Proven Rituals of Great Product Teams | Lane Shackleton (CPO Coda)
Jun 21, 2024
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Lane Shackleton, Chief Product Officer of Coda, shares rituals for crafting a vision, running product reviews, and making decisions. Topics include creating powerful artifacts, translating vision to roadmap, improving product reviews with Catalyst meeting, two-way write-ups, learning by making, and the trait leaders respect most.
Effective communication of the overall vision is crucial for motivating and aligning product teams.
Implementing rituals such as starting with end-customer experience and writing press releases aids in crafting a strong product vision.
Deep dives
Importance of Understanding the Big Picture
Focusing on the analogy of bricklaying, the podcast emphasizes the significance of ensuring that every team member comprehends the overall vision or 'cathedral' being built. By illustrating the story of three bricklayers and their varying perspectives on their work, the episode underscores the necessity for product people and leaders to communicate and ensure clarity on the larger objective. This understanding is portrayed as essential for motivating teams and avoiding aimless efforts in daily tasks.
Crafting a Clear Product Vision
A key takeaway involves implementing rituals that aid in crafting a strong product vision. The podcast discusses two effective approaches - adopting an Amazon-style backwards process and conducting team exercises to align on the vision. By starting with the end customer experience and writing press releases early in the development process, teams are encouraged to articulate the value they aim to deliver, promoting clear communication and alignment.
Creating Comprehensive Planning Artifacts
The episode highlights the importance of creating clear and comprehensive planning artifacts to guide product development. It shares an example from CODA's history where a detailed planning artifact, including product marketing examples and target customer details, was instrumental in driving a major strategic shift. The artifact served as a visual anchor for the team, ensuring alignment and understanding of the envisioned direction.
Effective Product Review Practices
The significance of efficient product reviews is underscored, along with common pitfalls to avoid. The podcast stresses the need for inclusive and timely reviews involving the relevant participants to prevent delays and miscommunication. It advocates for starting reviews with shared context, proper participant selection, and avoiding dominance by certain individuals to enhance the effectiveness of review meetings.
My guest today is Lane Shackleton, Chief Product Officer of Coda.
Lane has interviewed hundreds of product teams from Figma, Uber, Spotify, and more as the chief product officer of Coda. He shared with me his favorite rituals from these interviews for crafting a vision, running product reviews, and making decisions.
Timestamps:
(00:00) Cathedrals, not bricks to craft a great vision
(03:41) Moving beyond the 1-line vision with powerful artifacts
(06:46) Translating vision to roadmap with quarterly plus OKRs
(13:26) Why most product reviews fall short
(16:08) How the Catalyst meeting makes reviews better
(22:50) Two way write-ups to avoid the highest-paid person's opinion