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

Living Product Document

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. 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:

Before

A forest of disconnected docs that couldn’t scale

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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

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So in 2022, we developed a gold-standard product hub template known internally as a

Living Product Document

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. It aligns a team of 40+ makers and stakeholders to one vision for a product design and development project. We’ve now used this template 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.

The Doc’s Superpowers: Connectivity & Scalability

The template uses an underlying connected data model to manage and scale our product operations across 4 key elements:

Epics

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,

Components

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,

Sprints

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, and

Action Items

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. (For details, see

@Data Hierarchy

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). Here’s how they connect in this doc:

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.

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2. Break down

Epics

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into Components in real time with your team.

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3. Estimate story points for

Sprints

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while updating your

Dev Component Roadmap

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.

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4. Pull tasks from

Meeting Notes

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– tagging Epics, Components, or Team Members.

No more keeping track of tasks in separate docs––action items captured in meetings notes will automatically get added to the

Action Items

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. See all the tasks you’ve been tagged in here:

My Action Items

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.

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Ready to create your own product hub? →

Get Started

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.

Acknowledgements