What sets great teams apart | Lane Shackleton (CPO of Coda)

... moments that stretch you or 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, right? Like those are the moments that stretch you and give you sort of like a new, uh, foundation. So oftentimes, you know, you'll hear like a career question like, "All right. Do you feel like you're growing in your role?" And that's like a very ambiguous, in my opinion, way to ask this question. A much sharper way is like, "Hey, how many like oh-shit moments have you had in the last like six months, year, two years, and what are they?" I think if you ask yourself that question and the answer is, "It's been a really long time since I've been like stretched in some meaningful way," or, "I've felt like I- I'm underqualified to be there," then it may be worth kind of like digging into.

(instrumental music) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Lane Shackleton. Lane is chief product officer at Coda, where he is held the role for over eight years. Before that, he was group product manager at YouTube, a product specialist at Google, and as you'll hear, he started his career as an Alaskan mountain guide and then as a manual reviewer of Google AdWords ads. Lane is an incredibly deep thinker, very first-principles oriented, and has built an incredible product team and culture at Coda. In part, he's done that by studying the principles and rituals of great product leaders and great product teams. In our conversation, Lane shares what he's learned and what he's found great PMs and great teams do differently. He shares a bunch of his favorite rituals and principles, how you can implement them on your own team, plus a really clever and unique way of understanding if you're making progress in your career, plus so much more. I could talk to Lane for hours, but we try to keep this to under an hour and a half. With that, I bring you Lane Shackleton after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next-generation A/B testing platform built by Airbnb alums from modern growth teams. Companies like DraftKings, Zapier, ClickUp, Twitch, and Cameo rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern growth team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools or trying to run your own experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most about working there was our experimentation platform, where I was able to slice and dice data by device types, country, user stage. Eppo does all that and more, delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytic cycles and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. Eppo lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics and instead use your North Star metrics like activation, retention, subscription, and payments. Eppo supports tests on the front end, on the back end, email marketing, even machine learning claims. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com. That's geteppo.com and 10X your experiment velocity. This episode is brought to you by Vanta, helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate your growth. Thousands of fast-growing companies like Gusto, Calm, Quora, and Modern Treasury trust Vanta to help build, scale, manage, and demonstrate their security and compliance programs and get ready for audits in weeks, not months. By offering the most in-demand security and privacy frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, and many more, Vanta helps companies obtain the reports they need to accelerate growth, build efficient compliance processes, mitigate risks to their businesses, and build trust with external stakeholders. Over 5,000 fast-growing companies use Vanta to automate up to 90% of the work involved with SOC 2 and these other frameworks. For a limited time, Lenny's Podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-a.com/lenny to learn more and to claim your discounts. Get started today. (instrumental music) Lane, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.