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Last week, many of you joined us for our second Coda Block Party, where we announced upcoming , a new , the creation of a $1 million , and the Rituals of Great Teams . You can watch the replay We spent much of the day — and the past few months, really — in awe of the insights and templates our speakers use to create their foundational processes. And their rituals are inspiring and reinforcing our own motivation to improve the way we plan, meet, and work together. We’ve captured some of our favorites below. The Docket is our version of the staff picks shelf at your local bookstore. Every month, we recommend published docs that we’ve personally read, loved, and copied. See past installments 
From , founder and CEO: Arianna Huffington became a household name through her advances in journalism, but her latest invention is my favorite. After having a set of tough experiences with stress, Arianna set out to understand the true science behind stress. She found a few key insights, like the fact that in just 60 seconds, your brain can activate the parasympathetic nervous system. She created the idea of Resets — short, personalized videos that give you joy. And she brought it to teams through her new company, Thrive Global. For example, you can start meetings by playing a random team member’s Reset, as a way to simultaneously de-stress and also learn a bit about each other. She even convinced me to build . Her doc is such a creative, must-practice ritual for teams and individuals!
From Brian, Sales, Success, & Support: There’s little argument that customers are the lifeblood of any organization. But if customers are so important, why is it that the most senior leaders of an organization are often the most removed from customer interactions? From the most enthusiastic fans to the most disgruntled detractors, customer feedback is critical. I would venture to guess that a lot of us would be surprised at how little of their time is spent with customers. This is where Nick’s guide comes in, showing us the framework to not only hold ourselves accountable to being customer focused leaders but also making it easy for the entire organization to follow suit. Take the client time score as a first step, it might just surprise you. If you want to increase your score keep following the guide to make it easy on your entire organization to be more customer facing. 
From Nicole, Product Marketing: As a product marketer, it’s important I have a strong understanding of what product/market fit looks like before investing in a plan for growth. Most product teams spend months collecting user feedback, building audiences, and tracking insufficient metrics to answer this question, which can cause roadmap deadlines to be extended and frustration among internal teams. By combining an educational guide with dashboard templates, this doc is a comprehensive recipe book for product teams to efficiently establish, track, and maintain a strong path to explosive growth. Most critically, Rahul’s doc empowers product teams to marry the benefits of vision and data to influence growth — an invulnerable foundation for long-term success. If connecting people to the value of your product with ease and agility is important to you, this is a doc you should have in your arsenal. 
From Lucas, Engineering: Between varying stakes and changing players, so many decisions go into a single game of poker. And the more I play, the more I’ve thought about the need for intentionality around those decisions. For example, I’m currently in the habit of developing hypothesis about each player’s style, and I test my decisions against that hypothesis (often losing in the process 🙃). Annie’s doc, particularly the , has made this process a lot easier. Now I have a place to analyze all my decisions and update my framework to make better decisions next time — in poker and beyond.
Another quarter (we see you, Q4), another opportunity to adopt sustainable planning processes. Here are five rituals to help clarify how and how often your team should plan, what you’ll have at the end of planning, and how to keep everyone accountable.Aavia, an up-and-coming health-tech startup, views OKRs as ambitions that should influence every decision made, no matter how small. Because that level of dedication takes sustained focus, they’ve crafted a set of rituals to help them avoid being distracted by shiny new ideas. Read more in their doc: Product School is a global leader in product management training. And considering their instructors are top PMs working at Google, Facebook, Netflix, Uber, and Airbnb, we’re not surprised at the number of insightful, actionable product development rituals they’ve managed to catalogue — from product launches to roadmaps to user research. Explore all of .The ultimate goal of planning is to create a polished product that people want to use again and again. From an engineering standpoint, that means establishing a systematic approach to product quality. Digit Chief Product Offer Rushabh Doshi uses a Jira-based SLA system with built-in checks and balances to pace development and incentivize engineers to care about the quality of their code. Copy his doc for happier, more productive engineers: As Pinterest’s Head of Product, Naveen Gavini made it a personal OKR to better organize planning workflows, and he found himself asking: Is there a better way to plan and track goals? The Pyramid OKR tracking ritual he developed as a result connects company focus area goals and team results while ensuring increased transparency across the org. Read the success story and adapt the ritual for your own team: Miro has seen explosive growth in the past two years, but not without the challenges of scale. Honing in on problem framing and structured product discovery, Farbod Saraf adapted time-tested product development strategies into Miro’s own Product Alignment Framework. This doc-meeting combo promotes inclusivity, visibility, and growth, all while moving the product forward. Here’s their all-in-one product hub:
Meetings don’t have a great reputation. These five rituals want to change that.Audit meeting productivity. Review your meeting culture and drive effectiveness with Lucid Meetings CEO .Connect authentically with your team. Gauge sentiment with Zapier CEO Wade Foster’s customizable .Condition your team to avoid distractions. Leverage John Zeratsky’s and Jake Knapp’s ritual to create a space for rapid, hyper-focused iteration.Run offsites that your team actually wants to attend. Get tips, tricks, and best practices from Stripe COO . Icebreakers optional.Help your board operate at peak capacity. Explore Reid Hoffman’s , borrowed by the playbooks of Microsoft, Airbnb, LinkedIn, Coda, and others.
As Shishir mentioned in his , we’ve been running Bing’s test to find Coda’s Golden Rituals. Here are our top four:: The Coda favorite that stacks discussion topics and sentiment to avoid groupthink and ensure great ideas can come from anywhere.: A template for sharing information and encouraging engaging-yet-organized feedback.: The framework Codans use for productive one-on-ones—and to avoid forever-scrolling meeting notes.: A guide to our color-coded shorthand for breaking down a problem into a set of choices, trade offs, and options that enable us to move forward.
The Docket
October 2021
All the docs from Block Party that we can’t stop talking about.
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🧘
by , Founder and CEO at Thrive Global
🤝
by , CEO at Gainsight
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by , Founder and CEO at Superhuman
♣️
by , author and former world champion poker player
Planning rituals to map where you’re going.
Meeting rituals to help you execute efficiently.
The house specialties: Coda’s own rituals
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