This is basically a way to have a discussion in your doc instead of aloud. Believe it or not, I’m an introvert, but I’m a loud introvert – so it tends to be easy for me to get my voice heard if I want. But not everyone is that way, and they often have better ideas than I do. The benefit of this approach is that, instead of the loudest person being heard, the person with the best ideas gets heard. And that’s especially great when you’re working across different teams. 

I always joke with PMs and say, if I move on from Coda, I’m 1000% stealing this just because of how much time it saves me. Oftentimes, what I’ll find is that if I do this along with people sharing a writeup about their sentiment, half the time I can just cancel the meeting because there’s a very clear consensus. And the other times, it cuts my meetings in half because, instead of round-tabling all of this, I can just hop right to the one or two things that are clearly hot button topics. We can just spend most of that high-quality, precious, synchronous time really diving into those topics and resolving them.

I’m using a Coda feature here called a reaction button. You push the button and it’ll vote it up, and you can sort or filter to make sure you’re looking at the ideas that are getting the most votes. So, here, we can see the topic that is bubbling up is the limitations of current templates, and I can see specifically who wanted to talk about this and who upvoted. And you’ll notice that most of these ideas are from different people, so it’s not just one person sharing all the ideas and dominating the conversation. Plus it’s really helpful when you see all these topics at the top, and they’re not necessarily what I would pick; so it’s a really powerful tool to drive alignment and make sure we’re all getting on the same page.

An upvote is basically saying, I agree with exactly what you said or the direction of what you said.

For downvotes, it depends on the setting. I find people tend to not use it; they tend to withhold upvotes more than they use downvotes.

But a variant I’ve used and found effective is – instead of framing it as a downvote – framing it as a question. Like, I'm confused by this or I have a question, and then I ask people to add a comment or something with the question. That tends to get better, healthier engagement that's different from an upvote. I'm not downvoting this, I'm not trying to punch your idea down. But I just don't understand what you meant in the way that you said it here. Could you help clarify for me? And I have found that approach to be productive.

We have another variant of pre-meeting feedback but instead of facilitating discussion, we’re gathering feedback on sentiment. So it’s more like, if you had to rate how in favor of or against the proposal in the writeup – on a scale of 1-4 – and then share why. So, at a glance, I can see how people are feeling about it. And you can see how different stakeholders are feeling. Or, for example, I’ve done this and gotten sentiment that is mostly negative, which is a great sign that I need to take another crack at it before we jump into action. Normally, it’s way better to find out that quickly – either before the meeting or in the first 10 minutes – rather than as you’re about to launch something.

I’d say these are really good for aligning early-on in projects and for making important decisions. I like to sprinkle this in whenever we’re aligning or making decisions.

An example of when this is really useful is when you want sentiment feedback from different people in different functions – for example, the CEO vs. the head of design vs. legal. I can specifically ask how they are feeling about something – say, the budget, based on what I’ve said above the table – and have them reply on a 4 point scale.

Matt Woods

At Coda we use this process to discuss and gather feedback before meetings happen.

Pre-meeting feedback process at Coda

Team-submitted topics for discussion

Sentiment table (completed by team)

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