You're listening to the founders Flint. Audible versions of essays from technology most important leaders selected by the founder community. This is rituals for hyper growth, an inside look at how YouTube scaled by Shashir Mehrotra, co founder and CEO of CODA, a cloud based document editor, When Shashir left YouTube in 2014, a number of other company leaders wanted to understand how YouTube worked. So he wrote this article, summarizing their key rituals in a stage of hyper growth.
This article was originally published in 2015, but has since been expanded upon, read by NFX. I joined YouTube in 2008 soon after the Google acquisition and started on one of the most incredible roller coaster rides of my life. Much has been written about the external accomplishments of the YouTube team, growing from a mostly misunderstood video sharing property to the form for millions of creators to connect with audiences all over the world.
Interestingly, though, very little has been written about the internal workings of YouTube, When I arrived, the team had grown to a couple 100 employees about a third pre acquisition, 2 thirds post. My initial role was owning the monetization strategy, And over the course of the following years, that scope grew and we settled into a pattern where 3 of us primarily drove YouTube. I ended up taking on ownership of most of the core tech functions product, engineering, and UX.
Robert Kinsell covered the business functions, content, sales, and marketing, and our boss, Salar Commingar, was the CEO. The team we constructed was fairly special and was the key to our success. Though YouTube was a popular consumer property, it was far from a given that it would be a viable long term business and many critics thought it was likely to be Google's first failed acquisition. This meant that most of the team that came on board was more pirate than navy.
By the time I left in 2014, the team had grown to over 2000 employees. We had many growing pains through the years, but became well known as a high performing fast moving team. Our internal YouTube culture had a few interesting challenges. Startup big company melting Pete, The company was acquired early and had to adapt to being integrated into Google, an iconic company already well known for its rituals.
But YouTube had its own distinct culture and challenges, So while we borrowed many best practices, we also recognized that many of the Google rituals didn't quite fit. Hyper growth. The period from 2008 to 2014 represented enormous hyper growth. Every metric was breaking records regularly. Our user base and revenue grew from millions to billions, and our team scaled quickly to keep up.
In a phenomenon that Reid Hoffman now describes as blitz scaling, we had to adapt the breakneck pace at which we were growing. An intertwined 3 sided marketplace. While some businesses have natural separations, YouTube's business was very interconnected. Changes we made in our product rippled quickly through our creator and advertiser communities, and adjustments we made to our go to market model had to be synchronized with key product Pete.
It was quite common for initiatives to be cross functionally coordinated with a set of engineers, product managers, content partnership managers, marketing folks, press relations, lawyers, and others. In the early days, this mostly led to a mess. A few symptoms we saw were Always planning and replanning as the new shiny effort quickly bumped to the forefront and upset everyone's plans.
James complained that the process was either excessively topped down and didn't allow for creative freedom or to bottom up and lacked coherence or prioritization. Meetings weren't well planned, often missing the right people or the right context. Because everything was important at once, the team struggled to make trade offs. And with such an intertwined business, it was often hard to know where to go for hard choices.
We slowly constructed a set of rituals and best practices that worked well for us. Over time, the YouTube team went from being known for controlled chaos to being known as a well aligned team that could simultaneously run a complex business while taking on meaningful strategic initiatives. Our culture became a highlight. Something our team held onto as a reason to push through hard challenges and an attraction to new employees.
I'll admit while I was on the roller coaster, I didn't always appreciate the uniqueness of our rituals. When I left YouTube in 2014, I got asked by a number of other company leaders to help them understand how YouTube works. One person, Daniel Eck, Spotify's CEO and co founder was the most encouraging. He suggested that perhaps I could write down a short summary of our key rituals so others may learn from them.
What started as an email reply to Daniel gradually turned into a few pages of prose and then grew from there. It's worth noting that this is now an almost decade old snapshot. Most of the processes here have since been adapted and adjusted by the current YouTube team. And for my own company, Coda, we've kept some of these rituals, but also operate differently in a number of ways. A snapshot of the YouTube cadence.
While it didn't happen overnight, the YouTube cadence gradually settled into this pattern. Planning cadence, 6 month strategic planning, and 6 weeks sprints. At Google, most teams planned on a quarterly OKR process. I e a 3 month cycle. We found this awkward. 3 months was too long to commit to in our fast moving hyper growth mode, but also too short for our big aspirations.
This was exacerbated by Google's traditional 70 percent OKR rule where you were only supposed to achieve 70% of your goals, so we divided this into 2 separate processes. Strategic planning. Every 6 months or 26 weeks gave us more time to set and achieve meaningful goals and include every team in the company along the way. There were 2 key outputs, a, a list of big rocks, and b, the matrix of project allocations. The process of achieving these outputs was done both bottoms up and top down.
The bottom up process was done with a review of every team's two pages in a compressed and intense review cycle. The top down process involved brainstorming big rocks and then driving alignment through a virtual dollars across a set of candidate initiatives. The matrix planning and allocation output was critical to ensuring we actually had alignment, This not only showed overall headcount allocated to teams and big rocks, but it showed the matrix of how resources were mapped between them.
This forced trade offs to be quite literal and less likely to be fudged. Strategic planning took a while, generally 3 very focused weeks and was very comprehensive Beller team in the company was involved. While it was an intense 3 weeks, the output was the backbone of how we operated. Most YouTube employees could immediately recite the current stack of big rocks and had an idea about how their team contributed to them.
The process also served as a key step in keeping the team aware and aligned with each other. Spirit planning. Every 6 weeks allowed teams to narrow commitments to what they could realistically get done in that time frame. Instead of Google OKRs, which were aimed at 70% success criteria, these spirits were meant to be true commitments that other teams could actually depend on. We tried to keep this as lightweight as possible and tried to timebox it only to be a couple of days of alignment.
We settled on 6 weeks as the ideal cadence, mostly because it aligned to how our iOS releases were staged, but it turned out to feel about right in terms of overall planning cadence. Forking from the Google quarterly process was not easy as we still had to collaborate with many Google teams, but we found that shifting to a 6 month week planning model was more appropriate for how our team operated. Weekly cadence.
With our strategic plans in place, we could then focus on driving healthy execution on a weekly basis. We had 4 primary types of meanings, and we defined clear expectations for each. Decision making. Meetings explicitly for decision making, with a very small required group of recurring attendees and a new relevant audience assembled for each meeting, often with a wide list of optional attendees, a write up describing the decision and the options under consideration would be sent in advance.
Examples include product review and deal review, a forum called ytx. Group information sharing. These meetings, often large, were primarily used for broadcast and coordination and not decision making forums. Examples include our weekly staff meetings, the stats meeting, and are all hands.
Tagups, a unique meeting format that we sometimes refer to as group 11s, These were generally meetings where a, the attendees are fixed, b, it's scheduled at a fixed time each week and not rescheduled, and C has a rollover agenda. A bulk of our meeting time was spent in targeted group tagups. And one one's Since tag ups took over any project specific decisions, this left 1 I would regularly defer topics from one ones to tagups since they required the other attendees.
Our weekly cadence was based on several key philosophies. Avoid ad hoc meetings. Definitely the most controversial, but our process was designed to avoid the just in time ad hoc meetings. We found the trap of ad hoc meetings had a lot of downsides. First, each one requires schedule coordination of attendees so it can push discussions out Can I get 15 minutes to chat about x ends up happening 2 weeks later?
But even more importantly, the lack of a clear structure can often lead to unproductive meetings Pete don't know if it's for information sharing or decision making, and it's not clear what level of prep, etcetera, is required. So a key litmus test for us was minimizing ad hoc meetings, by creating the right regular forums with enough time and the right attendees. Our approach to tag ups turn into a unique way to handle this Reserve Beller time.
A creative experiment that turned into a hallmark of our process, many of our meetings included a long bullpen period, The time was intentionally unstructured and without any agenda, where the only rule was that you had to stay present. This would lead to many multi threaded discussions happening in parallel And if you didn't have anyone to talk to, you could just keep working on your own.
Many of these decisions would have naturally become ad hoc meetings and instead got handled in a timely manner. It also led to a much tighter leadership team since the list of interested parties in a topic was often different than might have been originally imagined. Replace readouts and meetings with broadcast emails. There were a handful of key regular broadcast emails that the team relied on, including my Sunday night email to the team, We recovered a lot of meeting time this way.
Pre reads come prepared and expect others to be prepared. We almost never presented anything in meetings. Materials were always sent in advance and people were expected to pre read. Almost all of our meetings were scheduled to be 30 minutes and often ended early, framing matters. Rather than jumping to solutions, teams quickly learn how to ask the right eigen questions and frame discussions in the right way. Avoid rescheduling.
Every time a meeting is moved, it has an enormous butterfly effect on the whole organization as they change their schedules to match. Also, the level of preparedness for a meeting is directly proportional to the expectation that it will actually happen. Don't be afraid to cancel. With standing forums and materials sent in advance, it's generally clear before the meeting Beller or not there was a reason to meet. We often send out an agenda, resolve the remaining issues, and cancel the meeting.
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