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

27:05And really what we're trying to do is kind of take a 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 toward a broader cathedral as opposed to Lang Bricks. Such a beautiful metaphor reminds me of this other quote I just looked up while you're 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. Classic. That is right. Antoine de Saint -Expiori, expiori.

27:46Okay. Something I was curious about as you're 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've 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 to define these things? Five two things. One is reading really broadly. So I think not just reading kind of like PM style literature. Like I said, I think tend to get a lot of inspiration from outside of tech. I think that's one thing.

28:20I think the other thing is, 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 inspiration up They 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 to you sports Storytelling you know go go look at Some of the best story tellers in the world and they're actually out there on a stage telling stories There's a book called story worthy that I was just gonna mention that that book is so good somebody mentioned this on the podcast And I was I read it's like the most useful practical book for how to tell their stories It's so good.

29:23It's so the inside is amazing the the inside 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 plugs from Matthew Day. The other thing that stuck with me also from that same, and we're just going all kinds of tangents.

30:02From that same insight is, and I watch movies completely differently now, where basically the characters you need at the beginning of the story, they're gonna be completely opposite at the end of the story, because of this transformation that takes place. So I'm watching movies in my wife, and I'm like, okay, she's very shy right now. She's gonna be very extroverted by the end of the movie. Or they love each other, or they're gonna have a lot of problems. And yeah. So interesting. Oh, that's such a good idea. Okay, I'm gonna get this guy on, hopefully. And he's like the moth, He's like a mouth champion basically.

30:30Yeah, I mean, that's like what I would say is like, is a maybe a principal version of this. You know, the way, the way that you learn, or the way that everyone and 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 mouth, story slam, you see some like really good stories. Like if you're watching 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 early in your career.

31:18The 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. Yeah, this podcast is an amazing resource. Thanks, man. You've done something very special. 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 OSHIT moment. I don't know if it's related to which is shared of just giving us people a sense of whether they're making progress in their career. Yeah, talk about that.

31:49Sure. 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 shit, you know, I shouldn't be here. I'm under qualified to be here. Those are the moments you should be seeking out, right? Like those are the moments that stretch you and give you sort of like a new foundation. 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?

32:34And 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 ocean moments have you had in the last like six months, year, two years? And what are they? And like, I think if 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 under qualified to be there, then it may be worth kind of like digging into. 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.

33:10I 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 of back to the cave you fear contains the treasure you seek. Nice. That reminds me of have you read the book The Opsicle as 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.

33:55And he has 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 for us reading. It's so hard. It's so hard to do hard things, man. I'm going to cut that out. 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?

34:28I know you have this really interesting process. Yeah. I mean, in general, I'm a big believer in, you know, good designs and good product starts with noticing and 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, oh, you know, end up kind of like just probing and asking a lot of questions. And then in many cases, you know, nowadays with Koda, we're building new rituals alongside people.

35:13So, someone has a creative idea about how to implement something and 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 the whole process. And then of course, she shares writing a book called Richels of Great Teams. So we've been kind of cataloging. We've been hosting a bunch of Richels dinners where we basically get people together for a dinner and we usually have three or four presenters at those dinners.

35:54And it's just a great chance to learn and think about how the engine runs and a lot of these companies. What are some rituals that you've learned from these dinners and these, and as research you've done that have really stuck with you? There are so many hits that get hard to choose. Maybe I'll choose two that are top of mine. One is Darmesh Shah 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 someone gives you feedback and you're either like underinterpreted or overinterpreted and as an organization, I think the core principle here is like you want to be calibrated on how much to pay attention to a bit of feedback.

36:47And so he outlines four flash tags. He presented this in a dinner, one of our dinners. And I absolutely love the phrasing of these as like someone who's given a lot of feedback on product stuff in their career. So the range is from, I think it's FY suggestion, recommendation plea. So FY is basically like, I had a thought, 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 gonna die on? And FYI is like, you know, there's no hill in sight. Suggestion is like, there's a hill, I'm not gonna die on it. Like, you know, this is what I would do if I were you, like you can take it or leave it.

37:33Recommendation is like, I'm climbing the hill, I'm not gonna die here, but like, I've thought about this a lot. So like, don't ignore this, you know? And then the fourth one, please, is hopefully rarely used in the organization. It's like, I don't like Dianne on Hills. That's not what we do here. But this is a pretty good candidate for it. You should really trust me. And so we have ended up using that. We 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 a hundred pieces of feedback and there's like one plea.

38:12Okay, let's spend our time on that, you know, or there's a whole bunch of FIs. I think we're fine. Let's keep going. No worries. That's amazing. It's interesting. None of them are just do it this way. I imagine that's very intentional. Yeah, I think it's, I mean, it's honestly, it's a sign of a, in our match's case, I don't know him super well, but like it's a sign of a really experienced leader to know that scale. But every time I look at the scale and I'm sort of weighing where I am between suggestion and recommendation, I have to kind of like giggle to myself. And how do you actually use it?

38:47In the feedback you like put a hashtag plea kind of thing? The way it's used in code docs in the way I think other companies have made it a ritual is like you'll have a feedback table and you know you'll write your feedback And then there'll be just be a little select list and you can select between those four and Usually people 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 it's 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, these are 100 pieces of feedback and you're going like, oh man, we gotta address all this feedback.

39:39Whereas, 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 a FYI? Oh, I've definitely heard that in many meetings. Like, is, are you making a recommendation or are you making a plea? Amazing. 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 gonna be like, take it really seriously and the team's gonna rush back and be like, oh exactly.

40:14Told us to change this thing. I imagine how to just make it clear. No, you don't need to actually change this. Just my thoughts. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Awesome. This episode is brought to you by Azra, the leading full body cancer screening company. I actually used Ezra earlier this year, unrelated to this podcast, completely on my own dime, because my wife did one and loved it, and I was super curious to see if there's anything that I should be paying attention to in my body as I get older. The way it works is, you book an appointment, you come in, you put on some very cool silky pajamas that they give you that you get to keep afterwards, you go into an MRI machine for 30 to 45 minutes, and then about a week later you get this detailed report sharing with a found in your body.

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41:44Ezra scans for cancer and 500 other conditions in 13 organs using a full body MRI powered by AI and just launched the world's only 30 minute full body scan which is also their most affordable. Their scans are non -invasive and radiation -free and Ezra is offering listeners 150 dollars off their first scan with code Lenny150. Book your scan at Ezra .com slash Lenny at easyRA .com slash Lenny. Any other rituals that that stand 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 Catalysts.

42:27And 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 most review forums or product reviews or decision forums, is that they generally suffer from two problems that are kind of hard to spot, unless you've sat through hundreds of them. The first is they have standing attendees, and the second is they're normally single threaded, meaning they're normally one topic at a time. So maybe I'll talk about both of those because I think they're not exactly intuitive.

43:09So when you think about what happens in a standing set of attendees. You either have the situation where you have like too many people in the meeting or you have like not enough people in the meeting and both of those can cause problems, right? So like if you've ever been in a meeting, I certainly have where it's like, hey, do we have the salesperson who like knows most about this? Or do we have the engineer who's actually implementing this? Here, oh great, they're not here. They're not like a part of the standing set of attendees. You either like have to reschedule the meeting or worse, you just do the discussion without the person who's most knowledgeable, which seems crazy and retrospective.

43:50The second problem is single threaded, so one topic at a time. If you think about if a product development process is somewhat of a chaotic assembly line for a second, your review or your decision forum ends up being a big time bottleneck in many cases. And obviously, you want to be in a situation where product people have a lot of autonomy and they can make most of the decisions themselves and a big believer and decentralized leadership and all of that. But there are things that cut across the company that need to get reviewed by a broader set of stakeholders. And so what happens when those things are single threaded is either the meeting is really long.

44:36So it's a three hour review meeting once a 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 it, 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 like throughput of your review meeting is really slow. So we built catalysts to really solve those two problems. And so the way it works is it's essentially 3 1 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.

45:26It's a very transparent system So like a salesperson can say oh, I'm interested in this product development. Yeah, I'll 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 and like one doc and what happens is the day before That hold that's on calendar gets removed and then you have specific topics that get added so there may be like three topics going all at the same time because they don't have overlapping attendees and And the impact of this, I think, if you really watch it in progress is huge.

46:10Like it's, 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 a clear set of drivers and roles in these meetings. So that means that we can review work much, much faster with the right people. and ideally that results in more value to our customers, more things getting shipped, just a higher velocity organization. So that's one that we get asked about a lot. And actually a couple weeks ago, we spent a while kind of remaking the template for that one. I love that. Richel, 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.

46:52If folks want to try this out and you link to actual templates, people can actually use it there. Companies. When someone's listening to this and they're like, Oh wow, this is extremely cool. How easy is it to 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 -in, and play at a lot of companies? Yeah, I think it depends a lot on what your role in the company is. If you're maybe to say the extremes for a second, if you're like a brand new PM to an organization, you probably shouldn't go try to remake the whole review, product review cycle that like the head of product is really passionate about and it's like crafted.

47:34But you know, you can probably take a decision template or some interesting ritual that has facilitated a team in the past and use it with your team. Another one of my favorite series, $100 boating, 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 as often times it's like, okay, maybe I'll describe the ritual real quick. So the ritual was essentially, you can take any set of problems or solutions or themes or whatever you wanna get people's input on and you put those in into a table and then people can basically vote with their dollars and usually you allocate $100.

48:20And so people will go through and say, I wanna 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, you 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, So if going back to the thesis of turning ambiguity in clarity, a lot of this is like we're trying to get the ambiguous stuff out there so that we can make it more clear.

49:03And so I use that as an example because you can be a brand new PM, run a brainstorm, run a planning session like that, and you're probably going to get great feedback. People are probably going to go, this is kind of cool. I've never done this before. Now, to go to the other side of this spectrum, we help a lot of companies that want to remake a whole process. They want to remake a review system like Catalyst or they want to remake their decision kind of like rituals. And so in that sense, we're usually talking to a head of product or director product or VP of product. and someone who tends to have a lot more agency over the way that the team works.

49:48Code is interesting and 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 there'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. It is there like a, how do you think about that percentage wise? People are always coming up with new creative ways and to kind of like make their teams run better, make decisions go smoother. And we're kind of continuously adopting those, but there's definitely a backbone of the system.

50:26Like the backbone of the system is catalysts 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 room, and then like individual topics got added. I mean, that took us launching like automations and the ability to add things to calendar in order for that whole process to really work. So in the years prior to us launching that, that we did it with very manually. So I think there's still a lot of creativity that I see every day. So I'll give one quick example.

51:08One of our PM leads on core products, Scott Nathan, he basically saw that a lot of decisions had a lot of different stakeholders because 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 DMs on like who to involve in these decisions because like every one of these with core product feels like they impact everybody. And so like 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.

52:10And it was like such a pro -mute. 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 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.

52:50So just like keep going and check in later. So I think those are those types of little iterations are usually based on a really good insight. Sounds like a dream come true for a platform team to reduce how many people have to be involved in all your planning this year, making. and that process and which way 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, and it's really an anti -pattern.

53:29It'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 engine lead and your design lead, they're not hearing that. So you end up with this big game of telephone, where you'll have a conversation with your manager in one -on -one, don't go back and translate to their engineering and design lead. Of course, the fidelity of the game of telephone, something is lost in all of those transmissions. And so the core idea is kind of have a group one -on -one with the key stakeholders. And so we have this concept of brain trust that's kind of modeled off after Pixar's brain trust.

54:10And 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 Okay, ours 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 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 of what we call Dory, which I can talk about.

55:00But 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 sales person 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.

55:48I'm sold like, let me like I want to implement some of these things. Where do I look? And so I found myself sending them a bunch of links to individual templates. So that was kind of like that cue to send to the fact that we needed to have like a better kind of core handbook for teams that wanted to adopt some of these rituals and also learn from all the rituals that we have learned from and feel very fortunate to partner 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, we'll talk about everything from rituals like catalyst to decision rituals, to a lot of planning and strategy and road maps, that kind of stuff.

56:38And trying to pull out the most interesting patterns and also give people a pretty practical view of how to implement these things. So I think that's what has been lacking sometimes. Amazing. Well definitely links to that. Hopefully it's live by the time this goes up. We'll make it happen. I know I'll see you said she's working on a book that's related and basically the rituals of great teams and she was on the podcast and talked a lot of 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 as one of the earliest episodes actually one of the most popular.

57:09Yeah, 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 you 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 was, I didn't realize it was such a controversial, but really thinking about it, obviously, like letting people skip ads, like it's see why people were not excited about that. Did you just tell that story and basically it's like the story of how people labs on YouTube came about?

57:46Yeah, so I moved over to YouTube shortly after that acquisition It was amazing like tight knit team. It definitely felt like the Wild West. It was you know We were getting sued by buy a con 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 other context, the sales team was very nascent and all they wanted to sell was the homepage. And for good reason, that was where you made your money as a salesperson. And so I had just been sponsored by Salar and Shashir to become a PM.

58:29It's a longer story that I'll leave out for now. And we can go into. But on day one of being a PM, Shashir is like, great, you're the new guy. you get the project that nobody else wants. And that's called Skippable Ads. And we've got this crazy idea that we can align the incentives of advertisers and viewers and creatives in this really clever way by putting a skip button on the ad and then charging people per views. And the latter part, we hadn't quite cemented yet, but it was part of the core idea. And so the thing I read about in this post is, Like as a new PM, this feels like a really consequential decision, right?

59:11It'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 for like months or years, you know. And I was sitting in a one -on -one with this guy named Phil Farhi, who's an amazing product leader and was my boss at the time. and we're trying to figure out what to do and how to handle all the different dynamics. And he just kind of like stops and he's like, you know what, just test the extremes, start the experiment tomorrow, like then we'll figure it out essentially.

59:49And I think his point was like, look, we can debate this forever. So I would rather us see the upper and lower bounds of how good this could be or how bad this is gonna be, like immediately. And so, you know, we launched a set of experiments, SkyJME currents who's still there, a little tiny little skip button, you know, on one experiment, Giants, skip button that covered the entire player on the other side of the experiment. And within a few weeks, I think we had developed some conviction, you know, based on some very directional data that we were onto something. And so the lesson that I took, 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, go like run an experiment, go make a prototype, you know, go write a doc, go make a mock, just don't talk about it.

1:00:49And, and I found that people, Also, as a leader, people really follow that concept. And I also found that it transcends level. I'm not talking just to ICPMs. I'm talking to heads of products and CPO's and CEOs to some degree. 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 in most, you know, circular discussions on it. Makes me think a little bit about Twitter, where they spent years just thinking about the added button or all these different changes.

1:01:29They're so scared. They did so much research. And then now just like they're changing things left and right. Everything's fine. And everyone's still using it. It shows you that you don't have to be so delicate. Yes. It's almost never as bad as you think it's going to be. So yeah, it's just a question of how much better it can be often times. 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?

1:02:05And 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. There was like two or three hundred of us at that time. And then eventually thousands that started in Cheryl Samberg'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 outsource to other countries.

1:02:41And so there was this process where basically an ad would show up on your screen. You would market family safe, non -family safe, foreign, 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 event. Like they failed the wrote 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.

1:03:21Moved on the phone support. That was eight hours a day of talking to AdWords customers. Really a total roll -acosuride. 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 adverbs and then like the next minute you would be on the phone with like a sidekick or a taxi driver. It 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.

1:04:07Like 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 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 early 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.

1:04:43Like, you were like the expert on it and they were trying to tell them about Ad Groups and like, how this ad form AdWords and Bala. And like, most of the time, people were like, dude, I'm a small business owner. I'm trying to like give people to come to my auto mechanic store. or I'm trying to get people to come to my taxi service or whatever it was, I don't care. And so basically the product had to kind of get out of the way and really just drive impact for the customer. 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.

1:05:21And 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 are like 15 product specialists at Google. And that was, for me, that was an amazing time because I was getting to sit on like seven or eight different core teams, core product teams. And 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 masterclass in PMing because I was getting to watch like what was working for some PMs And what wasn't working for other PMs and just kind of like taking notes behind the scenes so That was a that was a really influential role and then yeah went went on to various PM roles that Google and YouTube Coming back to noticing Comes up again and again in our chat This is so interesting because it feels like you basically came from the mail room of tech to to the top of the product field.

1:06:20And 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, five years before being able to PM. And that was, I think that was like a slightly harrowing journey because at the time you had a computer science degree. Google, right? Cool, so I think that's one takeaway too is give it time. It's not gonna happen There's a lot of people there's like I need to become a PM immediately And I think this is a good example of like it's not gonna happen overnight Coming back to your two lessons.

1:07:00I think they're really interesting and I'm curious if there's anything else Like comes to mind of what you've found was Essential to you succeeding in this path. So the first lesson you shared is being customer facing and And in this case, like being in retail is custom -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, Apple Grombi, 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, is trying, 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.

1:07:39And that is like really, really valuable in tech organizations. And oftentimes it's kind of undervalued. And so I think people who want to move into PM roles who are sort of not currently in PM roles can often lever that experience and that knowledge of the customer in ways that are pretty profound for the organization and pretty insightful for the organization if they really are creative about it. And then I think the other thing is, regardless of where you are in the organization, you're always serving a customer. You can't just talk to one big enterprise customer and you can't just talk to the smallest customer.

1:08:19You kind of have to have a diverse and continuous stream of customer interactions in order to have good intuitions about what to do next. And your engineers aren't going to really trust you unless you have good intuitions about like where the customer is headed and what they want and stuff like that. And so the stakes, I think, are pretty high. And the good news is, it's like easier than ever with all these tools to really get into the mindset of a customer. My lesson touches on something the previous guest talked about, Paige Castello, where she was like the often the youngest person in the room and built a lot of respect.

1:08:55And people really trusted her over time. And her lesson was know that 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 again people just like oh Lane tell us more and they bring you into conversation because you're providing value You're not just they're sharing opinions Everyone's got opinions. I mean, that's that's basically how Both me and I had a friend named Bill Farrell who transitioned into PM at the same time and that's essentially how we got that the try at being a PM inside of Google was like we needed the customer really, really well.

1:09:29And we were often in conversations, you know, sort of bridging the gap from, here's what the customer thinks. 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 Zroada V Hotel chain and just like is steep in hospitality. And he came to Airbnb and started doing this worldwide tour, talking to hosts.

1:10:03And he's just like, guys, when you talk about product, like you're like telling hosts, hey, the product's gonna be updated or you're gonna launch all these features. Like they don't, like they think their home is the, is the product of Airbnb. They don't understand what you're talking about, when you're talking about the online experience and the website, like that's the last thing they think about it's the experience of someone traveling on a ReenB and staying in their own. So I think it's a really good reminder of like most people don't care about the product they should have as a prop and you just happen to be this website that will help them solve it.

1:10:30You know, I think most people can be like way more concise of their communication like even internally people don't care. You should assume that people don't care or you know, if you're you know 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 before yourself to be a little bit sharper in your communication. So. I won't 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' date that drove a lot of traffic. Can you share that story?

1:11:06Does that ring a bell? Sure. Yeah, there's lots of memorable days at Coda. One of them was Tim Ferriss' day. So I guess for context, we had built this kind of like publisher, very nascent publisher motion where we were going out and helping people you know publish their rituals and this is what you see in the gallery, the Kota gallery, and you know a lot of what we talked about today but we had this one person in that team who's got Al Chen, Tim Ferriss fan and also I think had been really tenacious with like the people around Tim Ferriss and and basically finally got an into him and like figured out a really neat way to implement one of his rituals and Prododoc.

1:11:47And the none of us really knew this, but this is all happening. And anyway, we wake up one morning and traffic is just 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 something's going haywire. At the time, we were also in the China Basin office. And the fire alarm went off. And so now we're outside on our laptops. We were like in a war room trying to figure out what was happening and now we're outside trying to figure out what's going on so anyway make a long story short data scientists investigate and You know we have eventually figured out that we had been featured in Tim Ferris's email newsletter and you know I think early on You hear you hear this lesson or this at edge of first time founder, build a great product, second time founder, build a great distribution.

1:12:43I think that was one of those early big cues to think about the importance of content distribution and the importance of these publishing flywheels. And it definitely made us double down. We're like, okay, if we can do this with Tim Veris, like what's next? And we definitely spent a few months trying to reach that high watermark that was set that day and traffic and sign up. So it was the fun memorable day and people for like the subsequent one or two years, you know, would refer to it as Tim Ferrste. So funny. I bet Tim Ferrste had no idea what he did. No idea. And I hope you have a Lenny's podcast day when this comes out.

1:13:21Everyone'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 landing round? Maybe we're talking really briefly about two -way write -ups. Yeah, let's do it. I have that on my notes, but I skipped it, so I'm glad you I 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 that maybe the historical view of this, I got really obsessed with the history of how work gets discussed and decided upon and kind of broke it down into like three phases.

1:13:55And so the first phase was 1980s. We had PowerPoint, it was like this amazing tool. You could manipulate shapes on a screen and we were all using fancy clip art, and it was really fun, but we've all had the experience of being in a really long PowerPoint presentation and kind of like someone's droning on in their slides and stuff like that. Second phase is in the early 2000s, kind of like two things converged. One was Google bought this company called Rightly, that became Google Docs. So instead of having Word on your desktop and sending files around, you now had kind of like online collaborative editing.

1:14:33And the other thing was Jeff Bezos sent this very famous memo, which basically said, no more PowerPoint at Amazon. And what that did was kind of started and earnest their six -page ritual, so you can read all about this in the book, working backwards, like, get book, call and briars. And so that started, I think, what was kind of like what I'll call the one -way write -up phase, which is like, you're writing down your ideas, you're expressing them clearly, it's in pros, so you have to be really clear. where that was like a big step up, I think, from presenting, always presenting work and deciding on work by representations.

1:15:09And then kind of the thesis is that we're like in the midst of a new phase, which is essentially two way write ups. And that's where it's more conversational and feedback and discussion is like actually part of the content itself. So that's kind of like the broader historical art. But if you think about it, PMs and like product people are always at the like brunt, you because they're the ones that are like driving decisions and really the ones that are driving discussions oftentimes in companies. And so, you know, I think the problem with one way write ups, I felt very deeply at Google and YouTube.

1:15:46And just to name them, the first one is, you would always be trying to figure out like who's read your write up. So, you know, I have many memories of sending a write up out at 11 .30 p .m. and then like waiting patiently for the avatar of like the SVP in my area to show up in there. And that was like a sign that they had like read it, which is like, you know, just totally insane if you think about that behavior. The second one is you end up having a lot of the discussion in the comments itself. So, you know, this is a space that's really built for like grammar and spell checking and things like that.

1:16:23And you're having like these really meaningful discussions in this kind of like 100 pixel right margin. And part of that I think is like there are all these questions that are being raised. And so you have really no idea like what the most important question is. And so if you're facilitating those discussions in one way, right, you're often like going through the comments in the 20 minutes before that session, trying to figure out like which one of these do I want to address. And then the other behavior, and I don't know if you've ever seen this in a doc, but like in one way, right, if you see a lot is like, there'll be just a mega comment thread on like the title of the doc.

1:16:56And it's like people are like, I don't think we should do this or like, you know, you'll get into this 30, you know, 30 comment thread on the title because that's like the best place to put your like overall thoughts. And I saw this like pattern all the time. So if you, if you live that life, I think the world of two way write ups and like the way that I think a lot of our customers are doing it and you can do this some other tools besides code at two. I think it's quite a bit better. You end up, I guess the alternative to go down that list is you have a done reading button at the end of a write -up.

1:17:31So now you can say, oh, these are all the people that have read this. And I think even you see a pattern in some of our customers where if it's like a particularly long write -up, you'll have three done reading buttons. So you can kind of see where everyone has gotten to. And then the second thing is making sure that you're actually addressing the most important question. So instead of pulling questions out of the comments and trying to figure out which one to address, just putting those in a table and then letting people up with those, and that's what we call Dory. And then I think probably the most valuable is sentiment or pulse, which is, you know, how do you feel overall about this particular proposal?

1:18:12And if you think about, you know, the contrast between like a comment thread on the title and seeing a list of all the sentiment, how everybody feels about this proposal, and really being inclusive to the entire audience, it's just wildly different. I think in my particular experience, I'll give you one example. I wrote this proposal a couple of years ago. I thought it was gonna sail through no problem. I thought I was gonna get four out of five and five out of five smiley faces from everybody that's sort of how the sentiment table works. And one of the lead designers basically said like one smiley face we shouldn't do this.

1:18:52I was like, oh man, this particular person's not really vocal in meetings. And so I would not have heard that feedback. It was very unlikely I would have heard that feedback unless they had had a sentiment table a place to add that. And so I think the punchline on all of this is I really authentically believe this is like this is sort of where we're headed. And I hope that a lot of PMs and product teams adopt this in general. So 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. Yeah. Great. Yeah. Awesome. Is there anything else that you think that we should touch on that we haven't touched on?

1:19:36Yeah, I think one thing that we've discussed before is just about strategy and planning and stuff like that. So it may be useful to touch on a couple of insights there. I think there's kind of like two insights in the strategy and planning thing. And this is again in the handbook that we're writing. But the first that I end up seeing a lot is just this idea that like OKRs are not actually strategy. So I think the way that we plan and the way that our customers plan, the kind of key point is it's critical the disconnect strategy discussions from OKR discussions. And it sounds really obvious, but I think a very common mistake.

1:20:18And I think a really simple question to ask yourself, do we have a separate strategy process or strategy ritual that is distinct from OKR setting and metric setting and goal setting? And I have found you can pick whatever strategy framework works for you. But I do think it's quite important to pull those two things apart. The other kind of like rule that we live by on the planning side is what we call 10 % planning rule, which is essentially, you know, just ensure that you're not for a given time period planning for more than 10 % of that execution period. And I think this is a really easy mistake to make.

1:21:01I mean, we this is a hard -fought rule because we've made that mistake before, but you end up getting kind of like bogged down and planning or saying like, planning felt rushed and so we need to make it three weeks instead of one week or whatever. And the byproduct of that over the course of a lot of time is that you end up just planning way too much. And oftentimes, you know, you really don't know what's ahead until you've, you know, launched or learned something. And so I think that's a pretty good rule, the follow. I love that rule. I found the same. You were a stick, it's a 10 % like planning for a week, planned for half a day, playing for a month, maybe like three days.

1:21:39Yeah, I love it. With that, we've 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. It's really, I think, a very succinct and very fast read about how flywheels work. We talked about story worthy. I recommend that book a lot. Good strategy, bad strategy, love that book, very simple framework that I've reused a bunch, maybe outside of tech, waking up as a book by Sam Harris, on mindfulness that I really like.

1:22:17And then an old one that I really like is the inner game of tennis by Timothy Galway, which is a kind of classic. Amazing. On Good Strategy, bad strategy, I'm working on getting Richard Rammolt on the podcast, and it talks with his agent and they seem to be excited. So we'll hope that that actually happens. And then you're inspired me to try to get the third story worthy guy on. So 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? Yeah, it's a little bit hard with three kids in a job. These days to watch a lot of TV.

1:22:51I would say I really enjoyed the last dance. I love any sports documentary, all those. Have you seen underrated? it's Jeff Curry's new documentary. No, I haven't. I gotta watch that. It's really good. I've been rewatching arrest the development. That's also just a timeless classic. Classic. I love that Michael Sarah is in the Barbie movie not to give any spoilers. That was a funny surprise. Next question. What is a favorite interview question they like to ask candidates? There's two I really like. One is teach me something that I don't already know. I think it's like just an awesome way of seeing if someone's gonna lean in and like really figure out what you what you don't know and then how passionate they are about sort of pitching what they do.

1:23:38I think it's really fun. And then Shashir and I have been asking a version of Teleporter question and evolving it for many years now. So I like that question quite a bit. So she shared that question in his episode and we make TikTok clips out of some of these conversations and that clip just went crazy. People love it. It's a more of a most of you clip, I think, in TikTok or just like, what would you answer to that question? So we'll try to link it in the show notes if you want to watch just that one in every question. I think you maybe gave it away. So maybe that's why you're evolving it. Yeah, no, no, for screw you.

1:24:11I also read up a recently read post about my favorite rough check question, which I think is I would love to learn other people's favorite rough check questions. Reference is check. Oh man, that's its own. Oh man, I'd love to do a podcast just on that. That is such an important skill. The first question you mentioned of asking people to teach you something, I heard the best version of that in a previous episode, or Maya, they had a product for Spotify podcasts, asks, what would your podcast be if you were to start a podcast? I like that. Yeah, I like that. So feel free to steal it. Yeah, I do.

1:24:43I sometimes do a version of making them explain it two different ways after and making the candidate explain it two different ways and saying like, OK, now you have to explain that to your grandparent. And then now you just told me about sewing or some hobby of yours. Now I'll sell it. And it's like most technical form to someone who knows everything about this particular topic. And so it's kind of fun to also see the range that people can operate. Awesome. What is a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you really love either digital or physical, anything that come to mind? A few, I'm like, become a real sleep nerd.

1:25:23So I'm asked that, like, sort of cup around your eyes. I love, obviously, in the tech world, like, Chad G .P .T. There's a product that I got really obsessed with tennis during the pandemic. there's a product called Swing Vision. It's really good. It basically cuts up your match into like different, you know, all of your forehands or all the longest rallies or all that. 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. We live not so far from each other so we get to play some tennis on it. You can check out this very cool product.

1:26:00Yeah. Let's do it. You're on. That'll be your sequel. Just our game. Next question. What is a favorite life motto that you either repeat yourself often like to share with people around you share with your kids maybe? I don't know if it's as motto as much as it's just a way of being Essentially the present moment is all that we have You know realizing that our attention is very often on the past of the future and And in so many ways, the present is where it should be always. And so I think that that is something I think about a lot. I think maybe more broadly, I had a mentor who roughly set a version of like make things happen.

1:26:42And so I really try to apply that to anything that I do if that's like work or life or sports. You know, I try to be the person who creates like momentum and positive change in progress. And so I think that that's like generally a good kind of model to live by beautiful What is the most valuable lesson that your mom or your dad type? My mom's a psychologist and so in a professional counselor so certainly active active listening you know Maybe the tech version of that or the modern version of that is like steel manning someone's argument being able to like repeat back to someone What they said and in a better form more clear form.

1:27:22So yeah, she's, she's an amazing woman 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? You know, there's kind of a saying, which is like the But safest climber is the one who knows when to come down, essentially. And I think that there are many times that you have to kind of like put your ego in check and come off the mountain or come out of a climb because it's not as safe as he thought it was.

1:28:02So I think that's maybe one. I think the other is, it's probably not a one -way door. So I think in many ways you can do climbing and you can do some of these outdoor pursuits on the side or you can 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, Coda 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. There are two final questions working folks finding a line if they want to reach out and ask you any other questions.

1:28:39And how can listeners be useful to you? I'm on LinkedIn and Twitter and I have a sub -stack. We'll be releasing that handbook for product teams that I will probably post on sub -stack. And in terms of useful to me, yeah, give, give, go to try, give us feedback. I love hearing from product people all over. It's like one of the bright spots in my day to hear all the creative rituals that come from this community You you know created a just an legendary community of people and so you know They always give very thoughtful feedback so very open to all of that and yeah, thanks for having me awesome lane.

1:29:22Thank you again so much for being here. Thanks Bye everyone Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'sPodcast .com. See you in the next episode.