What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda)

1. Seek “Oh Shit” Moments

Actively seek out uncomfortable situations where you feel underqualified to foster growth and build a new foundation. Regularly assess your career by counting these moments; a lack of them indicates a need for change and deeper engagement.

2. Build Systems, Not Just Goals

Shift your focus from being solely obsessed with goals to building consistent, “default-on” systems that inevitably lead to desired outcomes. For example, establish a regular routine for customer interaction rather than just setting a goal to talk to customers, as this builds stronger instincts.

3. Orient Teams Towards a “Cathedral” Vision

Ensure your team understands the larger vision or “cathedral” they are building, not just the individual “bricks” they are laying. Present the vision through multiple facets (write-ups, metrics, mocks) to make it clear and inspiring for everyone and remove mystery from broader constraints.

4. Learn by Making, Not Talking

Prioritize learning through action by immediately running experiments, building prototypes, writing docs, or creating mocks instead of engaging in prolonged discussions. Expressing ideas through creation is more valuable and faster than endless talk or pontification.

5. Practice Deep, Holistic Listening

When listening, consciously try to absorb every fragment of what the other person is saying, including non-verbal cues, without simultaneously crafting your response. This allows for deeper understanding and more powerful insights, rather than just preparing for the next step of the conversation.

6. Cultivate a Beginner’s Mind

Approach problems with a “beginner’s mind,” as if you know nothing about the topic, to encourage first-principles thinking and uncover novel solutions. Use this approach in reviews by having others observe and identify issues from a fresh perspective.

7. Get Early Customer Exposure

Seek out customer-facing roles early in your career to gain deep expertise and intuition about customer needs, as this experience is invaluable throughout your professional life and often undervalued in tech organizations.

8. Define Principles: Read, Mentor

To develop your own principles, read broadly from diverse fields beyond your immediate industry. Additionally, pay attention to the advice you consistently give when mentoring others, as these often reveal your deeply held beliefs and help clarify your own thinking.

9. Learn from Experts, Dive Deep

To learn quickly, seek out and study the best practitioners in any given craft, then deconstruct their methods. Additionally, actively put yourself in uncomfortable, challenging situations that force you to develop new skills, especially early in your career.

10. Assume Customers Don’t Care

When developing products or communicating with customers, assume they don’t inherently care about your product itself, but rather about solving their problems. This forces you to focus on delivering impact and communicating more sharply and concisely.

11. Separate Strategy from OKRs

Crucially separate your strategy discussions from your OKR (Objectives and Key Results) and metric-setting processes. Ensure you have a distinct strategy ritual to avoid conflating strategic thinking with goal setting, which is a common mistake.

12. Adopt Two-Way Write-Ups

Transition from one-way write-ups to “two-way write-ups” where feedback and discussion are integrated into the content itself. Include features like “done reading” buttons, upvotable questions (Dory), and sentiment/pulse ratings to foster inclusive, efficient decision-making.

13. Streamline Product Reviews with Catalyst

Adopt the “Catalyst” ritual for product reviews, scheduling multiple one-hour blocks where the whole company is available. Assign clear roles (driver, maker, brain trust, interested) and run multiple non-overlapping topics concurrently to increase throughput and ensure the right people are present.

14. Use Group “Tag-Up” Meetings

Avoid discussing project work solely in one-on-ones, as this creates information silos and fidelity issues. Instead, hold weekly “tag-up” meetings with key stakeholders (e.g., product, engineering, design) to unblock decisions and make progress collaboratively in a small group setting.

15. Calibrate Feedback with Flash Tags

Implement “flash tags” (FYI, Suggestion, Recommendation, Plea) for feedback to clearly calibrate the importance and urgency of each comment. This helps teams prioritize feedback effectively, speeds up decision-making, and avoids treating every comment with the same weight.

16. Prioritize with $100 Voting

During planning or brainstorming, use “$100 voting” by listing problems/solutions in a table and giving each participant $100 to allocate to their priorities. This quickly reveals collective priorities and highlights areas of disagreement for discussion.

17. Follow the 10% Planning Rule

Implement a “10% planning rule,” dedicating no more than 10% of an execution period to planning. This prevents over-planning and ensures flexibility to adapt to new learnings after launch, avoiding being bogged down in planning.

18. Stay Calm, Prioritize, Act

In challenging or scary scenarios, prioritize staying calm, assessing the situation clearly, prioritizing actions, and then taking decisive steps. This approach, learned from high-stakes situations, is applicable even in less extreme scenarios like software development.

19. Prepare, Check, Ensure Redundancy

Thoroughly prepare for important tasks, even spending months for a few days of activity, and implement extensive checklists. Build redundancy into your systems to ensure success and mitigate risks, checking equipment and plans multiple times.

20. Scale Advice by Writing

As a leader, if you find yourself repeating the same advice in one-on-ones, write it down to scale your insights and clarify your own thinking. This also allows for feedback and refinement from others.

21. “Make Things Happen” Motto

Adopt the motto “make things happen” by actively striving to be the person who creates momentum, positive change, and progress in all aspects of your life, whether work, personal, or hobbies.

22. Know When to Back Down

Recognize that the safest approach often involves knowing when to retreat or “come down” from a challenge, even if it means putting your ego in check. Prioritize safety and practicality over pushing forward in unsafe conditions.