The PXE Hub: How to align product, engineering, design, and marketing.

Explore

The PXE Hub: How to align product, engineering, design, and marketing.

The PXE Hub: How to align product, engineering, design, and marketing.

The PXE Hub: How to align product, engineering, design, and marketing.

A connected operating system of themes, features, and deliverables.

Drew Holman

Product management can sometimes feel like standing in a cyclone. You’re trying to move your product forward while struggling against a chaotic swirl of documents and communications with no real structure. If you’re having trouble finding your footing, you’re definitely not alone!

I recently wrapped up 8 years at a leading experience management company. During my time there I was a Product Manager, a Technical Program Manager, and a Global Operations Manager. In each of these roles, I faced frequent “cyclone conditions:” never-ending documents, disconnected tools, communication gaps, and broken processes.

Despite all this, we managed to build a true single source of truth for product information we called “PXE Hub”. PXE was a pseudo-acronym for “Product” + “UX” + “Engineering”, as the ambition was to map work longitudinally across roughly 1500 employees to keep planning and delivery central, singular, organized, and always up-to-date. And as you’ll see, Coda was the tool for the job.

⁠

Ready to get started?

When you’re ready to build a similar operating system for your own product team, fill out the form below. The Coda team will reach out to help you get started.

⁠

Get started

⁠

The problem: Constant communication cyclones

Being in a communication cyclone is like shouting into a headwind. As a product leader, I’ve often found myself spending more time trying to communicate than validating and verifying features.

⁠

Communication can sometimes feel like a cyclone.

Communication can sometimes feel like a cyclone.

⁠

The root of the problem is often the artifacts we use to communicate. One of the most common ways product teams pass information between and within departments is through documents like spreadsheets and Google Docs. However, these planning scratchpads are out-of-date as soon as the meetings are over.

Consider an engineering team, whose manager and six employees are planning their next 12 weeks of tasks. They stand up a spreadsheet and share it with the director, who reviews each of five teams’ documents (half in spreadsheets, half in docs) and thinking about the upcoming planning sync with the VP decides to transcribe a new plan representing their larger team in Google Slides, accounting for some changes that were never updated in those original docs.

None of this data can be centrally queried, and by playing telephone, each new document makes old documents obsolete. Worse, even, these obsolete artifacts are sometimes found and referenced without readers realizing they are outdated. Every planning cycle we end up spending innumerable hours generating hundreds of these “dead docs”.

I saw this first hand on one of my recent teams. According to employees in our regular employee pulse, the work processes were struggling. For these kinds of surveys, a score of 60% approval or below is generally unacceptable. Our work processes came in at 52%. We even learned that team members were building workarounds and tools with expensive external tools and even Python scripts.

⁠

Our internal work processes scored a 52%. We knew it was time for a change.

Our internal work processes scored a 52%. We knew it was time for a change.

⁠

The results left no room for doubt—it was time to build a centralized system for tracking our product initiatives.

The Solution: the PXE Hub

As Hubspot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah

once put it⁠

, every company produces two products. The first is the external one that customers buy, and the second is the culture and systems that build the external product. If you don’t put as much care and strategy into this second product as you do your customer-facing one(s), it’s doomed to fail.

With this mindset, we began crafting a truly centralized hub for all product-related data and activities. In Coda, we started by building a dependency management system. This foundational, simple setup allowed us to understand what every team was working on and what fell above and below the cut line.

Soon, we realized we could track not just dependencies, but our entire product stack in Coda. We built our PXE Hub around the three core areas of the our product engine, with each subsequent area nested under the previous:

⁠

Themes⁠

: The value we deliver the market (groups of features with buyers in mind).

⁠

Features⁠

: Functionalities we release to our codebase.

⁠

Deliverables (Team Planning)⁠

: Tasks owned by individual teams that move features forward.

Our Coda hub includes all three, plus how they relate to one another. Everyone can see how their personal work, as well as that of teams they manage, fits into the company’s overall strategy.

⁠

The PXE Hub is a central system for tracking product initiatives.

The PXE Hub is a central system for tracking product initiatives.

⁠

In addition, we added several pages to increase transparency into our work, including:

Resource Planning⁠

Weekly Status Report⁠

Dependencies⁠

Feature roadmap⁠

, and

Capitalization⁠

With Coda, all of these pages are dynamic and inter-connected, reflecting the most recent changes and up-to-date information. When engineering updates something—work completes or priorities shift—other teams like sales, marketing, and product can see that change immediately. No more herding cats.

The result: Clear skies

My team now has a single place to see all product work. Compared to the communication cyclone we faced before, the PXE Hub brings the product and engineering teams’ work together. We can now tell a cohesive story, closing the gap between developer and customer.

The hub also aligned our stakeholders; PMs, PMMs, engineers, designers, and researchers can all contribute to the same database from their personalized views. PXE directors and PMM’s care about “value to customer,” product managers and researchers care about “what we release,” and UX designers and engineers care about “what we do.” Each of these perspectives plays a key part in driving our product forward, and each is reflected in our PXE Hub.

Alignment now takes days, not weeks, speeding up our product output. We’ve also moved additional functions into Coda from other (expensive) external tools. In addition, every single feature has some ROI tied to it, completely changing the conversation about how we can best resource teams.

Ready to implement a PXE Hub on your own team?

I’m a strong believer that every product and engineering team should have their own operating system, customized to their unique workflows and rituals. I’m partnering with the Coda team to help you do that.

When you’re ready to build your own product operating system, fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch.

⁠

Special thanks to Woj Kubik, James Thomas, Colin Tidd, Marshall Kadlec, and Lane Shackleton for their contributions and feedback.

Gallery

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.