Script

Welcome to Block Party 2021!

I’m Shishir Mehrotra, CEO and co-founder of Coda.

We gathered our maker community at a restaurant in downtown San Francisco, and previewed the set of building blocks that we said would allow anyone to make a doc as powerful as an app.

It was the first time many of the attendees had ever seen Coda. And we were still months away from them being able to use it.

A lot has changed in the last three years.

We came out of beta, shipped Coda 1.0 and Coda 2.0...and made over 300 improvements and features... including big organizational updates like infinitely nesting pages, collapsible content, outlines, Cross-doc...

We enriched the UI with header images, serif fonts, wide alignment, attachments, and embeds

...and supported enterprise-friendly features like hidden pages, locking, and role permissions

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....and you finally got dark mode

The Coda community has grown exponentially too, with tens of thousands of teams making docs across the world.

The first time I remember hearing it in this context was from my friend Bing Gordon.

Bing, if you don’t know him, was the Chief Creative Officer at EA and has been an investor of iconic companies like Zynga and Amazon.

I had the pleasure of sitting on a board with Bing, and in one meeting he rattled off an observation that really stuck with me.

He said: “Every company has a small list of golden rituals.”

He gave a few quick examples: Google has OKRs. Amazon has six-pagers. Salesforce has V2MOM.

And I immediately thought about Coda. What is our golden ritual?

So I ran Bing’s test.

One Friday I sought out the new hires who had just started that week and asked them what Coda’s golden ritual was. And the answer was universal. Every single one responded with Dory and Pulse.

They’d only been employees for one week and they reported they had seen 20 different instances of it.

For people who aren’t familiar...

Dory is a way to ask questions without having to interrupt each other and raise hands, and people vote on which topics they want to cover.

And Pulse is a way to collect everyone’s viewpoint without having to go around the room.

Dory and Pulse definitely meets Bing’s tests. It has a distinctive name. Every Coda employee knows it by their first Friday. And it’s templated.

In fact, you can type /dory in Coda, to access the templates.

Interestingly as one of these new hires was telling me about Dory and Pulse, she mentioned that this wasn’t memorable because it’s a better way to run meetings.

She told me that Dory/Pulse represents her favorite part of Coda’s inclusive culture - how we strive to avoid groupthink and ensure great ideas can come from anywhere.

So as I thought about kicking off this Block Party event, and which theme I wanted to focus on, I found myself returning to this word “Rituals”.

For me, this word has become very sticky, and has driven a lot of how I personally have been rethinking the world around us. And for Coda, it’s become an anchoring point for many of our initiatives.

You might have seen releases like reactions, where we took common patterns for how people drove participation and made it front and center in the product.

We also saw how powerful it was for rituals to be named and templated, so we made it easy for people to build their own custom templates.

At the start of this year, I decided to spend my free time researching and learning about the rituals of great teams.

I set a goal to collect and catalog rituals from hundreds of different teams and leaders.

I reached out to past colleagues and friends who graciously offered their time to be interviewed. I asked them each Bing’s question: what’s your golden ritual?

This even turned into a fun dinner series, where every other Wednesday, I asked leaders to share their rituals in a group.

Honestly, the reactions were heartwarming. People were very eager to share their rituals. And I got to see first-hand that for the best teams in the world, half of their success is what they do, and the other half is how they do it.

I have dozens of stories to share from this research. Let me share one of the earliest and most impactful conversations. Here’s Jenny Emick, a Design Lead at Square.