Shishir Mehrotra’s Home

Welcome to my new home page! I’ve always wanted a center for everything from musings to favorite links. I’ll be adding more to this over time. If you want to keep updated, sign up for my newsletter at

https://shishir.substack.com/⁠

A bit about me: I’m founder/CEO of

Coda⁠

—soon to be the CEO of Grammarly—and previously spent a generation at Google (mostly on YouTube), and Microsoft (mostly on Office and Windows). I grew up in Virginia, went to MIT for college, where I met my wife Anjuli. We have two wonderful daughters (16 and 18). Fun fact: I coach my daughters’

LEGO robotics team⁠

which has qualified for World Championships in 4 of the last 7 years!

I write regularly about a wide set of topics, and you can see my published docs on the

docs page⁠

. If you’re looking for a starting point, consider:

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⁠Rituals for Hypergrowth: An Inside Look at How YouTube Scaled ⁠ ⁠ ⁠Eigenquestions: The Art of Framing Problems ⁠ ⁠ ⁠Four Myths of Bundling ⁠ ⁠ ⁠Shishir’s To-Do List Philosophy ⁠ ⁠

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My current fascination obsession is with learning about

Rituals of Great Teams⁠

. I was drawn to this topic after a chat with Bing Gordon, a friend and mentor, and have now interviewed over 1,000 leaders and companies about their rituals. I’m working on publishing this as a book in 2024. To read and contribute to early drafts, sign up

here⁠

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Latest Highlights

Coda and Grammarly are merging to define a new era of AI-native productivity

After 10 years working to make Coda the blinking cursor of choice for teams, I’m excited to announce our next chapter...

Coda is merging with Grammarly, the trusted AI assistant for communication and productivity. Together, we will build the AI-native suite of the future. And I’m honored to lead the combined companies as CEO.

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Grammarly - Email Header - Alt 3 - 600x360.png

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I share more detail in my

blog post⁠

, but both companies have a similar view of the future where AI will redefine every business application and workflow — and will reinvent productivity as we know it today into a place where humans and AI work together everywhere you get work done. Together, we want to rethink a suite of tools and come together to provide users and teams with their own AI productivity platform for apps and agents.

Presenting at Lenny & Friends Summit

At the end of October, I gave a talk at Lenny Rachitsky’s Lenny & Friends Summit about how we can 10x decisions with intentionally-designed rituals. I’ve been a huge fan of Lenny and his community for years, and it was amazing seeing such a dense group of talented product thinkers in one space.

The video came out great, and I’m excited to share it with everyone...

And if you want to dive in further, my Coda doc includes the

presentation slides⁠

, the full

script⁠

, as well as free templates for the rituals I discussed.

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Lenny & Friends Summit Talk: 2024 Behind the scenes from my talk at Lenny & Friends Summit 2024. coda.io⁠

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Presenting at Figma Config 2024

Yuhki Yamashita (Figma CPO) and I enjoyed our joint presentation at

Figma Config 2023⁠

so much that we came together again for

Figma Config 2024⁠

—this time to talk about planning.

Planning often takes more time and effort than the actual execution...no one wants that. And I’ve heard so many product leaders say that “planning is broken.” So as we sat down to decide the topic of our Config talk this year, Figma’s CPO, Yuhki Yamashita, and I decided to study how world-class teams approach planning.

We shared our insights—as well as teams’ unique rituals—that will hopefully help “unbreak” planning at your company. And if you’re intrigued (and/or confused?) about why planning is WOOOOOOOOOW... here’s a hint: count the number of O’s. :)

Watch the video, read the script, and take a peek behind the scenes at how we used Figma Slides to put everything together.

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