Coda 3.0, New Builder, New Client

Hi All,

This month we signed our first multi-month renewal agreement with Big Spaceship, brought on a new builder, and celebrate the launch of Coda 3.0!

We also faced our first major challenge as a company - our client MediaCom canceled our project.

Highlights:

🐱‍🏍Welcoming Scott Weir to the Team

Scott has so much talent and a unique background we love - as a special ed teacher in the California public school system.

Scott has already won one of the first grants from Coda’s MakerFund to deliver an integration pack with Canvas (a learning management system used by many schools).

Scott’s passion for education is an amazing addition to our team (check out his "Get Unstuck" Coda sessions).

He also helped us secure our third client, BUCK, an early adopter of Coda with ambitions to use it across their entire org. More to come!

🖐We lose MediaCom as a client

In January we took on a "high risk/high reward" bet to transform MediaCom's talent function. We achieved stunning results in just 40 business days - taking them from zero to two hires per day.

Despite that success, we couldn't win the buy-in from the holding company behind MediaCom, Group M, to continue.

A few lessons learned:

  • Chunk out risk. We approached the MediaCom project as an “all in” initiative to transform ops. While the performance was there, the relationships needed to sustain that level of change management was not.

  • Choosing a lane accelerates adoption. Going in as “TalentOps” enabled us to quickly build relationships and make a lot of changes. We'll build on that.

  • Holding Cos behave differently. Taking on a Fortune 500 was challenging, a holding company added a level of complexity in how decisions are made and signaled that we were unable to navigate.

We’re taking a break on pursuing F500s for a bit, but are sharing what we learned with the community!

✨Bringing Ops Innovation to the Enterprise

We shared lessons learned on John Scrugham’s No Code Twitter Space where 71 people joined!

The lessons we shared that generated the most response:

“Ops isn’t a technical challenge any more. It’s a question of permission - ‘do I have permission to change this?’ ‘do I want to give permission to change this?’ We look for the most supportive way to approach new ops projects. Sometimes an inconsequential start is how people get comfortable with making more change.” - @briansowards

The standout quote was from Phil Lakin, founder of Switchboard (a monitoring app for Zapier and Make):

“No one knows what no code is. Water is no code technically.” @philiplakin 😂

🎶 Going to Market

With a team of five and rapidly growing list of Ops projects, we’ve got all we need to get out there and tell our story. Look for that next month!

👀 Would you connect us with someone you know who loves designing Ops?

We’d love to learn from them and share what we're learning!

Brian