The rituals of great teams

Shishir Mehrotra is the co-founder and CEO of Coda, previously a senior product and engineering leader at YouTube and Microsoft, and a Spotify board member. The conversation covers Coda's growth loops (Black and Blue loops), the golden rituals that shape great teams and his forthcoming book on them, the eigenquestion decision technique, and how he evaluates product talent using the PSHE framework and reference checks.

01Key learnings

• Map your product's growth as loops rather than linear funnels, and draw a diagram of how users bring in other users; Shishir says most products have a loop hiding in plain sight.
• Remove friction from the moment users share, as Coda did by charging only for document makers, not for people they share with.
• Treat publishing as a discovery channel: users who publish something useful for their niche can expose the product to new audiences while pursuing their own goals.
• Recognize that different entry points bring different users; shared-in users often activate and retain best, while top-of-funnel users need the most onboarding work.
• Find the eigenquestion: the single question whose answer resolves the most downstream decisions, such as valuing consistency over comprehensiveness in YouTube's Modern Family debate.
• Practice decision techniques in low-stakes settings, like hypothetical interview scenarios, so the skill develops before high-pressure moments.
• Adopt named, templated, and widely known team rituals, since Shishir argues great companies build a small set of them and culture shows up through them.
• When evaluating PMs, separate scope from quality of work using PSHE (problem, solution, how, execution), and rely most on reference checks that ask who is best at identifying problems and solving hard ones.

02Frameworks mentioned

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