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In search of a better planning process: How Coda's core rituals evolved

The Best Planning Process doesn't exist. But the best planning process for your team does—if you're willing to make trade-offs. Here's a look at how Coda balanced bottoms-up reflection, top-down strategy, and bottoms-up planning.

David Kossnick

For a Product Manager like me, planning is one of the most important

rituals⁠

: it’s where difficult trade-offs are made, key conflicts get resolved, and clarity of focus emerges.

Before I joined Coda at the start of 2020’s Q4, I had

heard amazing things about Coda’s process⁠

, and I was excited to experience it for myself. Although I expected to arrive just in time for quarterly planning, I found myself immersed in a half-quarterly planning process—the last one before an intentional shift in cadence I volunteered to help implement. Here’s an inside look into Coda’s old planning process, the new process, and what it was like to shift one of the company’s core rituals.

There’s no Best Planning Process.

At my previous company (my own startup), we tried running sprints every week, two weeks, month, quarter, and everything in between. Back when I worked at Google and YouTube, we used quarterly OKRs. I have friends who swear by the

Lean Startup Methodology⁠

. Each framework has its strengths and weaknesses. The key is picking the right set of trade-offs for your team given your company size and types of projects and not being afraid to evolve when the current framework is no longer working.

Coda started using half-quarterly planning long before I joined. As I understand it, for the earlier stage team, these six to seven-week sprints were about as far ahead as they would tactically predict given how quickly the product and company were moving. Half-quarter planning was coupled with a top-down

Big Rock⁠

process every six months to establish key strategic bets and guide half-quarter sprints.

By the time I joined Coda, many teams were attacking longer-term projects that didn’t fit well into six-week sprints. The team had also grown to around 100 people, and there was more cross-team coordination than ever before. Many folks (PMs especially) felt like “we’re always planning,” with two of the six-week periods spent recapping the last sprint, planning, or pre-planning. Some of the PM team’s sentiment reminded me of the classic

Office Space⁠

whiteboard, Planning to Plan:

⁠

Sometimes a bigger scope is a better scope.

Shishir⁠

(our CEO/Co-Founder) and

Lane⁠

(Head of Product & Design) started to pull on the thread of “should we change how we plan?” another big theme emerged: reducing the number of meetings. We had several All-Company weekly meetings:

2020 All-company meetings

2020 All-company meetings

Day of week

Name

Time

Hours

Monday

Kickoff

1pm PT

Tuesday

Catalyst

1pm PT

Wednesday

Customer Story Time

12:30pm PT

0.5

Wednesday

Coda Stats

1pm PT

Thursday

Catalyst

1pm PT

Friday

Demos

1pm PT

There are no rows in this table

5.5

Sum

⁠

That’s not to mention optional occasional brown-bag talks, guest speaker series, happy hours, and all the project teams' meetings. Coda knows how to hold

effective meetings⁠

. But in combination with planning, the ratio of meeting-time to focus-time had become too high for many folks. Codans craved more uninterrupted work time, with many floating the idea of blocking out specific days or weeks as No Meeting Time.

⁠

At this point, the Planning Changes project became the Company Calendar Changes, encompassing both changes to the planning frequency and reducing the number of company meetings. I was initially apprehensive about changing too much at once. But as we started to get feedback on a few proposals, it became clear that people welcomed the changes, and implementing them all at the same time would be easier.

Many of the changes were uncontroversial. Planning at the quarterly level—so we’d have two weeks of planning per 12-week cycles—was an immediate favorite. On the No Meetings front, we compromised with no recurring meetings on Wednesdays, so urgent one-off meetings weren't off-limits, but focused time was encouraged. And we ritualized the combination of qual + quant data in

a new Stats ‘n’ Stories meeting⁠

. Our new calendar now looks something like this:

2021 All-company meetings

2021 All-company meetings

Day of week

Name

Time

Hours

Monday

Catalyst

1pm PT

Tuesday

Stats ‘n’ Stories

1pm PT

Thursday

Catalyst

1pm PT

Friday

Demos

1pm PT

There are no rows in this table

Sum

⁠

Meet the 2021 planning process.

Evolving our planning cadence included re-evaluating the mix of top-down and bottom-up planning. The half-quarter process was traditionally bottoms-up and paired with half-annual top-down

Big Rock⁠

priorities. With the shift to quarterly planning, a half-annual top-down cadence felt too infrequent.

The final new version of planning ended up having a nice mix of bottoms-up reflection, top-down strategy, and bottoms-up planning:

⁠

Screen Shot 2020-12-16 at 9.30.00 AM.png

⁠

In week 1, teams grade their past quarter and the leadership team shares a top-down 2-pager guiding company strategy. In week 2, teams write forward-looking OKRs, and they get summarized into a final company-level 2-pager.

Our main deliverables of quarterly planning are 1) cross-company Big Rocks and 2) every team's Objectives and Key Results. Internally, we’ve built an OKR tracker (in Coda of course, similar to

Brex's⁠

) that tracks work across teams. The Big Rocks elevate cross-team work that otherwise might slip, and the

team-level OKRs specify metrics⁠

to be scored at the end of the quarter.

Part of good planning is clarity of what’s in and out. For Coda, this made us target 100% completion for every OKR against their target metrics. Some companies, like Google, target 70% completion of goals with the spirit of “we should stretch ourselves.” However, we’ve found targeting 100% forces better conversations about what needs to be cut.

How do we know if our changes “worked”?

Time will tell as we get a few more quarters under our belt, but early signs are positive. One of our most frequent rituals is

Pulse⁠

, which captures how folks feel in a simple table. We had a Pulse at the end of our planning process, and feedback was uniformly positive (a small subset of feedback here):

⁠

One teammate reached out saying:

Just stopping by to say how frequently I’m hearing from my team (and how whole-heartedly I agree) that the updated planning process has really energized folks, and coupling it with the new cadence has a lot of ppl feeling like they have more time and space to focus in on the work with clarify and confidence in the plan. I know we’re only one month in, but it’s a month that feels really well spent.

Wearing my day job hat as the Data PM at Coda, I personally felt like I had a lot of clarity after the new planning process. As an internal platform team, the data team received a huge list of requests from other teams, ranked them, drew a cut line given our current resources, and made sure everyone understood what we wouldn’t be able to get to and why. To have these hard conversations once every three months and be able to exit planning focused on delivering against our goals has been incredibly valuable.

Happy Planning! ✍️ 🚀

David

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Google Product Manager Data Interview: Define TikTok Success

Don't leave your product management career to chance. Sign up for Exponent's PM interview course today: https://bit.ly/3uM53st Watch our mock Google PM interview. Kevin Wei (Coinbase PM) asks David Kossnick, Coda PM and former Google PM, an analytical question on defining success metrics for TikTok. Chapters - 00:00:00 Introduction 00:00:51 Question 00:01:30 Answer 00:02:09 Mission 00:03:23 Metrics 00:08:51 Types of users 00:15:24 Risks 00:16:40 Follow-up questions 00:19:40 Interview analysis To see more mock PM interviews, you can browse our YouTube Playlist: http://bit.ly/mockpm - Technical question by Google PM: https://youtu.be/gFNOJ5VLg5E - Product question by Google PM: https://youtu.be/e0Nj_eYDj2s - Product question by Microsoft PM: https://youtu.be/aJxiSYiNwXk - Product question by Amazon (Twitch) PM: https://youtu.be/ohVstQAAZyY - Negotiation tips: https://youtu.be/fyn0CKPuPlA Learn more about David Kossnick here: - Personal website: http://www.david.kossnick.com/ - Article on acing Data PM interviews: https://coda.io/@david/how-to-ace-your-pm-data-interviews 👉 Subscribe to our channel: http://bit.ly/exponentyt 🕊️ Follow us on Twitter: http://bit.ly/exptweet 💙 Like us on Facebook for special discounts: http://bit.ly/exponentfb 📷 Check us out on Instagram: http://bit.ly/exponentig 📹 Watch us on TikTok: https://bit.ly/exponenttikttok ABOUT US: Did you enjoy this interview question and answer? Want to land your dream career? Exponent is an online community, course, and coaching platform to help you ace your upcoming interview. Exponent has helped people land their dream careers at companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and high-growth startups. Exponent is currently licensed by Stanford, Yale, UW, and others. Our courses include interview lessons, questions, and complete answers with video walkthroughs. Access hours of real interview videos, where we analyze what went right or wrong, and our 1000+ community of expert coaches and industry professionals, to help you get your dream job and more! #productmanagement #pminterview #tech #productmanager #entrepreneurship #product #prodmgmt #exponent #execution

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A few of the 25,000+ teams that 🏃‍♀️ on Coda.

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Coda is an all-in-one doc for your team’s unique processes — the rituals that help you succeed. Teams that use Coda get rid of hundreds of documents, spreadsheets, and even bespoke apps, to work quickly and clearly in one place. This blog post is a Coda doc.

Find out how to Coda-fy your rituals.

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