The Exchanges

Q else I saw is that you are on the AdWords approval team. You're basically reviewing ads people submitted to run on AdWords, and that's kind of how you started in tech. So I guess, first of all, is that true? And then second of all, how did you graduate from that phase and become this chief product officer of one of the fastest growing, most interesting companies in the world?

A That was a, a really, uh, memorable time. It was, uh, there's an amazing cohort of People that started in tech. I think there was like two or 300 of us at that time, and then eventually thousands that started in Sheryl Sandberg's organization. I guess maybe some quick context. Before running ads on google.com at that time, you had to have them manually approved by a human. Um, before that was like handled by machine learning and, you know, outsourced to other countries. And so there was this process where basically an ad would show up on your screen. You would market family-safe, non-family-safe porn. And then you would, you know, based on that, it would either run or it wouldn't. And actually funny enough, some of my most successful friends, uh, were terrible at the approval bin. Like they failed the rote task of approving ads. They just like couldn't handle it. And they went on to be like really, really successful. So, uh, after working on ad approvals at that time, I moved to chat support. It was basically like when AdWords was launching chat support, I I remember very fondly having two chats, chatting with two advertisers at once, uh, moved on to phone support. That was eight hours a day of, of talking to AdWords customers. Um, really a total rollercoaster ride. It was basically like one minute you would pick up the phone and it would be, uh, someone from a fortune 100 comp…

AI assessment note: “after working on ad approvals at that time, I moved to chat support”

Q link to it in the show notes. I want to ask about what principles you've come to, but I also want to understand how you actually ended up doing ladders and performance review stuff at Coda. Would it be better to talk about that later after we go through some of these things? Or is there something you want to share first of just how you think about it, Dakota?

A When we were doing career ladders, first of all, we, you know, we put it off for, uh, quite a bit of time. And that was based on the advice of a lot of other leaders that said, like, as soon as you introduce this, then the incentives sort of like flipped from being company focused to being individual focused. And so I, I think we, we delayed it for a good bit of time. There came a time where we kind of decided Hey, look, we really do need to provide better guidance here about like what it means to grow and what it means to be great. And so about the same time we were doing the levels thing, I started writing down some of the principles that I've been publishing. One of the things that I think about a lot when talking about levels is just how to keep everyone oriented toward their team and their, their company. Right. And I think that we've done a really good job of that over the years. So levels aren't by any means at the forefront of any, uh, company discussion. In fact, we, we kind of don't use titles that much.

AI assessment note: “When we were doing career ladders, first of all, we, you know, we put it off”

Q Okay. Something I was curious about as you were chatting also is for folks that want to develop their own principles and define how they want to think about product. Is there anything you found to be useful in helping kind of emerge these into principles that you can come to? Is it just sitting around thinking, is there anything else you've done that has helped you define these things?

A Probably two things. One is, is reading really broadly. So I think, uh, not just reading kind of like PM style literature. Like I said, I, I think tend to get a lot of inspiration from outside of tech. I think that's one thing. I think the other thing is, is, you know, insofar as you get the opportunity to mentor other people, think about like what you're saying to these people, you know, like think about, okay, this person came to me with this challenge. What was my response? Why was that my response? Am I giving that response a lot of times? Okay. Maybe like this is a more deeply held belief. And, uh, so I think noticing those instances was helpful for me.

AI assessment note: “Probably two things. One is, is reading really broadly.”

Q All right. You're on. That'll be our sequel. Just our game. Next question. What is a favorite life motto that you either repeat yourself often, like to share with people around you, share with your kids maybe?

A I don't know if it's a motto as much as it's just a way of being. Essentially, the, the present moment is all that we have. Um, you know, realizing that our attention is very often on the past or the future, and in so many ways, the, the present is where it should be always, and so I think that that is something I think about a lot. I think maybe more broadly, I had a mentor, uh, who, who roughly said a version of, like, make things happen, and so I, I really try to apply that to anything that I do, if that's, like, work or life or sports, you know, I, I try to be the person who creates, like, momentum and positive change and progress, and so I think that that's, like, generally a good kind of motto to live by.

AI assessment note: “a mentor, uh, who, who roughly said a version of, like, make things happen”

Q Amazing. Okay. So on that same topic, I noticed maybe your first job was a mountain guide in Alaska. Was that inspired by this legacy? And also how did, why did you decide not to pursue that and get into product management? Completely different life.

A Yeah. Yeah. Very, very different. Uh, very different time. Didn't have kids back then. I was, I think I was convinced at the time I wanted a career outside. Uh, just like love spending time in the mountains and climbing things like that. To be honest, like I wasn't the best guide. There, there were a lot of amazing, you know, uh, uh, guides out there that just had, they were almost invincible in terms of their ability to climb for 20:30 hours. But I learned a lot from the experience and maybe the quick story on why I stopped, uh, guiding. I was on sort of a, what is like a dream trip for mountain guides, which is We were flown to a remote portion of Southeast Alaska, uh, about an hour. It's an hour long flight mountain called Mount Fairweather, beautiful, 15,000 foot peak. Um, and as a part of climbing on glaciers, one of the things that you do for context is you, you're roped to another person. And the reason that you do that is because if you fall, if someone falls in a crevasse, you want to be able to like stop them or pull them out. Um, so I was wrote to a very nice client that, uh, I was guiding, um, and he fell, uh, pretty close to the top on our way down. And luckily, like we were able to self arrest, um, and arrest that fall. But, you know, I spent probably the next like six hours walking down that mountain, thinking the same thing over and over again, which is like, I …

AI assessment note: “maybe the quick story on why I stopped, uh, guiding”

Q people can actually use at their companies. When someone's listening to this and they're like, oh, wow, this is extremely cool. How easy is it do you find for people to take a ritual from a company and implement it? Like how much of that is cultural and it's hard to transplant? Or do you find people can take this catalyst idea plug and play at a lot of companies?

A Yeah, I think it, it depends a lot on what your role in the company is. Like, you know, if you're maybe to, to say the extremes for a second, if you're like a brand new PM to an organization, you probably shouldn't go try to like remake the whole review product review cycle that like the head of product is really passionate about and is like crafted. But, you know, you can probably take, uh, uh, you know, a decision template or some interesting ritual That has facilitated a team, you know, in the past and use it with, with your team. Another one of my favorites there is a hundred dollar voting. Uh, we use that a lot in the context of planning. And I find that like creative rituals like that are easy to pick up for teams because oftentimes it's like, okay, maybe I'll describe the ritual real quick.

AI assessment note: “I think it, it depends a lot on what your role in the company is.”