Teaching People to Fish: Coda’s Support Philosophy
By: Charlotte Espeland
Tags: Support, Empowerment, Startup, Customer Service, Productivity

This post was originally published as a doc, which you can see here.

Coda docs can take many shapes. Users stretch and mold the product in ways that sometimes surprise even us. With infinite unique possibilities for your docs, it’s no surprise that our support process doesn’t always provide a one-and-done solution. You may have heard this quote before:

Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach a person to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.

It’s a bit cheesy, but it helps to explain our philosophy.

]The goal of support at Coda is to equip you with tools that help you tackle questions you ask now and those you might have in the future. Think of it like math class — if you received the solution up front each time and never had to work through a problem, you wouldn’t have learned very much. While we could build out a doc that follows our preferences, it might not be what you want and could pose further problems later if the structure isn’t clear to you.

Coda’s magic comes from allowing you to create what you dream up.

Your doc is yours: support through empowerment.

New products introduce learning curves — curves that change shape depending on how you intend to use the product. In Coda, for example, publishing a blog-type doc without tables is different than setting up a relational database with formulas. Our aim is to help you embrace whichever learning curve you find yourself on through learning materials, help content, the Coda community, and direct support.

More importantly, we focus on empowerment. While we want to unblock in the moment, laying a good foundation is critical to opening up your productive capacity with the product. At the same time, we want Coda to be intuitive. The complexity of your doc should be your own choice, so we aim to support creation of a doc that works for your needs.

Learning is a two-way street.

When you brainstorm solutions on your own or with us, we learn how people use the product and what the product can do. And we often see users find solutions to problems that we didn’t even know existed in the first place. While Coda’s support team are experts in the basics and building blocks, every maker has their own preferences in how to use Coda.

We’re here to help you explore those preferences and variable solutions toward the same goal. For example, let’s say I want to add multiple values to a table with a button — maybe I want to populate a table like a template or duplicate data from one table to another. There are dozens of different ways to accomplish this. In the gif below, one button pushes two buttons in the Values table. A second button uses the RunActions() formula to add two values. And a third references the Values table to map those values onto the new table. Each button does the same thing — they’re different paths to the same result.

A good deal of the support process is trial and error. We put Coda to the test every day, using our own docs where we test our formulas and new features. We’re all nerds when it comes to a good challenge, but we’re also each just one person, providing a solution based off of our understanding of the product and our experiences. That’s one reason the Community is so valuableーhere, you’re able to crowdsource answers from a range of makers.

Transforming the product with your feedback.

Support at Coda doesn’t stop when our conversation is over; our goal as a team is to ensure that you are set up for success with your Coda experience. We want to make sure that our learning and help content is useful and that the feedback (even the implicit requests) are funneled to the best places internally for action.

We bring direct quotes, trends, and stories to the product teams to help support their planning process and continue to iterate on the product to ease those points of friction that might get you stuck. That said, turning feedback into action takes time — our product team is constantly shuffling and reprioritizing requests to deliver a great Coda experience to all users.

The community is a great place to post questions about the product or feedback, as you can get traction with other members responses. When more people run into issues with the same thing, it helps to expedite the request on the team’s roadmaps.

Coda support, wherever you are.

Different support resources might be more valuable at varying times in the learning process. But which is right for you right now? Here are our suggestions:

Coda Learn — Fundamentals

Here you’ll find videos on how to use the building blocks of the product.

Help Center — All levels

Content is divided into broad categories, but split up by skill level. No matter where you are in the process, the help center is extremely valuable for solutions.

Community — All levels

The Community can seem like an advanced space at times, but we encourage all users to check it out and post questions and answers, as it can often be the most impactful place to crowdsource answers. Plus, the community serves as a public record for other users to see what solutions arose from your questions.

When providing support, we often use the community to find varying solutions to problems!

And of course you’re welcome to contact us directly. We’re always here to help.