Elevating IT teams with Coda
Making your IT team more functional and efficient.
The Coda team
Elevating IT teams with Coda
By The Coda team
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When you need to ramp up productivity while somehow magically cutting costs, it can be a gut-check moment. If you add context that you only have a tiny bit of runway left, the dread can be suffocating. Coda will lead you through this maze, just as we’ve done with thousands of others in this exact situation. Here’s how we did it with Plato, a small but promising startup: The folks at Plato, a professional mentoring platform, had only three months of runway left and had just laid off half their team. They needed to scale without breaking the bank. At that point, they were paying separately for Expensify, Lattice, Asana, and Meet Hugo. They were burning through their funds across several SaaS tools, and it wasn’t adding up: their productivity was nosediving. The team at Plato determined they were spending a lot of money on a lot of tools. Then, they made a simple switch: pivot to Coda. Fast forward to the present, and Plato is saving $200k per year from transforming their IT teams and systems. Some of these steps included consolidating their tool stacks, reducing the seats for expensive licenses, and enabling them to become more proactive in their support. Coda will do all of this for your IT team—and The Ultimate Coda Handbook for IT Teams shows you how. SaaS subscriptions generate bloat for IT teams’ bottom line. Coda can help sort through the tools you definitely don’t need, as well as the ones you can start using in moderation. Here’s how:
1) Replace several tools without skipping a beat.
IT leaders face immense pressure to cut software while maintaining or even elevating their output. We’ve learned from helping thousands of teams that consolidating their tool stack into Coda is one of the most important steps they took during this transition. TwoLink is one such company that consolidated its SaaS lineup. When they were founded, TwoLink tried several tools for product development, hiring, onboarding, and more. They found the collaboration features of Google Sheets, Excel, Asana, Jira, and Lever to be limited, and the interfaces unfriendly. TwoLink wanted a more intuitive tool with real-time collaboration chops. TwoLink replaced every tool they had been using for internal operations with Coda docs, saving $24k per year from solely eliminating unnecessary tools. One part of what makes Coda so valuable is that you won’t need to choose between a project tracker or a spreadsheet to stay organized. Coda offers the best versions of these tools, so your IT team won’t need to search for links when task-switching: it’s all there, right in Coda. This means that everyone on the IT team can create their own ideal workflows while everyone operates from the same single source of truth. This consolidation also eliminates the risk of tool-switching mistakes and simplifies onboarding new hires since they’ll only need to learn one tool. As Max Pauwels, the CEO of TwoLink puts it: “Why jump from tool to tool when I can just build a solution that fits our needs in Coda?”2) Unique billing model that doesn’t charge for every seat at the table.
Coda bills differently than most SaaS vendors. We don’t charge for contributors, only people who make docs are billed. There will always be seats for those who view, comment, edit, and collaborate. Want to see our unique billing model in action? Take Intercom, for example. Intercom, a customer service and communications software company that needed an easy way to organize workflow, information, and resources for product launches. The success of Intercom’s PMM team depends on coordinating cross-functional teams. Having workflows spread across siloed databases cost the team time and resources, and key information often got lost in translation. Intercom adopted Coda and uses it to keep their teams up to date on all activities. It has been their living source of truth ever since. The team hubs sync with databases living in other docs every few hours, so they don’t have to manually update different pieces of information. Since Coda only bills for those creating the docs, Intercom has the flexibility to direct anyone from any team to that Coda doc for any information, assets, or references needed for a campaign.3) Reduce the seats for the must-have tools.
While Coda can replace a vast amount of your IT team’s tool stack, there might be some that are too foundational to remove. In this scenario, it is highly likely that these expensive licenses are under-utilized. Specifically, some employees might have full access to services that only require read-only permissions. This is where Coda can help. Taking advantage of Coda’s Packs and unique pricing model, you can get rid of under-utilized software seats by pulling data from these expensive apps into a Coda doc and sharing it with your team. So you can pull in Salesforce reports, Jira issues, Asana, and Airtable task tables into a shared doc, so that these team members can get the info they need without having to directly access the app. Most of our Packs have two-way sync capabilities too, so those users can send updates back to the service through a shared account. It needs to be said: there is a lot of catharsis in getting rid of unused, empty seats. Consolidating costs is just one part of how Coda will impact your IT team. By aligning and organizing your team into a single hub, they will become better business partners for the other teams they are supporting.Re-focusing where you spend your time.
IT teams that use Coda tend to experience a metamorphosis: locking into the single source of truth, realizing the different ways they can operate efficiently, then being freed up to enable the surrounding teams to do their best work. One way in which Coda produces this efficiency is in team hubs. For example, one use case in which IT teams use team hubs is maintaining an IT support knowledge base. This could act as a first line of defense for your IT team, freeing them up from answering the same questions. An IT support team hub could include step-by-step processes like:- Software set up.
- Troubleshooting.
- Working with outside vendors.
- Any other procedure relevant to your business partners.