Lane Shackleton: recommendation

Transcript context

…I guess one that I get asked about a lot on our team is called Catalyst. And I guess maybe to set some context on this one, in most product teams, the review forum is just a really important part of the product development process. And the core insight for most review forums or product reviews or decision forums is that they generally suffer from two problems that are hard to spot unless you've sat through hundreds of them. The first is they have standing attendees, and the second is they're normally single-threaded, meaning they're normally one topic at a time. So maybe I'll talk about both of those because I think they're not exactly intuitive. So when you think about what happens with a standing set of attendees, you either have the situation where you have too many people in the meeting or you have not enough people in the meeting, and both of those can cause problems. So if you've ever been in a meeting, I certainly have, where it's like, "Hey, do we have the salesperson who knows most about this or do we have the engineer who's actually implementing this here? Oh, great. They're not here? They're not a part of the standing set of attendees?" You either have to reschedule the meeting or worse, you just do the discussion without the person who's most knowledgeable, which seems crazy in retrospect. The second problem is single-threaded. So one topic at a time. So if you think about if a product development process is somewhat of a chaotic assembly line for a second, your review or your decision forum ends up being a big time bottleneck in many cases. And obviously you want to be in a situation where product people have a lot of autonomy and they can make most of the decisions themselves. And I'm a big believer in decentralized leadership and all of that, but there are things that cut across the company that need to get reviewed by a broader set of stakeholders. And so what happens when those things are single threaded is either the meeting is really long, so it's a three-hour review meeting once a week, and by the end everyone is about to fall asleep, or it's really short and it's really hard to get on the calendar. You're like, "Oh, can we get on the calendar in two weeks?" And the downside of the not being able to get on the calendar is that now you've just slowed down the whole velocity of the company because the throughput of your review meeting is really slow. So we built Catalyst to really solve those two problems. And so the way it works is it's essentially three one hour blocks throughout the week, and the assumption is that the whole company is free. So you can get anyone in the company for those three hours. And each topic has essentially four roles. Driver, maker, braintrust, and interested. It's a very transparent system. So a salesperson can say, "Oh, I'm interested in this product development review. I'm just going to mark myself as interested." iver, maker, braintrust, and interested. It's a very transparent system. So a salesperson can say, "Oh, I'm interested in this product development review. I'm just going to mark myself as interested." And then the driver is the person who's actually going to drive the meeting, drive the decision, drive the outcome, things like that. And basically, this is all centralized in one doc. And what happens is the day before, that hold that's on calendar gets removed, and then you have specific topics that get added. So there may be three topics going all at the same time because they don't have overlapping attendees. And the impact of this, I think if you really watch it in progress is huge. You basically have many topics running all at the same time, so the throughput is much better and you have the right attendees every single time, and you have a clear set of drivers and roles in these meetings. So that means that we can review work much, much faster with the right people, and ideally that results in more value to our customers, more things getting shipped, just a higher velocity organization. So that's one that we get asked about a lot. And actually a couple of weeks ago, we spent a while remaking the template for that one. I love that ritual. You actually wrote even in more depth in the post that we worked together on how Coda builds product, which we'll link to if folks want to try this out and you link to actual templates people can actually use it 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? How much 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?…

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