Coda’s year in review

Here’s a look at how we flipped the script on 2020.

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Coda Blog

5 min readDec 4, 2020

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Explore this post as an interactive doc here.

This year accelerated the future of work in the blink of an eye. As we adapted to long-distance collaboration, we realized that the new normal didn’t stretch our existing processes all that far. After all, Coda already ran on Coda. And we accepted the challenge of supporting teams outside of Coda with a new set of features and tools to help them explore an evolving workspace.

Our top moments.

It was hard to pick just three! Honorable mentions include a Year of the Maker campaign, Coda for Enterprise, and a shiny new Meet Coda video.

Enough of this Sheet: Documents and spreadsheets haven’t changed in over 40 years. We need a new doc that brings words, data, and teams together.

The Doc Gallery launch: A place for makers to explore and share docs.

Series C: We raised a Series C round, and we can’t wait to show you what we’ll build next.

We doubled our launch velocity.

2020 be damned. This year we launched 100 features with less than 100 people.

A lot of these features improved upon our existing building blocks. Others were in response to what our community needed: tools to adapt your collaboration and communication processes. And on top of it all, we cut the ribbon on a home for you to open-source and share your insights, the Doc Gallery.

We also fixed a bit of plumbing, like performance and search, to make Coda run smoother overall. Meanwhile, we grew the team by 40%, so imagine what we’ll do in 2021. (By the way, we’re still hiring.)

We shipped your top-requested features.

Our community was more involved than ever. We kept a close eye on your discussions, asked for your feedback in countless Betas, and studied your support tickets — all to help guide our product roadmap.

In January, Maria and Shishir hosted a webinar and invited makers to request and vote on features. At nearly year-end, we’ve shipped 20 of those requested features, and we have plans to continue work on many more.

Join us for this year’s reflection webinar on December 18th. Bring your wishes for 2021. 😀

We moved into our new office: Zoom.

Coda’s been a distributed team from the start. (Read more in Shishir’s Guide to Distributed Teams.) Going into 2020, we had people spread across eight states and two continents, three physical offices, and no central headquarters. As a result, we were used to troubleshooting audio and video issues over Zoom and optimizing our meetings to give remote voices equal air time. We also made it a habit to record all our team meetings and distribute the links afterward for folks in different time zones.

On March 18th, the WFH switch was flipped. Coda became a fully distributed team overnight, and the rubber hit the road. For the most part, all our systems worked well. And a few things happened that you might expect: We noticed our meetings increase substantially. Some of that was filling the necessary gaps to get our job done. A lot of it was voluntary social occupation and comfort. We installed a virtual water cooler in the form of a Zoom room that was always open (and a #misc-wfh Slack channel to pass around memes and flex on our sandwich game). Our usual happy hours and hackathons went virtual too.

Codans also started moving around more. Now going into 2021, we have Codans in 12 states and 4 time zones. We’re embracing our remote-first mentality, and we don’t plan on looking back. (Did we mention we’re hiring?)

*Want the exact numbers? Head over to* *the doc.*

Generated with the Zoom Admin Pack. See how.

We relied on our rituals.

All our usual rituals, like Dory and Pulse, became all the more important. We made sure to intentionally reinforce the patterns that were inclusive and remote-friendly, and made them readily available inside our doc. True to form, half of our most-used templates were meetings-related, including some new favorites. Like this Timer, which keeps us from soliloquizing over Zoom during Friday’s all-hands meeting.

Curious which templates we reached for most?

Note: You can find these templates with the / command, in the Explore panel, or in @codaquickstarts.

We maintained our culture with open communication.

Every week a member of our exec team writes an email to the entire company. Each email provides us with a channel to get to know our leaders, a space for big-picture guidance, and a way to recognize great work. In a year when we needed stability and guidance, it’s no surprise that “team” was mentioned over 100 times.