Hi, I’m Oliver. I’ve been the Head of Engineering at Coda since 2021. Before that, I spent 14 years as a VP of Engineering at Google where I ran different teams like the YouTube Creator team and the Google Travel & Shopping teams. Along the way, I built a litany of products like Google Flights, Google Shopping Ads, YouTube Content ID, Gmail Frontend, and many more.
A common thread throughout my career has been planning and OKR management. Planning has always beena passion topic of mine. I first read Andy Grove’s
—a book that laid the foundation for the OKR framework—when I went to university in Germany. I was inspired to see the huge impact that simple planning and a focus on priorities could have. For the last 25 years, I’ve had the opportunity to lead planning at many different companies, from Pan-European R&D projects, to a variety of global engineering teams at Google, to Coda where I lead the company wide planning process. At Coda, I’ve also been able to learn from and advise many companies on their planning processes.
As part of my journey in planning, I have seen many common issues and patterns of success. Perhaps the most important insight I’ve learned is that it is tremendously important to have a powerful but flexible tool to run your planning process. As I learned in my time at Google, limitations and inflexibility in tooling directly impact the quality of your plans and the resulting execution.
So I set out to create this handbook, documenting the most impactful planning insights I’ve learned and detailing why Coda is the perfect choice for running your planning process. The contents of this handbook should be helpful for anyone looking to optimize their existing planning process or to create a new one from scratch.
I’d love to hear your feedback as you read—you can find me on
After reading through these steps, it should become quite evident that choosing the right tool is critical to a successful planning process. With that in mind, I’ll give you my detailed perspective on why Coda is perhaps the best tool you can choose for your planning process on the
walking you through every step. This tutorial is extremely comprehensive, offering hands-on guidance on how to build a full-scale planning process from scratch. To run OKRs for a larger team or company, I strongly recommend the tutorial.
Lastly, if you want help setting up your planning process in Coda, don't hesitate to