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Product Team Rituals & Growth Lessons with Shishir Mehrotra

Tony Pelosi

Details

Fri, Jun 24, 2022, 10:00 AM - 10:30 AM PT
Host:
Shyvee Shi
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(Product @ LinkedIn)
Speaker:
Jonathan Rochelle
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(VP of Product @ LinkedIn and co-founder of Google Sheets/Docs)
Guest Speaker:
Shishir Mehrotra
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(CEO & co-founder of Coda, former Microsoft & YouTube, Spotify board member)

About

This is a recording and notes of a live session on LinkedIn Learning where Jonathan Rochelle asked Shishir Mehrotra about his career journey, including his best lessons from leading and scaling product, design, and engineering at YouTube and Coda. Shishir also shared his experience on why product teams need rituals for growth. Whether you’re an experienced product leader or just getting your PM career started, this event was beneficial for anyone in the product space!
🍿 This is part of LinkedIn Learning’s “Product Management Learning Series” show, a series of live streaming events where industry thought leaders share their PM career journeys and lessons learned to inspire aspiring and current PMs to level up their Product career. 🚀 Learn more here:
https://bit.ly/3sy5kyW
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Video

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https://www.linkedin.com/video/event/urn:li:ugcPost:6930628801345335296/
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Notes

Super Simple Insights
great businesses start with super simple insights
Google - search can be 1000x faster and 1000x more relevant
Gmail - people don't want to delete email
YouTube - online video will do to cable what cable did to broadcast
Google Docs/Sheets/Slides - kill the save button
Coda - allows anyone to make a doc as powerful as an app
Coda Core Insights
when we asked how teams operate, they list tools and usage, but true observational ethno revealed it's really mostly documents, spreadsheets, decks and "some" collab tools (email, slack)
For years, if you flag a YoutUbe video, it created a row in an Ops persons's spreadsheet, this is a GOOD thing because easy and flexible and don't have to rely on updating custom software
Division between custom software and Docs/Spreadsheets continues to narrow
Tools haven't fundamentally changed much since 1970s, if Austin Powers popped out of a time machine he'd know how to use Docs/Spreadsheet/Presentation
Need to start from scratch, from blinking cursor, how would you design from there to solve for today's needs
How did you go from YouTube to Coda?
Same paradigm, both maker generation
What people missed about YOuTube was they underestimated humans, don't have to live in LA and go to film school but this doesn't matter, ability to tell good story is better, there was a toolset gap but this has been narrowed
We have 100x more musicians now than before Spotify started, same with Etsy, gaming, etc.
Coda will do to software what YouTube did to video
Coda gallery is halfway between Medium (learn how companies do things) and and AppStore (shop for templates)
Maker community requires creation tools + distribution platform
Rituals
Writing a book, rough draft is public on Coda, crowd-sourced and co-editing
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https://coda.io/@shishir/join-the-rituals-of-great-teams-braintrust
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Bing Gordon (found EA) "great companies have as small list of golden rituals"
1. named
Label rituals with iconic names to create emotion
2. every employee knows them by their first friday on the job
3. have a template
Coda rituals (
Dory & Pulse
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)
1. Dory - how to ask questions (named after the Disney fish)
2. Pulse - how to make decisions
Gallery for rituals of great teams
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https://coda.io/gallery/rituals-of-great-teams
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contribute!
Why your company needs rituals
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https://coda.io/@shishir/masters-of-scale-rituals
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Book recommendation
Switch: How to change things when change is hard
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https://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-Hard/dp/0385528752
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If I recommended 5 books, this would take 2 of those slots
Rider on an elephant in a pack
3 techniques
1. Direct the pack
2. Motivate the pack
3. Shape the pack
PSHE
problem, solution, how, execution
Larry Page established this at Google
it's about scope of responsibility; as a junior employee you are handed a problem and a solution and a how to execute (talk to who, etc) and asked to execute, and as you get more senior you take on more and more from right to left until you are the one determining what the problem is and which ones to focus on
same framework works for other functions; design, marketing, sales, etc.

Coda is the doc platform that brings words, data, & teams together. Join the more than 25,000 teams using Coda and
get started today for free
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