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From virtual game shows to distributed team stand-ups: Coda's May Meetup with Matt Galligan
Recap of the Coda May 2020 meetup with Matt Galligan, VP of Design at Earnest Research
For May 2020's virtual NYC meetup, I had a chance to speak with , VP of Design at about the various startups he's co-founded, his passion for distributed teams, Coda docs he's built for work and personal use, and his membership in the two-letter Twitter club. When I first learned about Matt's personal use case, I was particularly excited to see what he had to show (spoiler: it involves and ).
Employee competency framework
Matt first used Coda for an employee competency framework at Earnest Research that the HR team originally had in a Google Sheet. When Earnest held an internal hackathon, Matt took the opportunity to transform the Google Sheet into a more usable Coda doc that eliminated multi-tab inconsistencies. The original Google Sheet had a bunch of values that could potentially change, and to update the file required a lot of manual copying/pasting:
With the Coda doc, Matt built to easily filter the different competencies depending on who is looking at the doc. While this is a simple use case of Coda, Matt emphasized Coda’s simplicity to his team while demonstrating that it can replace other document platforms like Confluence and Google Docs:
Wrap-ups, not stand-ups
At a high-level, a wrap-up is a stand-up solution for distributed teams—they allow for your team to get work done asynchronously. Wrap-ups don’t require everyone to be available to do the meeting (typical for stand-ups), make hand-offs easier, and memorialized data in a Coda doc.
Here is the summary Matt demoed (code-named Project Burrito internally):
Matt is a proponent of distributed teams, but he’s increased his team’s focus on communication and documentation during the pandemic. His wrap-ups Coda doc is an example of a lightweight solution to documenting work being done on his team without it being lost in a Slack channel.
The gist of the wrap-up tool (based off of by ) is an entry form filtered to the user who is viewing the doc and a display page that shows all the input from everyone on your distributed team:
Entry form for a team member
Daily summary view of everyone's wrap-ups
Hosting a virtual game show
For his third use case, Matt and his friend built a virtual game show that has attendees, a host, a sound board, a control room—and sound effects. They also got on the beta for the popular Clubhouse app that doesn't even , where they found themselves asking questions to (apparently Naval knows random trivia facts about ). In Who Wants to be a Hundreadaire, Matt built a "control room" view for him to use while the game show is happening but his friend (the host) had a "stage" view:
Present at or attend a future meetup
If you want to showcase something you've built in Coda for the greater community, feel free to . Organize your own virtual event with this template. To RSVP for future meetups, check out our dedicated meetup page which also has content from previous meetups:
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