How to Run an Effective Product Team From Your Coda Docs

Well-functioning teams are the lifeblood of successful companies.

In particular, product development teams are often at the center of large cross-functional efforts that are critical to a company’s goals. But, it can be challenging to keep people aligned to the project roadmap across a diverse set of roles, relationships, and communication styles.

While leaders may debate how to get there, the best teams usually exhibit a few characteristics:

• Organized and coordinated: Team members are continuously in sync on tasks and dependencies within and across teams
• Connected directly to the customer: The voice of the customer is present in discussions and integrated deeply into the team’s actions and decisions
• Clear set of goals and awareness of progress: The team is aligned on KPIs and key results that ladder up to broader goals
• Open and mindful about risks and tradeoffs: The team is transparent with risks and is intentional about the tradeoffs necessary to achieve their goals

This week’s featured in-doc templates are designed to let product teams do their best work, right from their Coda docs.

To-Do List with Progress Bar

We are big believers that being able to visualize your progress is a strong incentive for producing high quality work. Our To-Do List With Progress Bar adds a simple progress bar above your team’s to-do list. Check the tasks off your team’s list and get the reward of watching your completion percentage move up.

Heads up: the percentage completed and progress bars are great examples of Coda’s formula language at use in the canvas.

Team Goals

Here at Coda, we try to structure all our goals using the OKR method. John Doerr, the legendary venture capitalist, even has an amazing OKR tracker in our template gallery!

Our Team Goals template allows you to easily add key results and linked associated objectives, right in your Coda doc. There are two connected tables, and easy buttons to add new items with one click. Drop the template right into your doc and you’ll instantly have a tool to keep your team’s work aligned with what matters.

Red, Green, Yellow Risk Map

The best product teams and product managers are able to see all angles of a problem. This extends beyond just what the ideal outcomes are — it also means keeping track of the risks associated with a given decision.

Our Red, Green, Yellow Risk Map utilizes Coda’s conditional formatting features to provide an easy way to rank and manage the associated risks with a project or launch. But what good is knowing the risk if you don’t have a product plan to handle it adequately? To keep track of how you’ve prepared to manage the risk, add your mitigating tactics in the ‘mitigation’ column.

Team Projects and Tasks

Similar to the Team Goals template, our Team Projects and Tasks template links two tables and has buttons to instantly add new rows to either. Since the best product teams rely on their teammates to be accountable for their work, we’ve added a few columns to these tables for you to mark the owner of a task and associated project—which works to simplify your sprint retrospective. There are even formulas to show you at a glance how many tasks are completed and how many are still open.

That’s it for this week! How are you going to use our in-doc templates to build the product of your dreams?

Have ideas for other templates we should make? Send us your favorites and be sure to check back next week where we highlight another use case.