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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

(Product @ LinkedIn)

Speaker:

Jonathan Rochelle⁠

(VP of Product @ LinkedIn and co-founder of Google Sheets/Docs)

Guest Speaker:

Shishir Mehrotra⁠

(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

Video

⁠

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

⁠

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

⁠

https://coda.io/@shishir/join-the-rituals-of-great-teams-braintrust⁠

⁠

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

)

1. Dory - how to ask questions (named after the Disney fish)

2. Pulse - how to make decisions

Gallery for rituals of great teams

⁠

https://coda.io/gallery/rituals-of-great-teams⁠

⁠

contribute!

Why your company needs rituals

⁠

https://coda.io/@shishir/masters-of-scale-rituals⁠

⁠

Book recommendation

Switch: How to change things when change is hard

⁠

https://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-Hard/dp/0385528752⁠

⁠

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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