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) Reduce your SaaS spend without losing momentum.
Team leaders are under a lot of pressure to cut software costs while maintaining or even increasing their output. One way to do that is by consolidating your tool stack into Coda. Take Outsource.Digital, for example. This consulting agency’s disjointed tech stack wasn’t meeting the needs of its remote workforce, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. So they began pulling all of their workflows—from planning through development—into Coda. As a result, they were able to cut their knowledge base and task management software licenses, saving them $20K. Plus, they quickly discovered that Coda was powerful enough to build entire custom applications. Instead of trying to force Jira to fit their specific processes, they created their own tailored experience in Coda, saving their team time and helping projects run much more smoothly. As Andy Beveridge, CEO of Outsource.Digital, puts it: “I built something powerful enough to replace Jira and other tools company-wide. Now, we do everything 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.