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From virtual game shows to distributed team stand-ups: Coda's May Meetup with Matt Galligan
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

Recap of the Coda May 2020 meetup with Matt Galligan, VP of Design at Earnest Research

Al Chen

For May 2020's virtual NYC meetup, I had a chance to speak with

Matt Galligan⁠

, VP of Design at

Earnest Research⁠

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

Clubhouse⁠

and

Naval Ravikant⁠

Watch the full replay of the meetup here (Crowdcast replay

here⁠

⁠

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:

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With the Coda doc, Matt built

controls⁠

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:

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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):

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⁠

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

this doc⁠

Macolm Bastien⁠

) 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:

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Entry form for a team member

⁠

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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

have a website yet⁠

, where they found themselves asking questions to

Naval Ravikant⁠

(apparently Naval knows random trivia facts about

Norse mythology⁠

). 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:

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