The rituals of great teams | Shishir Mehrotra, Coda, YouTube, Microsoft

I generally value the reference check over interview signals. You know, if I had to stack rank in interviews what is the best signal, the, uh, reference check is the top of the list. Tho- those people, you know, they work with this person for, you know, sometimes for years. Like, their knowledge ... What you're gonna get out of 30 minutes of artificial scenarios is just, like, never gonna compare with what a good reference check will give you. (instrumental music) Shishir Mehrotra is the co-founder and CEO of Coda. Before starting Coda, Shishir led the YouTube product engineering and design teams at Google, where he spent over six years. Before that, he spent six years at Microsoft. He's also on the board of Spotify. As you'll hear in this episode, Shishir is an incredibly deep and very first principles thinker on all kinds of topics. And in this episode, we cover growth strategy, specifically a framework that he calls blue loops and black loops. We talk about the rituals of great teams, something that Shishir's been passionate about and has been collecting from all of the best leaders in tech for the past two years, and which he'll soon turn into a book. We talk about Eigenquestions, which is not a German game show. He shares how he evaluates product talent and s- gives some really great advice on doing reference checks. We go into so many other topics. This is the longest episode that I've recorded yet, and you'll see why. Shishir is so full of wisdom, and we could have kept going for at least another hour. And so with that, I bring you Shishir Mehrotra. Hey, Kasey Winters, what do you love about Coda?

Coda's a company that's actually near and dear to my heart, because I got to work on their launch when I was at Greylock. But in terms of what I love about it, you know I love loops, and Coda has some of the coolest and most useful content loops I've seen. How the loop works is someone can create a Coda and share it publicly for the world. This can be how you create OKRs, run annual planning, build your own map, whatever. Every one of those Codas can then be easily copied and adapted to your organization without knowing who originally wrote it. So they're embedding the sharing of best practices of scaling companies into their core product and growth loops, which is something I'm personally passionate about.

I actually use Coda myself every day. It's kind of the center of my writing and podcasting operation. I use it for first drafts, to organize my content calendar, to plan each podcast episode, and so many more things. Coda is giving listeners of this podcast $1,000 in free credit off their first statement. Just go to coda.io/lenny. That's coda.io/lenny. Hey, Ashley, head of marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?