What sets great teams apart

Lane Shackleton, Chief Product Officer of Coda, shares how he thinks about product management principles, team rituals, and career growth. The conversation covers his path from mountain guide to product leader, Coda's approach to leveling and decision-making rituals, and practical habits for building great product teams.

01Key learnings

• Treat the core job of product work as turning ambiguity into clarity, and build repeatable systems rather than chasing one-off goals.
• Build default-on customer contact systems, such as a standing weekly slot with customers, instead of quarterly OKRs to talk to customers.
• Ask career questions about how many 'oh shit' moments someone has had recently, a sharper signal of growth than asking whether they feel they are growing.
• Use shared feedback labels like FYI, suggestion, recommendation, and plea to calibrate how seriously team members should take each piece of input.
• Run cross-functional review forums with rotating topics and defined roles (driver, maker, braintrust, interested) so decisions move faster with the right people.
• Hold group 'tag-up' meetings with key stakeholders instead of discussing project work in one-on-ones, which loses fidelity through repeated retelling.
• Test extremes early with quick experiments rather than debating a product idea for months, as the skippable ads story illustrates.
• Keep planning to roughly 10% of an execution period and separate strategy discussions from OKR and goal setting.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.