3 proven strategies for collaborating better with your teammates

How Coda's design, social media, and product marketing teams break down silos and move toward goals together.

The Coda Team

3 proven strategies for collaborating better with your teammates

By The Coda Team

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Product teams · 6 min read
Collaboration is all about “meeting in the middle”—finding common ground, sharing ideas, and making plans as a team. With an intuitive interface, real-time data connections, and robust AI capabilities, Coda is designed to support teamwork in all its varieties. Flexibility is its superpower, allowing it to stretch and bend to fit a range of collaborative use cases and functional groups. While Coda is a popular asset among IT teams and project managers, it’s also an advantageous tool for creatives like designers, content creators, and writers, who use it to organize their work, save time, and up-level their innovative ideas across departments. At Coda, we also find “middle ground” within our platform. For example, designers and non-designers can collaborate via the same language (Coda) without design terms getting lost in translation. In this post, we’ll share three ways our team members use Coda to elevate cross-functional teamwork between diverse functions such as design, social media marketing, and product management.

1. Bridging the design team gap.

 By Seth Gutierrez, Brand Designer at Coda I’ve seen a lot of non-design(er) colleagues express apprehension about making edits to a file for fear of “messing something up” within Figma. With Coda’s familiar interface, the platform works as a bridge between designers and their non-designer collaborators, making the feedback process less daunting for stakeholders.
For example, our Design Team Hub acts as our home base for all cross-functional projects and allows everyone to dive into creative tasks without constantly switching between tools.
"Coda is a great place for designers and non-designers to collaborate. It can act as a gateway to a variety of material and helps you stay organized."
Seth Gutierrez
Brand Designer at Coda
Another great way Coda helps to enhance collaboration is through its embed capabilities. Coda makes it easy for designers to add Figma files and sketches directly onto the doc surface. All the embeds are synced to the underlying files and update automatically, in real-time, meaning that you don’t have to worry whether you’re looking at the latest version of a particular design. Unlike a screenshot, which may become out-of-date moments after you take it, your Coda embeds stay fresh!
The integration between Coda and Figma simplifies task management and design reviews. Task templates let you gather all your action items into a single location for tracking and review. And, you’re also able to add more structure to projects, from clear direction to deadlines and milestones. Learn more on the FigJam Pack and Figma Pack and connect it to your Coda docs.
Experience the Figma Pack

2. Improving content creation for social media.

 By Brian Klein, Social Media Manager at Coda Social media management can feel like a siloed role. Luckily I have Coda to help connect the dots between different teams and my core responsibilities: strategy and planning, content creation, community management, and data. Centralizing all four of these can be a heavy lift, especially if you are clicking in and out of a bunch of different tools.
But in Coda, I can pull all our social media data from LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook into a single canvas for review and even data analysis and then use that information to build long-term strategies and find opportunities for incremental improvements.
"With Coda as my hub, I’m able to do most—if not all—my core work, from strategy and planning to execution, in one place."
Brian Klein
Social Media Manager at Coda
Another thing I do in Coda is organize posts, images, and videos in a content library within Coda that makes for easy reference and re-use. And, if we want our colleagues to share a specific post or a piece of content, the Slack Pack takes care of the notifications for us. Want to sync your community management data from Common Room into Coda? Here’s how. Coda’s flexibility supports creative solutions to common social media management problems as well. For example, our YouTube data was available through their native dashboard, but it was static, with no way to manipulate the numbers or look at a combination of metrics at once. By developing the YouTube Studio Pack, I was able to bring that information into Coda and leverage the platform’s extensive functionality to do so much more with our video data. I could even create new data columns, like views per 24 hours and views per impression for more detailed reporting.
Plus, as an added pro-tip, Coda has a great template for content calendars to make it even easier for you to get started building out and tracking your content. Check it out! Make data-driven decisions about your video strategy with the YouTube Studio Pack.
Get the YouTube Studio Pack

3. The ultimate product marketing hub.

 By Rebecca Bassett, Product Marketing Manager at Coda Product marketing has a lot of moving parts and cross-functional dependencies. When it’s time to plan a product launch, this becomes especially obvious. But great news. With Coda, you can organize information from multiple tools to create a hub for your product launch plan.
The Jira Pack, for instance, allows you to bring in tasks and feature information for team-wide review, while the Salesforce integration can pull in win-loss analysis and competitive insights from field teams.
With the Coda for Miro app, my team combines free-form ideation with structured planning, embedding live, editable Miro boards within our Coda docs for follow-up and execution. In fact, I recently did a launch where I did the visualization and brainstorming parts in Miro and instead of copy-and-pasting or reworking it, I embedded it directly into my strategy doc in Coda.
Any data connected in Coda is live and updated in real-time, so you never have to worry whether you’re looking at the latest version of something. It also means you don’t need in-depth expertise or high-level access permissions to find the information you want. Take designs in Figma. I’m not a designer, so when someone sends me a Figma file, I don’t know how to navigate it or collaborate on it without messing it up. Same goes with something in Jira from our product teams. That’s their world. With Coda, you don’t have to think like that. It’s not your turf or my turf—it’s a centralized hub for cross-functional collaboration.
"Coda is a horizontal tool for teams. It’s a neutral ground where teams don’t feel alienated, but supported."
Rebecca Bassett
Product Marketing Manager at Coda
For PMMs, collaboration is the name of the game. Whether you’re working on market research, new content, or go-to-market strategy on your next launch, Coda puts you at the center of it all. Explore our library of 600+ Packs.
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Endless possibilities, one central hub.

 If your team’s collaboration tools could use an upgrade, we’ve made it easy to get started with Coda. Try one of our free templates for a more structured introduction to working in our platform, or simply start with a blank doc and see where it takes you. Add tasks, tag your teammates, start a brainstorm, or dive right into planning mode. Whatever your goal, task, or project, Coda will meet you there.
Start a new Coda doc

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