How Huge cut 4 hours of meetings per week and generated $10M with Coda.
World-leading creative agency Huge united transcontinental product, design, and engineering teams to streamline internal operations and ship faster.
Spencer Swan
Associate Director of Product Management at Huge
How Huge cut 4 hours of meetings per week and generated $10M with Coda.
By Spencer Swan
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Case studies > Huge
Before: Playing “broken telephone.”
Sketchy phone coverage is one thing when you’re trying to catch up with a friend backpacking in Peru. But when you’re building experiences for global brands like Google, NBCU, or M&M, clear communication matters. Before they started using Coda, Huge’s globally distributed product teams could end up in hours of meetings every week, just to make sure they were on the same page. It wasn’t always that difficult, but when communication broke down, it took hours of meetings to bring the teams back together. Spencer Swan, Associate Director of Product Management, said Huge’s updates process sometimes felt like playing “broken telephone.” The closest thing Huge teams had to a single source of truth was a Google Doc for each account that linked out to Figma, Jira, and any other relevant tools. Any update to a project roadmap kicked off a tri-continental flurry of emails stuffed with updated presentations, spreadsheets, and PDFs. Teams trying to move forward with their work couldn’t always tell what information was correct or outdated, hence the extra hours of meetings. Sometimes, Swan says, they ended up having “meetings about meetings” to make sure everyone was aware of the context, insights, and evolution of each project through “oral histories” that were being passed down through meetings. “Docs lived across platforms, often with distributed access that prevented team members from seeing things (Google Workspace, Figma, Jira, etc.),” Swan says. “Presentations became the source of truth for roadmapping because they were shared with clients, but weren’t updated with recommendations after the presentation, resulting in more meetings to clarify the latest requirements.”Onboarding slowdowns.
On top of that, Huge had no standard way of tracking their work. “Each region had their own tradition and way of doing things,” says Lauren Woodmansee, Group Director of Product Strategy & Product Management. Every new add to every project wasted valuable hours getting up to speed on how the work was done, instead of diving straight into the work itself. There wasn’t a standardized onboarding process for new clients either. To explain the next steps to clients, teams would have to dig through presentations for previous clients and repackage them to tell the whole story. There wasn’t a single source of truth the account team could pass to new team members or client stakeholders that allowed them to find all the up-to-date information, so Huge had slow onboarding times that often delayed project delivery. This was a logistical problem for the organization, but it also grated with the specific culture of Huge’s team. “Huge has intrinsically motivated teams that take proactive action, so they need a shared living single source of truth to give them context to do their work, or else we have to meet,” says Swan. Sometimes, taking initiative even slowed things down, when proactive employees moved forward on things without access to necessary information.After: Fewer meetings, faster transitions.
After reading about the way Figma runs its product through Coda, Huge decided to try it out. Swan fleshed out a PRD doc to prove that it was possible to keep everyone on the same page. There were skeptics, but it wasn’t long before Swan saw his co-workers building out their own Coda docs to keep track of their work. When pitching Coda to skeptical teammates, he tells them, “I can promise you, we’ll have fewer meetings.” With Coda, teams could instantly update intricate, years-long product roadmaps across all of their offices rather than manually tweaking every corresponding spreadsheet and proposal doc. “Having this new document saves everyone on the dev team and all the designers between three and four hours of meetings a week,” Swan says. “With extremely far-flung dev teams that can range from 11 to 13 hours in time zone difference, centralizing decision logs, meeting notes, and prototypes is even more valuable for people’s time, and more importantly, their lives.” When Swan’s teams do have meetings, they’re able to link specific feedback from meeting notes onto co-workers’ personal task dashboards, immediately turning conversations into to-do lists—no meetings about meetings required. “We have a Coda formula that pulls our action items from meeting notes and connects them to personal task dashboards. The punch lists it creates have been the most valuable reference pages for our design and dev teams,” Swan says. He doesn’t seem to miss getting everybody on the phone at 11pm for last-minute refinement meetings.
Shipping on time, and on target.
Coda acts as the one place where everyone can go to see the vision, progress, and, ultimately, the final product. Referring back to a project’s blue-sky vision or feature roadmap no longer feels like a scavenger hunt. Design and dev teams have their own respective hubs within every client project hub, so they can focus on their work with the least distraction or doubt that information is up to date. Now, team leads can pour effort into their North Star strategy briefs, knowing the information will reach the people it needs to, across design, dev, and client teams—throughout the project’s lifecycle. The product team can be confident the vision from the beginning of the project carries through to the end of the project—from the backend to frontend details. With trusted, dynamic documentation that goes beyond broken-telephone oral histories, both internal and external stakeholders find it easier to get up to speed, align on deliverables, and experience the smoothest launches they’ve ever had. According to Swan, every client project they’ve ever managed on Coda has always shipped on time. Likewise, they’ve never had to cancel so many status meetings during releases until Coda. Huge’s “Living Product Documents” have had a measurable impact on more than just their meeting time. Swan reports that over 15 million users per month interact with digital products Huge built using Coda for their clients, and Huge has been able to secure over $10 million in additional revenue across project teams.
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