Why Coinbase is banning slide decks and 'endless meetings'
Crypto exchange Coinbase is getting rid of slide decks and “endless meetings” as a way to improve productivity following the purge of roughly 18% of employees last month.
In a July 13 blog post, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong noted that the company is currently focused on “driving more efficiency” as it continues to scale, pointing to a 200% year-on-year employee growth over 18 months that had started to put a strain on the firm’s organizational structure.
He suggested that many major firms experiencing rapid growth generally end up becoming complacent and slowing down, while great companies do the opposite:
As part of the focus on efficiency, Armstrong stated the firm is “experimenting with banning slide decks in product engineering reviews” to speed up the product development process.
“Inside growing companies, there’s a danger that product and engineering teams start shipping great slide decks instead of great products," said Armstrong.
Slide decks are essentially a series of slides used for visual representation when presenting ideas. They are very popular ways to communicate big ideas but have a reputation for frequently not being realized.
“But our customers never see the slide decks we create. They only see the product.”
Armstrong says that he wants his employees to instead show realistic previews of how the products work in real-time using dashboards with metrics, product mockups, and the actual product itself.
“The important thing is to get hands-on with the product, see what the customer is seeing (or is about to see), and make it better,” he said.
The crypto exchange boss says he also wants to scrap internal meetings amongst its product and engineering teams, as Armstrong said they often get bogged down with
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