Rituals of Great Decision-Making | Lenny & Friends Summit 2024
Lenny and Friends Summit 2024 talk in which Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Coda and former YouTube product leader, shares rituals for great decision-making, drawn from the book he is writing in the open, Rituals of Great Teams. It starts with Bing Gordon's golden rituals: great companies keep a small list of rituals that pass three tests - they are named, every employee knows them by their first Friday, and they are templated, like Amazon's six-pagers and Google's OKRs. Dharmesh Shah's observation frames the stakes: you build two products, one for customers and one for employees, and the second one is described as culture but runs on rituals. Mehrotra then works through four decision topics - the right question, process, forum and stakeholders - opening with YouTube's 2008 Modern Family question: the top search query was a show YouTube did not have, half the team wanted to link out to abc.com, half called it suicide, and a Google Shopping insight about users picking consistency over comprehensiveness reframed the whole debate. No sponsor read appears in this episode. PARTIAL COVERAGE: this summary highlights the framing and first topic; the remaining rituals are not covered. These are Mehrotra's own views and stories, not independently verified.
Executive Summary (TL;DR)
Lenny and Friends Summit 2024 talk in which Shishir Mehrotra, CEO of Coda and former YouTube product leader, shares rituals for great decision-making, drawn from the book he is writing in the open, Rituals of Great Teams. It starts with Bing Gordon's golden rituals: great companies keep a small list of rituals that pass three tests - they are named, every employee knows them by their first Friday, and they are templated, like Amazon's six-pagers and Google's OKRs. Dharmesh Shah's observation frames the stakes: you build two products, one for customers and one for employees, and the second one is described as culture but runs on rituals. Mehrotra then works through four decision topics - the right question, process, forum and stakeholders - opening with YouTube's 2008 Modern Family question: the top search query was a show YouTube did not have, half the team wanted to link out to abc.com, half called it suicide, and a Google Shopping insight about users picking consistency over comprehensiveness reframed the whole debate. No sponsor read appears in this episode. PARTIAL COVERAGE: this summary highlights the framing and first topic; the remaining rituals are not covered. These are Mehrotra's own views and stories, not independently verified.