Rituals and Templates of Great Product Teams | Lane Shackleton (CPO Coda)
Proven rituals and templates to help you craft a great vision, get stakeholder buy-in, make decisions faster, and learn by making not debating
Dear subscribers,
Today, I want to share a new episode with Lane Shackleton (CPO Coda).
Lane has interviewed 100s of product teams as Coda’s Chief Product Officer, including at Figma, Uber, and Spotify. He shared his favorite rituals from these interviews for crafting a vision, running product reviews, making decisions, and more.
I’ve also included templates for each ritual to help you implement them quickly.
Watch now on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.
Lane and I talked about:
(00:00) Cathedrals, not bricks to craft a great vision
(03:41) Moving beyond the 1-line vision statement with 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
(26:31) Building a culture where people learn by making, not talking
(30:46) The trait that leaders and makers respect the most
Templates to put these rituals into practice
To help you put Lane’s rituals into practice, I’ve included templates for each below:
Craft a product vision with the Cathedrals exercise
Get stakeholder buy-in with two-way writeups
Address risks before launch with pre-mortems
Learn by making, not debating with one-way vs. two-way doors and cupcakes
Let’s walk through each ritual and template step by step.
1. Craft a product vision with the Cathedrals exercise
Tired of generic 1-line vision statements?
Try this Cathedrals template to bring your vision to life through multiple artifacts:
Get your team together to discuss the high-level vision
Have each person fill in a part of the template (e.g., landing page copy, billboard)
Regroup to discuss the template together
I love this exercise because it lets your team contribute to the vision and gives them a sense of co-ownership.
2. Get stakeholder input and buy-in with two-way write-ups
Tired of super long comment threads in your product proposals?