Opinion
Shackleton: Tech career ladders are overly complex and inconsistent
“Most companies have career ladders with, like, 10 or 15 levels, and, you know, as soon as they hit some scale, the levels, there's, like, levels between levels, and I feel like I looked at the one at Google and, you know, you kind of, like, needed a PhD to dec…”
Insight
Shackleton: Career ladders flip employee focus from company to individual
“As soon as you introduce this, then the incentives sort of like flipped from being company focused to being individual focused.”
Disclosure
Shackleton: Coda does not make employee levels publicly visible internally
“Role stages are not visible across the whole company. Like, you know, we're not showing levels of any individual PM or designer, and that's partially because we just don't want to put a big focus on it.”
Disclosure
Shackleton: Coda uses a centralized committee rather than managers for compensation
“We have a centralized compensation committee and that's who decides compensation. And so it's not the manager that drives your compensation.”
Insight
Shackleton: Product teams should focus on systems rather than goals
“Instead of being as obsessed with a goal, You know, be obsessed with the system that gets you there. And so the phrase I sometimes use is, you know, goals with good intentions don't work.”
Insight
Shackleton: Discussing product work in 1-on-1s is an anti-pattern
“A lot of work and project work tends to get discussed in one on ones. And actually that's like an, it's really an anti pattern. It's a pattern you should try to avoid. So if you're talking to your manager about product work what's not happening in that moment …”
Insight
Shackleton: OKRs are not strategy and must be separated from planning
“The first that I end up seeing a lot is just this idea that like, okay, ours are not actually strategy. So, you know, I think the way that, that we plan and the way that our customers plan, the kind of key point is it's critical to disconnect like strategy dis…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Shackleton: Most large tech companies have 10-15 levels, Coda has five
“I think most other companies, especially large companies has, have 10 to 15 levels. I think we've made a really conscious choice to have only five.”
Insight
Shackleton: Great stories are built around a five-second moment of transformation
“The nugget of a great story is like five seconds of transformation. So if you just orient like everything else around that, like moment of trans, you know, transformation, then you end up usually telling a reasonably good story.”
Insight
Shackleton: Tracking 'Oh Shit' Moments Calibrates Career Growth
“The basic kind of thesis is that moments that stretch you are moments that you feel uncomfortable in, or you find yourself saying like, oh shit, you know, I shouldn't be here. I'm underqualified to be here. Those are the moments you should be seeking out, righ…”
Insight
Shackleton: Weighting all feedback equally slows organizations down
“Otherwise every bit of feedback is taken the same, which is just fundamentally like the impact of that is it slows everything down. Cause now you're looking at like a list of pieces, a hundred pieces of feedback and you're going like, oh man, we gotta address …”
Insight
Shackleton: Product reviews fail due to standing attendees and single-threaded agendas
“Most review forums are You know, product reviews or decision forums is that they generally suffer from two problems that are like kind of hard to spot unless you've sat through, you know, hundreds of them. The first is they have standing attendees. And the sec…”
Insight
Shackleton: Assume people don't care to force sharper, concise communication
“You know, I think most people can be like way more concise with their communication. Like even internally, people don't care. You know, like you should assume that people don't care. Or, you know, if you're, you know, talking to customers, writing a blog post …”
Insight
Shackleton: Decision-making is shifting to interactive 'two-way write-ups'
“And then kind of the thesis is that we're like in the midst of a new phase, which is essentially two-way write-ups and that's where it's more conversational and feedback and discussion is like actually part of the content itself.”
Insight
Shackleton: Teams should spend at most 10% of execution time planning
“What we call a 10% planning rule, which is essentially, you know, just ensure that you're not for a given time period planning for more than 10% of that execution period.”
Insight
Shackleton: Test candidates by having them explain topics to laypeople and experts
“I sometimes do a version of making them explain it two different ways after and making the candidate explain it two different ways and saying like, okay, now you have to explain that to, you know, your grandparent. And then like now, you know, you just told me…”
Insight
Shackleton: Repeating advice in one-on-ones is a signal to document it
“Anytime you find as a leader yourself kind of like repeating the same lessons, it's a good, it should be a good flag to say like, oh, I could, I should probably scale this in some way.”
Disclosure
Coda scheduled mandatory weekly Friday customer demo sessions in its early days
“In the early days of Coda, we actually did something similar. We had a time allotted on Fridays. And it was basically like, it was on the calendar, a customer or a potential customer was coming in. And so you knew that it was going to happen. And you had to ha…”
Assertion Supported
Shackleton: Google previously required a CS degree for PM transitions
“I probably worked for at least four or five years before being able to move to PM. And that was, I think that was like a slightly harrowing journey because at the time you had to have a computer science degree.”
