Decisions: Eigenquestions

• The eigenquestion is the question where, if answered, it likely answers the subsequent questions as well. Great framing starts by searching for the most discriminating question of a set — the eigenquestion. At Coda, the team always looks to find the “eigenquestion” when answering business problems. 

Example: Modern Family and the Eigenquestion

At Youtube they were facing an issue that the most common search on the platform was for “Modern Family”, but the problem was Youtube didn’t have any Modern Family content. It was only hosted on ABC. The team constantly debated whether to 1) link to the ABC hosting page (best customer experience) or 2) maintain the status quo and try to do a deal with ABC on Youtube (best for the business). They could never come to an answer. This is when Shishir reframed the discussion around the eigenquestion. He asked the team “in 10 years will the video market prioritize consistent customer experience or comprehensive customer experience?” In about one hour, they were able to agree that the market would center around consistent experience and in a world with consistent experience they would not link out to ABC. This also led to a bunch of other experience changes to Youtube where they optimized for consistency over comprehensiveness.

As an example, Apple initially built out the Youtube app on iPhone. Over time, they didn’t keep up with feature growth so Youtube decided to take the product back in house despite losing hundreds of millions of installs. This was because they prioritized consistent experience over comprehensive experience.

Shishir on the “Modern Family” problem

'We've had this discussion so many times, everybody has already decided what they think.  I'm just gonna have people come and yell at each other. And so we started this off site and I said, okay, we're going to have a different topic. We're going to talk about, in 10 years, will the online video market be more about consistency or more about comprehensiveness? And that, it turned out, we could have a pretty genuine debate on. And very quickly, we converged.

About an hour, we came to the conclusion that the online video market would be about consistency, not about comprehensiveness. Which, by the way, 16 years later  turned out to be true. If you look at the online video market today, enormous market, there is no one property that owns all online video. And so we decided the online video market will be on consistency, not comprehensiveness. And therefore, we're not going to link up to Modern Family"

Case study: Shishir’s prompt to test for ability to come up with eigenquestions

‍The below example is an interview question Shishir asks candidates to test for their ability to frame problems. It was originally published on Coda at this link.

The question starts as follows:

A group of scientists have invented a teleportation device. They have come to you and asked for your assistance in bringing it to market. What do you do?

At this point, most candidates will go into question asking mode. They will generally start rattling off questions one after the other, often dozens of them. This is considered good ー being inquisitive and creative is a key skill that I look for. They'll ask how big the device is, does it need a sender and a receiver, how fast is it to operate, what does it cost, etc. I'll generally humor this for some time, and then at some point, I'll add a twist:

It turns out these scientists are introverts and they are not enjoying all your questions. They have decided that they will only answer two questions, and from that, they expect you to give a clear go-to-market plan. What two questions would you like to ask?

Now we're in eigenquestion mode. There are many good ways to handle this twist. At this point, the candidate generally has a list of 10+ questions that they have asked and the job is to prioritize among them to find the two most discerning questions. Of course there's no "right answer", but I find this to be a useful exercise in exploring eigenquestions. Here is one example of an answer, in our standard diagraming colors:

This candidate focused on two questions: How safe is the device (safe enough for humans vs not), and where the primary cost is (is it in operating the device or purchasing them). With only this info, they were able to describe four very different go-to-market paths:

• If the device is safe enough for humans, but is more expensive to deploy than operate, then it should probably be stationed at a fixed set of locations and run much like an airport system.
• If it's similarly safe, and is cheap to deploy but expensive to operate, then we should enable everyone to have a device like this in their homes, workplaces, etc and then just use them when they find the use case valuable enough. In this way, it might be more similar to "fax machines."
• On the other hand, if the device is not safe enough for humans, but is still cheap to deploy, then we probably shift this plan and think of it a bit more like an upgrade to fax machines to be able to transmit 3D objects.
• And finally, if it's not safe for humans, and expensive to deploy, then perhaps we are building a freight network.

This is just one example question, but an illustrative one for the concept of eigenquestions.

C. Great Culture

• Every company builds two products. One product for customers and one product for employees. The product for employees is often called culture. Great culture comes from establishing great rituals at your company.
• Bing Gordan, partner at KPCB, coined the term golden rituals. Golden rituals have three criteria: 1) they are named, 2) every employee knows them by the first Friday, and 3) they are templated. Figure out what these rituals are and invest in them

Case Study: Coda’s Golden Ritual – Two-way writeups

Traditional Decision Memos

• Starts with a framed idea or goal in mind. Includes context and recommendation for decision
• Everyone reads the document and comments and/or discusses the document to make a decision
• Often times, the most important questions and discussions happen in comment boxes in Google Docs
• There is no clear driver to a decision. You often have to circle back to get everyone’s feedback/decision
• In Coda’s experience, this does not optimize for discussing the right questions or making the right decision

Two-way writeup

• Coda created the concept of two-way write ups to make a decision. Like decision memos, these start with a framed idea or goal and includes context and a recommendation There are three main differences:

1) Coda includes “done reading” toggles in documents. This is important because in existing documents you don’t know exactly who has read the proposal. This encourages participants to read the document and holds them accountable.

2) Coda asks everyone for their “pulse” in documents. This is a section in the document where everyone adds their view on the decision. The key part of pulse is Coda hides all feedback until after everyone is done inputting their feedback. This reduces groupthink and encourages broad participation.

3) Coda optimizes for discussing the right questions by including “Dory” table in documents. In a Dory table, participants write down their questions. The questions are voted on and the top questions are discussed. This helps the team discuss the right questions and not necessarily the questions the senior sponsor wants to answer.

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D. Designing an Operating System

• Every company has three meeting types: 1) Cadence meetings, 2) Catalyst meetings, and 3) Context meetings

• In Shishir’s view, the most common mistake companies make is mixing cadence meetings and catalyst
  • He argues most companies push decision making into cadence meetings (e.g., accountability meetings)
  • This is suboptimal because the group needed for a decision rarely overlaps with the recurring group
  • Instead, design systems or rituals to encourage decision making to happen in catalyst meetings where the right group is assembled to discuss a specific topic intensely. This results in better decisions and lets cadence meetings focus on speed and accountability

Case Study: How Coda designed a system to make decisions in catalyst versus cadence meetings
‍Coda uses a daily ritual called “Coda Catalyst” to encourage decision making in catalyst meetings. Below is how it works:

• Every week, three 1-hour calendar slots are held for everyone on the team (Mon, Tues, Thurs from 1-2pm PST)
• Anyone at the company can sign up for a Catalyst slot in a central doc
• As part of that process, you indicate who you need for that topic, divided into their core roles
• The day before the Catalyst, Coda runs an automation to replace the one-hour hold with unique invites for topics
• This pushes decisions into catalyst meetings and ensures the right group of people is in the discussion
• This increases the number of decision Coda makes weekly and keeps recurring meetings focused on cadence