Explore

Building a Team Hub that brings all your work together

If your information lives everywhere, your team can’t get anywhere. Coda is the all-in-one doc that structures your company’s knowledge and gives your team the wiki it needs to work smarter.

Ben Schottenstein

📖 12 minute read

⁠

Screen Shot 2023-02-09 at 1.01.33 PM.png

⁠

Try this template

here⁠

, or learn how to build and customize it with this guide.

A team hub is an investment in your teams communication

If your company is like most, then the majority of your work happens in docs and sheets. Docs are great because they don’t tell you how to work, they can flex to your team instead of the other way around. Despite teams buying lots of packaged software, people usually end up back in the most flexible surface: docs and sheets. So thats where a lot of the most important work usually happens. Unfortunately, that creates silos and out-of-date copies of all types of important information.

But over time, there is an unknown problem festering underneath the surface. Your team’s documentation and active work — from team notes to proposals — become scattered across hundreds of docs and sheets and it’s easy to have trouble finding where your current work lives, let alone referencing context and data from the past.

Bring all your work into one place with Coda

Move from many different tools to one so the PM is no longer sending lots of different links to docs for specs, bug-tracking links, dashboard links, etc. They’re just sending one link, your teams wiki.

Build in a tool that scales with you by easily adding pages and new sections to your doc. Teams using Coda usually start by creating a team hub with the essentials. Then something cool happens—it organically grows with the needs of the team.

Centralize your work so that team can evolve their workspace as the project or team evolves, versus having to fit into the constructs of several different systems. When you live in the world where your notes, goals, and specs are disconnected from your task management system, you may have a problem that you don’t know exists.

⁠

⭐ What you’ll get

A single source of truth for your team and your team’s work

One hub to organize your entire team

All of your teams links and resources brought into one reference point

🏗️ Features you’ll use:

Pages

Tables

Reactions

Buttons

Setting up your team’s new knowledge management hub in Coda

We’ll show you the basics and then you can customize them to fit your teams needs.

1. Create a new doc and then make a page

Everything that you do in Coda needs a place to live! You’ll start by creating a new doc and some pages with your doc for each section you are going to add to your doc.

Add a Page: Click + New Page at the bottom of the Page list on the left-hand side

Name your page: Replace “Untitled” with the page name of your choice.

Add a page icon: Click “Add Icon” and then pick the emoji of your choice.

Repeat: Add as many pages as you need for your team hub!

⁠

Tip: You can also type ‘coda.new’ into the URL bar of your browser to create a new doc.

2. Add your team’s mission, vision, or a welcome message for your team hub

You have a few options for adding content to Coda. You can add content natively to Coda by putting in images and text to write your document directly in Coda, or you can embed content from other sources.

To build content directly in Coda:

Type Directly in your doc: Wherever that blinking cursor is you can start typing.

Add section headers and format the text by starting with the slash command “/” and then selecting one of the options or typing what you want to add. Try something like “/H1” for a large header text. You can also highlight the text that you’ve just written and then you can reformat it.

You might have something that looks like this after adding your mission and vision:

⁠

Screen Shot 2023-02-09 at 10.06.07 PM.png

⁠

You can also embed content from other tools into your Coda doc, and then use Coda as the tool to surface and organize that content. You might embed content from tools like Google slides, Figma files, Mode dashboards, Miro files, Googled docs, and more!

To do this use the slash command and type “/embed” into your doc and then paste in the link.

⁠

⁠

Tip: Adding headers of different sizes is a great way to keep organized in Coda.

3. Combine all your teams links and resources into one place

Your team probably has a bunch of different tools and links that they reference in their day to day work. In this step we’ll see how to bring those things into one, easy-to-reference surface.

Paste a link into your Coda doc and then choose to display it as a “card”.

Try dragging the card around to re-order it or create a side-by-side column format.

⁠

Tip: This is another great page to consider embedding content if your company has an employee handbook in google slides or docs. Just type “/embed” and paste the shared link to that file.

4. Add a team roster to bring the whole team together

Coda offers many ways for you to stay organized and one of the biggest ones are Tables. They offer a ton of powerful ways to organize data, but also come along with a few more things to learn. Here we’ll try using a table to build out our company roster.

But first, you can get a quick intro to tables in Coda here:

https://youtu.be/p8lUMNm6sSM

Create a new page in your doc, and add a new table (”/table”), and title it “Roster.”

Add the names of the columns to suit your needs. We recommend:

Name

Role

School

Email or Phone number

Picture

Change the column types to match the column names. For example, you would want the Image type for your “Picture” column. You could also make the Role a select list column if you have multiple people in the same role.

⁠

Add your data to the table so that you all of your team’s info is in one place. That is a totally great stopping place, but you can also kick it up a notch by changing the view of the table.

Change the view of the table by using the “Options” menu at the top right of your table, change the view to “Cards.” You can adjust the “Cards display” options here as well!

⁠

Advanced Tip: The table showed above has some columns that are button type columns that if pressed will “open a hyperlink” of the email or Linkedin URL from that row of the roster table.

5. Build a database of all your teams active projects in your team hub

There are very likely some reasons that you want to bring tables of data into your team hub for something like project tracking. Coda makes it possible to put these tables of data right alongside your text and other data types.

Create a new page for your teams projects, add a table by typing “/table” and then add all of the columns you’ll need to track your projects. You can switch column types after adding them like shown in previous steps.

Collect feedback by adding a “reaction” column that will give users a button they can push to mark that they have a question, love the project, or whatever else you designate the reaction to mean.

Chang the view of the project table by clicking options on the upper right hand corner of the table, and then selecting one of the different view options available. If you edit in any of the views, the data will be updated in all of them.

⁠

6. Bring communication into your new team hub with comments

Now that all your teams content is in one hub, you’re likely going to want to talk and communicate about it. To help with this Coda has the communication layer of comments. You can comment on anything Coda like a piece of text, an image, or even a row in a table.

Highlight text in canvas or the cell and press “+”. You'll see the comment dialog pop up once you send the comment.

Click on the comment icon in the upper right hand corner to choose to hide or view all of the comments in your doc.

⁠