6 time-saving strategies for product teams
How teams at companies like Tonal, Huge, and Intercom save time every day with Coda.
Rachel Ding
Solutions Architect at Coda
6 time-saving strategies for product teams
By Rachel Ding
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Product teams · 7 min read
1. Transforming chaos into clarity: Tonal’s alignment enforcer in Coda led to faster project delivery.
The best laid plans aren’t worth much if no one can find them. During his first days as a Staff Product Manager at Tonal, Zach Lebovics found what he described as a “doc-splosion.” The company, which creates an at-home smart gym system, had such scattered and ineffective documentation that team members often couldn’t figure out what to do next. Roadmaps, plans, and records were nearly proprietary information, which meant that teams struggled to function when someone was out, and sharing progress outside the team was onerous. Zach knew the answer wasn’t more planning. It was effectively using the plans that had been made. So, Zach turned to Coda. He created a product roadmap for his team that connected strategy memos, execution roadmaps, PRDs, Jira data, and executive dashboards. This doc immediately aligned the team on easy-to-find objectives, so Zach and co could ditch their less-than-trustworthy spreadsheets. The Coda doc became what Zach believes every team needs: an “alignment enforcer.” It also happened to cut out full days of meetings. Over time, Zach’s initial roadmap doc has grown into a product team hub that empowers teams to find and focus on their work without constant check-ins. Today, they’re saving four meetings per team per week on average, and shipping 25% faster.2. Simplified solutions: Intercom used Coda to make admin smarter, not harder.
Different teams working on different elements of the same project need different things. Obvious? Sure, but how does one PMM actually supply several different teams with the resources they need without overwhelming everyone? Intercom hosts customer service and communications software solutions for over 600 million users every day. Their PMMs work with cross-functional teams building cutting edge solutions. But those PMMs often found it difficult to work with so many teams needing different access to different information about the same project. Things ended up in siloed databases that cost the team time and resources, and key information often got lost in translation. “We needed to give people on various teams the information to understand our goals, complete their tasks, and keep the momentum going,” says Mark Iafrate, PMM at Intercom. In Coda, Mark built a cross-team information hub that links the partnerships team with several internal marketing teams. Now, Mark’s team knows exactly where to direct anyone for any information, assets, or references needed for a campaign. This one doc, which took Mark about one day of work, saves Intercom PMMs a full work day every month—which adds up to more than the annual vacation policy at some companies—thanks to cross-team Coda docs, and 80% of PMM work lives in Coda docs.
3. Breaking the meeting cycle: How Huge reclaimed half a day of productivity with Coda.
If your team is cohesive enough, working asynchronously shouldn’t be a daily barrier. But at Huge, a global creative agency specializing in data-driven intelligent experiences, teams spread across continents struggled to stay on the same page. Developers in Vietnam lost time when they needed to wait on the U.S.- or Colombia-based teams to be online, and vice versa. Before Coda, Huge had a pretty entrenched meeting culture, and many of those meetings were called simply to make sure updates were properly recorded on the Google doc that linked to all of their projects. Miscommunication could derail expensive, years-long projects, so the teams were used to calling extra meetings to clarify what was said or decided in prior meetings. Spencer Swan, Associate Director of Product Management, said Huge’s update process sometimes felt like playing “broken telephone.” It could be difficult to tell what was correct or outdated on the Google doc, hence the extra hours of meetings. Then, they decided to build a gold-standard template on Coda, which they call a “Living Product Document.” This internal version of a Product Requirements Document operates more like a team hub, bridging Huge’s internal teams and the client into one place. Templatizing their documentation for each client project simplified things for everyone, cutting up to four hours of meetings for teams on three continents and freeing them from confusion. That means each designer and developer reclaimed a full half day of time for deep work, leading to the smoothest product launches they had ever seen. According to Spencer—who built this Coda template reflecting Huge’s ProductOS process—every client project they’ve ever managed on Coda has shipped on time, and his team has generated an additional $10 million in revenue from highly satisfied clients.4. Streamlining decision-making: Searchlight leveraged Coda for better collaboration.
A few years ago, Searchlight had a documentation problem. The company was growing, helping major tech players source top talent with the help of AI. They used Notion to store their data, but it couldn’t perform well enough to be the organization’s single source of truth. “We had invested in a world-class team, but didn’t have a fast and easy way to preserve all the great thinking that went into our decision-making. All of this valuable, relevant information was siloed away,” says Kerry Wang, CEO of Searchlight. Wang gave Coda a try as an institutional knowledge hub, and her team found much more to love than they’d expected. Searchlight’s Coda doc made everyone’s jobs easier by connecting them to the context they needed to make more effective decisions. Sounds simple, right? It was, but the effects were huge. Searchlight’s hub immediately increased the entire team’s efficiency by 10%, saving the company 15 to 30 hours of labor every week.
5. From silos to synergy: Opportun’s focus on teams and tools in Coda catapulted their efficiency.
A fintech/AI company merger makes perfect sense. But any merger means sorting through different teams’ preferred workflows, which can get messy. Oportun’s merger with Digit was one such case. Before the merger, Opportun’s teams worked relatively idiosyncratically, leading to documentation silos that resembled “a sea of spreadsheets and software.” Sure, it slowed things down some, but Opportun believed prioritizing flexibility was the best way to care for employees. Meanwhile, Digit kept everything in Coda. The combined teams decided to learn how to work together before overhauling everything. When an organic explosion in growth made the newly combined teams have to focus on efficiency, Coda’s ability to bring teams and tools together easily won out. “We didn’t press Coda, we just made it available—and everybody adopted it, both top-down and bottom-up,” says Ron Hanna, VP of Technology Operations at Oportun. “I had never seen something like that before.” Coda paid for itself by replacing multiple other SaaS tools in the Opportun office, and that consolidation saved time too. Now, everyone works out of the same basic set of information, and the teams are spending half the amount of time on strategic execution and governance processes as they were before Coda.
6. Begin with consolidation: Foraged got off the starting line faster by keeping tools and data in Coda.
Foraged, a sustainability-focused food delivery company, had their work documentation and processes spread across Asana, Miro, and Google’s many apps, which led to regularly fragmented work. By the time Coda got onto their radar, the PMs at Foraged weren’t very keen on trying a new SaaS platform. Why bother? What could another digital tool even do? They were delightfully surprised to learn exactly what Coda could do. Coda’s comprehensive workspace, plus the extensive library of integrations and templates, made it the most valuable SaaS tool they’d tried. Foraged quickly realized the streamlined admin saved every single employee five hours of working time per week, cutting their time to market by two full months. “If we hadn’t had everything in Coda for product and tech, we would have lost weeks of time just consolidating that information to start our new initiatives,” says Jack Hamrick, Co-founder and CEO at Foraged.