that are often both excitingly fresh, and sometimes, shockingly complex. It can take up to 12 weeks to crystallize a client’s product vision, and then it’s our job to carry that vision through from start to finish, mobilizing 40+ craftspeople and stakeholders spread across three continents. But without the right operating system, requirements get lost in translation, clients lacked a view into progress against the plan, and late-night calls multiply to get everyone on the same page.
Without a system that connects your entire product development lifecycle, work can feel like a game of broken telephone.
As an Associate Director of Product at Huge, I used Coda to templatize our team’s operating system to ensure our product development process was supercharging the team rather than stifling it. In 2022, our efforts led to a new gold-standard template for building product: the
. We’ve now used it to deliver some of the smoothest product launches we’ve ever had, while making a considerable impact on our team, clients, and revenue:
-4 hours of
meetings per week
yet every project run on Coda has shipped on time
15M
monthly users
have used digital products we built on Coda
$10M
in new revenue
from Fortune 500 clients across Coda-run teams
Before
A forest of disconnected docs that can’t scale
Before at Huge, referring back to a product’s blue-sky vision felt like a scavenger hunt.
We’d circulate a ton of slide decks, Google docs, and Gsheets with varying permissions. We also had to adapt and work in whatever the client's toolkit was. So if they used PowerPoint, we’d translate to PowerPoint...and so on.
Then for each artifact, we’d constantly need to go back to update a file, which translated to a PDF, which translated to an email.
It became for me a little bit of a game of telephone across all those documents without one living place to house all of it.
Over and over again, we’d give clients robust and beautiful information that would end up gradually becoming fractals of themselves. And on the flip side, they’d give us feedback on prototypes that would get buried in meeting notes, leading to more ‘meetings about the meeting’.
Now
A living ecosystem that adapts to the team & product
So in 2022, we developed a gold-standard product hub template known internally as a
(LPD).It aligns a team of 40+ makers and stakeholders to one vision for a product design and development project. We’ve now used LPDs for clients across a variety of industries (automative, technology, professional services, and financial services) to keep every team and their work connected by default.
I think of this document like a tree that grows from seeds, to sprout, to sapling—lengthening its branches and roots as the product itself evolves.
Now, one doc covers multiple altitudes of information, from executive strategy materials down to atomic components in the design system that become the backbone of the product.
Referring back to a product’s blue sky vision no longer feels like a scavenger hunt.
1. Visualize roadmaps as timelines or cards for client presentations and project coordination.
Relational databases in Coda let us show high-fidelity roadmaps to clients better than any another tool. Unlike with slide decks or PDFs, the client could click into this living roadmap and interact with it live––in a way that designers get the luxury and beauty that is Figma, where they can click around, scroll, and jump to another screen on another board.
For our team, the coup de grâce is when the client can give us feedback on a call, and we can immediately drag a component in the roadmap right there in front of them. It's a living roadmap that we’ve altered with the client's recommendation, and it remains the single source of truth for our team.
When typing up meeting notes, you can type “+” then tag people, epics, or components with the “@” symbol. The following line of text will then automatically log itself in the feedback tracker and map back to the tagged entities.
A huge round of thanks to all the product folks who helped review and refine this template:
Sean Cosier, Farhan Khera, Abby Reimer, Rachel Shwartz, Lauren Woodmansee, Nora Keller, Todd Cranston-Cuebas, Rachel Ding, Chris James, Haley Woolverton, and the Huge team.