When Coda was founded, we found ourselves faced with a number of tricky choices. From years of working together previously at YouTube,
(our founding PM) and I had developed a bit of a shorthand for how to "frame" problems. Over the years, we've refined and formalized the techniques, and we teach these skills as part of onboarding new employees at Coda. This document is a handbook of these techniques.
Before we get to the "how to" portion of this doc, let's start with a fun (and instructive) story.
When I joined YouTube in 2008, one of the key dilemmas facing the company was the "link out" question. YouTube was already the #2 search engine in the world (#1 was our parent employer ーGoogle), and we received a lot of search traffic for content that didn't exist on YouTube. For example, a trending query at the time was for the show Modern Family, for which our results were quite poor.
So the question was: if a user searches for something, and we knew that we didn't have the best result, should we "link out" to a third-party website?
The company was deeply divided. On one side, most of the product and engineering team aligned on the view that we should "link out" ー after all, it seemed to be serving what the user was asking for. On the other hand, much of the business side of the company aligned against this view ー arguing that it was difficult to license content natively if we sent traffic away from the site. This framing was clearly deadlocked, and I had a suspicion that another framing might help, so I spent some time thinking about alternate frames.
At an offsite to resolve the debate once and for all, I presented an alternate framing to break the standstill. Instead of thinking of this question as "link out" vs don't, what if we thought about this as the choice between consistency and comprehensiveness?
Through this lens, we looked across industries for examples. In online shopping, we saw an intense battle between Google Product Search (née Froogle) and Amazon. Most philosophical arguments suggest that Google Product Search would naturally win this battle ー after all, the catalog was a full superset of Amazon. And yet, consumers seemed to pick Amazon at a much higher rate. When asked, consumers said that they picked Amazon because of the reliable experienceーnot only did products deliver fast and on time, but the model for returns was clear, reviews always followed the same format, etc. We labeled this as a market where consistency was more important than comprehensiveness.
Even with this new frame, we had a vivid debate: would the online video market be one that rewarded consistency or comprehensiveness? After much discussion, we settled it: consistency was more important than comprehensiveness. And this led to a decision:
We would not link outside of YouTube for search results.
And the story doesn't end there. Not linking outside of YouTube became one of our core principles and quickly framed a set of other difficult decisions. For example, we removed the ability for creators to opt content out of different devices and removed all third-party embed players.
The most notable example of a difficult choice driven from this principle was our decision to
take back control of the YouTube iOS
app from Apple. For years the Apple team had owned our iOS experience and had struggled to keep up with our development pace. Not only were key features missing, these gaps triggered restrictions such that much of the YouTube catalog did not play on iOS devices at all, which led to an inconsistent experience. We sacrificed default distribution on the most popular mobile operating system because we had a clear principle: Consistency over comprehensiveness.
Aside from being an interesting snapshot from the internet historical archives, this story demonstrates an important learning: the power of a good frame — a critical success factor for teams and an important skill to master.
By reframing the question as "consistency vs comprehensiveness," we made a clear decision and created a frame for a series of hard decisions down the line.
Framing is the process of breaking down a problem into a set of choices, trade offs, and options that enable a team to make a call and move forward.
At Coda, framing
is an important skillーone we look for in candidates and teach to new employees. When done well, framing can steer the company, product, and team through tricky situations. When done poorly, we can feel stuck, frustrated, and like we're debating for an unnecessarily long period of time or are zeroed in on the minutiae of a decision.