Do your team’s tools and processes provide lift or drag?

Learn how to assess which tools and processes work for your team, and which don't.

Katy Turner

Product Marketing Manager at Coda

Do your team’s tools and processes provide lift or drag?

By Katy Turner

Share this article

Share on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Facebook
Product teams · 8 min read
When was the last time you checked in with your team on how they did their work, not just whether or not the work was finished? If you’re not evaluating your team’s go-to tools and processes at least somewhat regularly, chances are they’re taking on a life of their own. Every team has tools and processes—don’t let yours go unexamined.
The tools you use should help, not increase overhead, so it makes sense for tools to be part of the annual refresh. It feels grounding to align on desired improvements in our work as a team and ideal new workflows as we embark on new contracts and budgeting cycles. If you want to use Q1 to try new things, rally everyone around the latest vision, and do retros on everything that happened last year, take this month to hone in on the foundational processes and most effective tools—and use Coda to help you do that.

How we run assessments at Coda.

 The new calendar year is the perfect assessment season because everyone is fresh and ready to reorient. There’s a little bit more margin all around in Q1, so that’s when we like to dig into the way our systems helped or hurt our progress last year. Seeing those issues as early as possible could mean the difference between achieving our 2025 goals and missing the mark. Optimizing workflow as people are getting into new rhythms also makes it easier to get on other teams’ calendars, and Coda’s tools assessments are a tightly collaborative process with IT. This feedback loop is crucial to a useful system assessment. IT keeps an eye on the tools teams have subscriptions to and asks teams for feedback that’s relevant to their procurement decisions. Team leads gather detailed input from their direct reports on both tools and processes, ideally in one team meeting. Then, they confer with IT. In some workplaces, that feedback doesn’t always make its way to IT, but we recommend it. This feedback loop is the key to a streamlined tools kit. With this collaboration, IT can better understand how their decisions impact the broader team and company goals for the year ahead, and your team can be confident their tools are the best ones for the job. The best way to audit your team’s processes and tools is to do a live team retroactive, and it’s important to include as many voices as possible—otherwise, the information you gather won’t be nearly comprehensive enough. These calls with the team are at the heart of the process. So, once you’ve brought the team together, it’s time to start asking questions.

Assessment questions to consider...

 The strength of your assessment depends on the questions you ask your team. The most basic set are obvious: what went well, what went wrong, what was unexpected, and what can we do differently next time? But you can get near infinitely more specific.
The important thing to remember with these questions is you are not asking your team whether they enjoyed using a specific tool or if the product works well. You’re looking at the foundational infrastructure of how the team works overall—and then extracting patterns. So try not to focus on whether or not a something worked well for your team on a single project. Instead, look for common themes across all workflows. Which tools were present in processes that your team found efficient? Which tools are currently used in workflows that need to be improved? Taking this lens gives your team actionable goals for how you’ll work over the next year and actionable feedback for the IT team to help you achieve them. We use a few flexible templates to collect and sort through everyone’s feedback. The simplest template is a table that gathers team input, with a handy AI boost. If you use Figjam for brainstorming, this retro template gathers your stickies into a table with columns that let team members vote on their support for each point. And if corralling the whole team at the end of the year proves too challenging, these templates make it easy to send a survey to team members. Even better, you can send this feedback (or a detailed AI-generated summary) to IT, so they can help create the perfect tools stack for your team. That way, they’re in on your needs without any additional schedule wrangling, and you and yours are equipped to achieve your 2025 goals ASAP. Here’s what that actually looks like with our product and engineering teams.

Product team audits start with planning.

 For product teams, figuring out the right processes and tools can revolutionize the starting line itself. When you’re trying to foresee every task on a year of product building, the planning documents can build up all too quickly. Our CPO, Lane Shackleton, tells the story of one product lead whose annual planning process regularly resulted in the creation of over 200 different documents. Lane admits he ran into similarly excessive doc situations when he worked at Google and YouTube. But when he started working at Pinterest, Lane implemented a single source of truth in a Coda doc, and that’s been his retro system ever since. By keeping everything in one doc, Lane has found that teams reach decisions more quickly, with better alignment and stickiness, and the action items those decisions lead to get off the ground more quickly. If you’re a product leader who wants to avoid generating a warren of documents and spreadsheets for your planning process, here are some questions to consider:
And it’s not worth going through this process if the results aren’t useful. Data, decisions, plans, and specific action items need to be easy for the entire team to agree upon, of course, but it’s equally vital that the results of your retro are highly visible, not stuffed in some document in a sub folder of the planning process. At Coda, we collect everything a team needs for both planning and execution in one space, which keeps tools lean and processes agile. Overall, running our audits in one doc that’s connected to all our other planning leads to faster decision making and more consistent output, thanks to interactive briefs.

Audits save engineering teams from drowning in data.

 Our Head of Engineering, Oliver Heckmann, has helped hundreds of engineers and engineering teams figure out their processes, and he’s seen some consistent problems pop up. “One of the most common paradoxes I hear when talking to engineering teams goes something like this: ‘We have an overwhelming amount of information, but I can’t find the information I need,’” he says. Most engineering teams he’s talked to work from a plethora of tools. They use different platforms and docs to track OKRs, tasks, roadmaps, meetings, bugs, wikis, etc. For these teams, that means a lot of updating different, disconnected tracking spaces, which leaves plenty of room for errors, misalignment, and inefficiency. Essentially, the process for working from and on so many tools exhausts teams. Since moving to Coda, Oliver has consolidated all of his team’s work into one Coda doc that serves as a single source of truth for everyone on the team, and things have been moving much more efficiently. In their team hub, engineers can see everything from a table of open Jira problems and notes from the last meeting to their daily tasks and how those tasks are connected to the overall roadmap—all in an easily shareable space that even lets external stakeholders stay updated without pinging Oliver too many times. That comprehensive workspace doesn’t mean Oliver and co are free from process and tools audits though. Here are the questions they consider in an audit:
Centralizing all the data and tools your team uses as much as you can keeps your team from getting lost in the planning sauce, increases efficiency that would otherwise be lost to constantly switching between platforms, and allows for more effective cross-functional collaboration with other teams.

Q1 can be your biggest opportunity.

 By assessing efficiencies before your team gets bogged down in their old routines, you’re investing in both your team and your year. Spending some time Q1 evaluating which tools and processes work and which don’t means that you and your team can streamline the rest of the year. If you do have to wait until later in the year to do the team retro, I’m sure you’ll be just fine. But in the meantime, think of lightweight ways to monitor what’s working. Sometimes things have to break to become obvious. Whenever you do your retro, make sure to think about your goals and how your tools provide lift or drag. If you don’t have a tool that lets you work the way you want, consider Coda. Share your tools and processes assessment with your IT team and see what they have to say about bringing everything together in one doc. I’m confident a solid Coda doc will make your processes more straightforward and your tools more agile, helping your team meet their benchmarks all the way through Q4 of next year.
Connect with us

Related posts

Explore more resources for product teams.
Free project management templates

Customizable templates to help you streamline any type of project.

11 Coda + Slack templates

Take collaboration to the next level.

Comparing productivity apps

A guide to Airtable, Confluence, Notion, and Coda.