this was was my first year in review/CPO product discussion so im cautiously optimistic ??
with regards to roadmaps - is this an industry standard to have one? does notion have one? does airtable ? monday.com?
(notion did announcements earlier in the year, airtable - no.
from quick research, i found one for monday.com but for 2023 lol. fibery has one).
i liken SaaS products to those MLM/Marketing bros
sometimes you have the Andrew Tates/Tai Lopezs/Iman Gadhzis of the world where they shout from the rooftops and have little substance, and then you have the Tom Bilyeus/Alex Hormozis where they’re “heads down, bums up” and when have something tangible then declare it to the world. I think we all know if coda was a marketing bro, which one it’ll be (potential Buzzfeed quiz right there )
but seriously, I think these days because tech moves so fast and keeping a competitive advantage through stealth might be reasons why public roadmaps are far and few between.
All SaaS has its pros and cons / ups and downs/ ebbs and flows and we as customers/users can choose to stay or choose to go.
I will say that even tho i havent been around Coda circles for that long (14 months), it sure has been a delight / walk in the park as compared to Airtable. i was a loyal fan/power user of Airtable for 4+ years and boy! i never had so much whiplash and anxiety from a SaaS -
Overnight changes to Pricing (double amount for half the features), taking away functionality overnight (Interfaces layout) that severely hinder/halted business usability and the CEO declaring they as a company are only interested in “million dollar enterprise accounts”
And sometimes, its just about which one suits your needs/priorities the most (no SaaS can do everything)? or fulfill what are your non-negotiables ?
Lastly, to consider what the community is like?
Airtable does have a really nice one (not the official one cos they changed it from discourse to their own interest/affiliated one called Khoros lol) on slack with fellow consultants/power users) and they are really helpful.
But with the Coda community here, the sharing of templates and knowledge is to a level that goes above and beyond. It has accelerated the very steep Coda learning curve as well as taught me better general application/software/tool building principles (here’s looking at you @Paul_Danyliuk . Side Note: Coda - please sponsor/support him so he can go back to making awesome content hehe)
Others i have learned from immensely and thank you @Scott_Collier-Weir, @Agile_Dynamics , @joost_mineur, @Christiaan_Huizer (all those Medium articles), @Rickard_Abraham , @Nina_Ledid (thanks for summarizing concepts!), @Jono_Bouwmeester, @Susan_M_Davis (thank you for the call and giving me confidence to CFL), and many more! (it only allows me 10 ppl)
i shall endeavour to pay it forward now !
@Stefan_Stoyanov - for the discussions and clarity on future features that you yearn for - is being privy to such info mission critical to your utilization of Coda?
Sure it would be nice to know, but I feel that Coda is a stable and mature product and i havent had to rebuild anything majorly cos they released a new feature (except for that one time i built this collapsible rows in tables thing and then subitems released lol). airtable on the other hand- i had to keep rebuilding stuff cos they changed CPOs and reduced their workforce by nearly 50% in a span of 10 months.
Oh i meant Airtable had the unofficial slack channel of power users.
I know Coda has an official one with Codans and Community Champions etc…
Until we get to that elite status, i will start one this weekend for the rest of us peasants
As far as roadmaps go: the “power users” in this community are often working on edge cases and run into the limits of what can be done - and sometimes go beyond. I try to stay away from work arounds or black magic (Paul Danyliuk). Even if obscure solutions work, your doc becomes hard to maintain or it will fall apart.
Since we often want to do as much as possible in Coda, it is very important to know what is on the roadmap, so we can decide to wait for ‘it’, or, for the time being, create a work around or use another solution while we wait for new or enhanced features.
I don’t know if other SAAS platforms publish a roadmap or not, but I do know that in the past it was not unusual to have some roadmap.
As far as tech moving fast and competitive stealth: I see only advantages of sharing what the developers are working on: it is one more incentive to stick with Coda when you know some of your pain points are going to be addressed in the near (or not so near) future.
It honestly amazes me that Coda hardly shares issues solved, upgrades certain features without notice and changes things without communicating about it. I have learned to live with this: generally, someone notices something changed and shares it in the community, slack or with befriended makers, so we’ll find out sooner or later.
I feel that a bit more openness is a competitive advantage, but, and I have said it before, it is up to Coda to decide what and how they want to communicate. I am not saying this to defend Coda, it is just accepting the way it is.
Fortunately, even without a roadmap, we know some more goodies are coming, so I will stick around.
That’s it for now,
Joost
I could be wrong here, but it also seems like the mobile improvements are focused on building while on mobile. I’d really like to see coda make it easier for us to build docs that are designed to be used as mobile-first apps.
Even just the fact that in order to see what a doc looks like on mobile requires using browser development settings (rather than having a simple mobile view in coda, like Squarespace has, for example) makes it clear that coda doesn’t value the mobile front end user.
100% mission critical! I’ve put a pause on promoting Coda and building business-related solutions for months now - until I get some clarity on where things are heading.
Grammarly integration? Not exactly the game-changer I was hoping for. Why? Well, in an era of LLMs, a tool that isn’t multilingual or voice-operated feels a bit… last decade. I’d love for Coda to prove me wrong, though!
Don’t get me wrong - Shishir’s updates are always exciting. But as someone who’s been with Coda since the early beta days, I can’t help but feel like the company’s vision has been narrowing with each release over the past couple of years. Not on point, not what the users expected. If you need examples, I have plenty!
At the end of the day, there’s a big difference between Coda as a loveable playground and Coda as a powerful business tool - and I really hope we will see a serious push for the latter.
I agree. Codas grammarly strategy feels more like theorizing about what could be, than demonstrating what is coming. If what they claim is possible with ai where it reads your emails and knows exactly what info you need, why can’t it make a table with a filter? Why does it stumble at the simplest task? If packs are now agents does that allow the agent more access to packs than we already get? And if so why can’t we have that access ourselves?
There are alot of pie in the sky promises, but there has been very little evidence they can build it to the level they are claiming. Meanwhile things they can control like mobile not working or search ruining the workarounds users need to hide internal systems are still prevalent.
Well welcome to the community. This has been a great community for sure and I am honored to be included in the list of some Coda greats there! Wow.
Coda is a great product, some of us power users are a little frustrated with some things we’ve requested for a while and not just haven’t seem improvement on, but was made worse with recent changes. (Search bar, I’m talking about you.)
I still love Coda. It’s still my first choice, my favorite tool to work in, my favorite community, my favorite support people to work with but sadly, it is imperfect.
As far as seeing a roadmap, it is very important for the people who have built a business around Coda and knowing whether or not some of these issues are in the works to be handled. If you make Coda packs, there’s some limitations to what packs can do that are somewhat annoying. If the search bar isn’t going to be fixed, then some people are going to have to either move out of Coda or rebuild docs with cross doc. To answer your question then I’d say to the average Coda user and perhaps to the enterprise client who is using Coda within one business, a roadmap probably isn’t important, but to those building their business solely on Coda, it is important to know. You sure don’t want to have built thousands or tens of thousands of docs to then have one Coda update wreak havoc on all your past clients. I mean, it does mean they’ll be paying you to fix it for them, but no one really wants to do that.
)
@Scott_Collier-Weir, @Agile_Dynamics , @joost_mineur, @Christiaan_Huizer (all those Medium articles), @Rickard_Abraham , @Nina_Ledid (thanks for summarizing concepts!), @Jono_Bouwmeester, @Susan_M_Davis (thank you for the call and giving me confidence to CFL), and many more! (it only allows me 10 ppl)