Summary: The rituals of great teams | Shishir Mehrotra of Coda, YouTube, Microsoft

Shishir Mehrotra is the co-founder and CEO of Coda, and formerly head of product and engineering at YouTube. In this episode, he shares his insights on growth strategy, how he evaluates talent, a peek at his upcoming book The Rituals of Great Teams, why reference checks are the most important step in the interview process, and so much more.

You can also see the episode transcript and Shishir’s references.

Shishir’s background at Google and current role at Coda ▶

• Encourage active user engagement: One of the interesting practices at Coda is an internal contest for who can get the most views and likes on their content. This initiative emerged from a similar practice at YouTube - "at YouTube, I had one of the top videos... I got to learn all the tools."
• The power of niches: Some of the most popular content created within CODA emerged from niche interests or topics, similar to YouTube. One of the winning docs at CODA is an "Orange theory workout” doc, which found success within a specific subculture. Anecdotally, "the niches are actually much bigger than people think".
• Exploring complex topics: His superpower is to dissect complex topics and make them accessible to a wider audience. Having written "four myths of bundling" which unpacks how subscriptions work, he ended up getting a board position at Spotify.

Black loop and blue loops and how Coda uses this internal diagram ▶

• Black Loops and Blue Loops: Black Loops and Blue Loops are models that represent two distinct ways that Coda spreads
  • The Black Loop operates as a virally-propagated cycle, where a user creates a document, shares it with a group of people, some of whom create and share their documents, and this cycle continues.
  • The Blue Loop, on the other hand, happens when a user creates a document and publishes it to the world. The public exposure to the document serves as broad promotion of Coda, though the main focus remains on the document creator and their work.
• Inspirations from other biz models: These loop models are often referred to as the "Microsoft Loop" (Black Loop) and "YouTube Loop" (Blue Loop) due to their resemblance to the strategies used by these platforms.
  • Microsoft Loop mirrors the viral spread of documents and the quick conversion of viewers to creators, while the YouTube Loop corresponds to the process of publishing and sharing videos for various reasons, which serves as indirect promotion of the YouTube platform.
• Influence on Coda's pricing: The Black Loop influenced Coda unique pricing model, in which only creators of documents are charged, not those who edit or view. This approach reduces friction in the document sharing process and promotes the viral growth of the product, as users don't face a financial barrier when sharing a document.
• Benefits of the Blue Loop: The Blue Loop has a similar benefit of turning users into promoters for Coda. When users publish their documents, they naturally want to share them with the relevant audience, further promoting Coda. Nearly a third of Coda’s users come through this loop, learning about the product through a solution or idea that resonates with them.

Understanding the two loops also aids in addressing the needs of different user types: "building block thinkers" who prefer starting from scratch, and "problem solvers" who seek out solutions to their problems. The Black Loop serves the former, while the Blue Loop caters to the latter, presenting them with solutions in the form of published documents.

Why you should think in loops instead of funnels ▶

• Growth is more about cyclical loops than linear funnels. Instead of seeing the user's journey as a straight line – where users sign up, get on-boarded, and then use the product – one should consider the possibility of loops. Loops refer to cycles where users continuously engage, promote, and share the product, driving organic growth.
• Unearth your unique loop, it might be hiding in plain sight. Every product or service has its own basic loop. This could be as simple as having a share button on a document. However, identifying a unique loop, something not typically seen in the same product category, could be a key factor in unique growth.
• Documentation of your loops can guide growth. Once identified, these loops should be documented as they can serve as a blueprint to design strategies and tactics aimed at stimulating and facilitating the desired loop behavior.

Mining for your business’s loops by looking at what you tell job candidates ▶

• Creativity in business pitches: The ability to think creatively is necessary when explaining how a business will grow and operate. "Will people really do that?" This kind of critical thinking helps in developing a more compelling and convincing pitch for potential stakeholders and customers.
• Quality  =! Activation: There are different methods of bringing people to a product—through shared documents (black loop), templated documents (blue loop), or traditional marketing (top of the funnel). The highest activation retention is through shared documents, while the hardest is from traditional marketing.
• Users onboarded through different loops require varying strategies: Those who come through traditional marketing give the company control over how the product is introduced. However, when a user is introduced to the product via shared or templated documents, the person sharing or publishing those documents owns the conversation, affecting the positioning and perception of the product.
• When the community or ecosystem controls the narrative, it's essential to incorporate their perspectives. For instance, the famous story of Airbnb where they began by taking pictures of people's apartments to better control the user experience, but eventually had to let hosts market their properties.

The 3 Golden Rituals Of Teams ▶

Great companies has the very small list of golden rituals. And there are three rules of golden rituals.

1. They're named
2. Every employee knows them by their first Friday.
3. They're templated.

Amazon has six pagers and Google has OKR's and Sales Force has v2mom and, you know, there's all these different rituals that, that people do.

Coda’s Golden Ritual: Dory and Pulse ▶

It's a meeting management system that encourages open communication and inclusive decision-making.

• First, during meetings, instead of a round-table discussion, each participant writes down their thoughts independently (Pulse). Their responses are hidden from each other to avoid bias and encourage independent thinking. After everyone has written down their thoughts, they are revealed for discussion.
• Secondly, instead of random questions, they put forward their queries on a platform called Dori (named after the questioning fish in "Finding Nemo"). The questions are then upvoted or downvoted to prioritize which ones to discuss.

Rituals reflect company culture. They give insights into the culture of a company and how work is conducted there. For instance, Coda's ritual of Dori Pulse highlights its culture of open communication, unbiased opinion sharing, and inclusive decision making.

Building two products - for customers and employees. Dharmesh Shah, the founder of HubSpot, suggests that when building companies, two products are being developed: one for customers and another for employees. The latter, referred to as "culture," describes how a company operates and how work is done.

Shishir’s most impactful rituals: Arianna Huffington’s Reset, Gusto’s incredible hiring call, and Coinbase’s RAPIDs ▶

• Reset ritual by Ariana Huffington: This involves creating a one-minute personal video as a sort of meditative exercise. In team meetings, a team member's video is randomly chosen to be played, allowing the team to both relax and get to know each other better.
  • Everybody gets back into that sort of zen state a little bit, and you learned a little bit about each other."
• Celebrate job offers as a team at Gusto: Gusto has a unique approach to job offers where the entire group of people who interviewed the candidate join the call to congratulate the new hire. This is a wonderful way to make a new hire feel welcomed and appreciated.
• Develop a decision-making ritual: Inspired by Coinbase, Coda added a decision-making ritual named "rapids." In the meeting, roles are defined with everyone’s decision written next to their name. This not only facilitates decision-making but also streamlines communication and ensures everyone knows their role.

How do you find your own team’s rituals ▶

• Reassess and adapt rituals as the company grows: It's normal for some company rituals to work great when the company is at 100 people but become problematic when it grows to 1,000. It's important to actively reassess and adapt these rituals as the company expands.
• Create rituals for different operational modes: Companies often have distinct rituals for "peace times" and "war times," with the latter often involving a more focused, streamlined approach to achieving goals.
  • Facebook, for instance, refers to these periods as "lockdowns," during which they suspend their usual goal-setting process and everyone focuses on a key task or project
• Allow some rituals to form organically: Not all rituals need to be enforced top-down. Some of the most effective rituals can grow organically, driven by the needs of the team.

How to change things when change is hard ▶

• Intentionally create rituals to foster desired behaviors. There are instances where organizations deliberately form a ritual to drive specific behaviors. This requires an understanding of what you want to achieve and then designing a ritual that leads to those outcomes.
• Use the "Switch" framework: Direct the Rider, Motivate the Elephant, and Shape the Path. According to the book, there are three key steps:
  • Direct the Rider by telling people what to do, which could include incorporating the ritual into new hire onboarding.
  • Motivate the Elephant to create momentum for the change. In the context of rituals, this often involves branding and naming the ritual, which can help anchor the idea and foster a sense of identity.
  • Shape the Path by setting up the environment in a way that makes it easier to perform the ritual. This might involve templating or integrating the ritual into existing processes.

• Branding and naming rituals is critical: This helps to anchor the idea and foster a sense of identity around it. Naming and branding the ritual can make it something to be proud of and help the team form an identity around it.
• Make rituals easy to follow:The easier a ritual is to follow, the more likely it is to be adopted and regularly practiced. This can involve creating templates or integrating the ritual into existing workflows.

Airbnb’s unique rituals ▶

• Inject some fun into your rituals:  At Airbnb, "One is formal Friday where people dress up in suits and gowns on Fridays. Another is human tunnel for all new employees where every new employee has to run through a human tunnel and jump into like a beanbag or something."
• Create spaces for new hires to connect with veterans: In Airbnb's "New Hire Tea Time”, new hires drink some tea with some veterans and chat about where they're from and things like that.

A back story on YouTube and valuing consistency over comprehensiveness ▶

• Be strategic about content and user experience: At YouTube in its early years, a significant decision was whether to link out to content from other platforms. Despite having one viewpoint that this would be what the user wants, they ultimately decided against it because they valued the consistency of the user experience on their platform over the comprehensiveness of available content.
• Frame the problem differently when faced with tough decisions: This is what YouTube did when trying to decide whether to link out to other content. Instead of focusing on that specific problem, they asked a more theoretical question: In the future, would the online video market value consistency or comprehensiveness?
• Prioritize consistency when making strategic decisions: This meant choosing to create a more consistent user experience across fewer devices rather than offering a more comprehensive but potentially inconsistent experience across all devices. As a result, they decided to take back control of the YouTube from Apple, despite the fact that this would mean giving up default distribution on the world's most popular phone at the time.

Eigenquestions: What it is, how to use it, and examples of it ▶

This is the question that, when answered, also answers the most subsequent questions. For example, the discussion around whether YouTube should prioritize "consistency over comprehensiveness" clarified many other decision points.

• Rank Questions by Potential Impact: We usually rank questions by the order we came up with them or their apparent importance. However, the Eigenquestion concept encourages us to rank questions by the number of other questions they could potentially answer or eliminate.
• Practice asking Eigenquestions in low-stakes situations" For instance, if you're tasked with bringing a newly invented teleportation device to market, and you can only ask two questions about it. This exercise pushes you to ask questions that can truly drive your decisions, for example, "Is it safe enough for humans?" and "Is it more expensive to buy them or to run them?”

One of Shishir’s favorite retired interview questions ▶

• Practice Eigenquestions in low-stakes scenarios: Using Eigenquestions—questions that drill down to the core of a situation—in light-hearted or trivial situations can help develop this skill effectively.
• • And the question is, um, a group of scientists have invented a teleportation device. They've hired you, Lenny, to be their sort of business counterpart, bring this to market, product counterpart, whate- this question actually worked well for any role. Let's say you could be a product manager for this thing, bring it to market. Um, uh, what do you do?
• Use Eigenquestions to unearth the core of a problem: Recognizing the key, or Eigenquestions, can streamline the decision-making process. In the case of the teleportation device:
• • Is it safe enough for humans or not? And the second one is, is it more expensive to buy them or to run them?

How to evaluate talent, a story about YouTube and breaking down PSHE ▶

Evaluation should be based on problem-solving ability, solution creating capacity, decision-making about execution, and finally actual execution.

PSHE (Problem, Solution, How, Execution) is a framework to measure step-by-step progression in one's career.

"So here's how it works. So if you're sort of a junior product manager, what happens? You get handed a problem, you get handed a solution, you get handed the how...And at some point, you're senior enough that you tell us the problems, and you say, "Hey, I know you told me to go work on activation, but actually I think our issue is brand." Or, "I think our issue is quality." Or, "I think our issue is..." Whatever it might be. And that's sort of the pinnacle of this way of thinking about it."

This method ensures that those in senior positions are not only good executors but also effective problem-solvers and strategic decision-makers.

Radford has really interesting way of describing that as you grow in a profession... He uses the analogy of someone like, a sailor, and that a, a junior sailor is, like, learning to tie knots. And then you gradually can tie all the standard knots, and then you can tie the advanced knots and so on. And somehow you kind of work your way up. And at some point, the way you're judged is you invented nylon.

How to approach reference checks and what questions to ask ▶

• Reference checks can give a broader, more complete picture of a candidate's abilities, performance, and personality. “Reference check is the top of the list… Like, their knowledge... What you're gonna get out of 30 minutes of artificial scenarios is just, like, never gonna compare what, what a good reference check will give you."
• Technique for actually doing the reference check: Instead of asking direct questions about a specific individual during a reference check, it is suggested to ask more general questions about the team. For instance, "When you think of your teams, who is best at..."

A balanced interview should contain "home court, away court, neutral court" questions. Home court questions are about the company interviewing, away court questions are about the candidate's past experiences, and neutral court questions are unrelated to either, providing a balanced assessment of the candidate's abilities.

Favorite books ▶

• "Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard" by Chip and Dan Heath. The world is constantly evolving, and being flexible and adaptable to change is crucial. By learning about how to manage and thrive in changing circumstances, you can equip yourself with tools and strategies for success in your personal and professional life.
• "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud. The book's exploration of communication through comics can help us understand how to more effectively tell stories and convey complex ideas.

Favorite shows/movies ▶

• Only Murders in the Building
• WandaVision from the Marvel series.

Favorite interview questions ▶

• The teleporter question - Mentioned above
• The dashboard prompt series - This set of questions has several steps:
  • The interviewee is asked to pick their favorite technical product, with the constraint that it cannot be something they built, worked on, or competed with. Then ask to explain why they chose that product, testing their passion and understanding.
  • The interviewee is asked to design a one-page dashboard for that product, as if they were the CEO or general manager. This tests their understanding of the product and its most important elements. Then they are asked to redesign the product as if hired by a competitor to design a "me too" version of the product. This examines their understanding of the essential elements of the product and their innovative thinking.
  • The interviewee is given a hypothetical scenario where resources are cut down to a quarter of the original scope. This tests their ability to prioritize and adapt.
  • Finally, the interviewee is asked how they would differentiate if they could only change one element of the product. This tests their understanding of the product's unique selling points and their innovative capabilities.

Who in the industry Shishir respects as a thought leader ▶

• Ben Thompson from Stratechery - Shishir speaks highly of Ben's natural instinct for writing and his ability to express complex thoughts and feelings with clarity,
• Ariana Huffington - Shishir always learns a lot when he talks to Ariana, highlighting her as a source of valuable insight and knowledge.
• Shreyas Doshi - Despite starting with almost no Twitter followers, Doshi is now seen as providing insightful and well-put-together tweets
• Fidji Simo - As the head of Instacart, Simo is someone from whom Shishir states he learns a lot
• Daniel Ek - The CEO of Spotify, Ek is admired for his unique way of thinking and his ability to balance long-term and short-term views.
• Reid Hoffman, Ammon Thonaja, Mamoon Hamid, Quentin Clark, and Sarah Guo - Coda’s board.

This is a human edited summary of the podcast episode with Shishir, by Gaurav Chandrashekar (@cggaurav, productscale.xyz). To listen to the full episode, go here.