In this episode of the "Make Me a Doc" series, Coda CEO Shashir Mehrotra interviews product leader Gokul Rajaram about his SPADE decision‑making framework. Gokul recounts the origin of SPADE from a 12‑year‑old meeting at Google where Eric Schmidt highlighted the lack of a clear decision‑maker, prompting Gokul to obsess over assigning responsibility. SPADE stands for Setting, People, Alternatives, Decide, Explain. The conversation then shifts to building a live Coda template that operationalizes each component: - Setting captures the what, why, when, and contextual information, with optional images or presentations. - People identifies the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) using @‑mentions so the accountable person is notified. - Alternatives are listed, required to be feasible, distinct, and collectively cover the problem space; a DORI‑style voting system (up‑vote/down‑vote) and private mini‑polls are added to encourage unbiased brainstorming. - Decide involves defining evaluation rubrics (e.g., memorability, descriptiveness) and selecting the best alternative. - Explain creates a clear written rationale and automates distribution via Coda packs: sending email through Gmail and posting updates to Slack. The template also includes organizational features such as folders for active and closed spades, and buttons that trigger Slack messages. Gokul praises the final template as the best incarnation of SPADE he has seen in over seven years, hoping it will be adopted at Square and beyond. The tone throughout is conversational, enthusiastic, and instructional, with live demonstrations of Coda’s capabilities.
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I'm Shashim Rotra. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Coda, and I'd like to welcome you to our new series, Make Me a Doc. In this series, we interview amazing thought leaders, take their philosophies and ideas, and turn them into live Coda docs. Today, we'll be interviewing one of my favorite product people, Gokul Rajaram. Gokul and I met at Google, where he was known as the father of AdSense. He went on from there to run monetization at Facebook and then is currently at Square where he leads the Caviar team. Today we're going to be talking about a philosophy that Gokul came up with called Spade, a great way to run decisions, really changes how you run meetings and how you run the rest of your team culture.
The impetus behind decision-making and how to think about decision-making came from my time at Google where I will never forget this, this was about 12 years ago when I was in a meeting with Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt, all of us in different product teams. You probably remember this. We had a proposal, and at that point Eric stopped us. We were discussing, he stopped us, he just asked, and he said, "Who's the decision maker here?" So we all simultaneously raised our hands, and it was like really embarrassing because at that point he said, "The three of you raising your hands means that there's no decision maker." Since then, I've really obsessed over how to think about decisions in a way that there's a very clear person who's responsible. At that point, I and a couple of other Square employees, we took on the ownership, we took on ownership of coming with a process. Thanks a lot. It is called SPADE, and as you might realize, it's an acronym which stands for Setting People Alternatives, Decide, and Explain.
Gokul sent over, before we started, he sent over one sample SPADE. Our goal here is to produce a template for other people to be able to put the SPADE philosophy into use. Should we start the doc build part? Ready for the exciting part here? So now in my setting, I now have the what, the why, the when, and some useful context for people.
I think one important thing in the what is that you have to give the decision maker a framework or rubric to evaluate the alternatives versus each other. What if there are 5 names?
How, what, what are we going to look for?
Is it like memorability? Is it descriptive nature? What are the 2 or 3 things that we're going to evaluate them based on?
Oh, that's great. Here we added to the setting, we added a little bit of context. Sometimes, you know, a picture or a presentation can help. Actually, let me—
That's great settings, Shashir. We're all very clean and crisp.
I'll fill in the, the list of responsible people, and I'm just going to use @mentions here. And so one nice part about this is you know, that person is now notified.
People felt the decision being made by the highest paid person in the room, right? And so that's not what SPATE is about. SPATE is about making sure that the responsible person— we call them at Square, we call them the DRI, directly responsible individual, or responsible within the SPATE framework— is the person who is also accountable for the decision.
The next phase I wanted to jump to is alternatives. What would be a good philosophy statement for alternatives?
Alternatives should be feasible and should be different from each other. And they should maximally cover the problem space.
So you might also remember this from Google. We used to call these DORIs. That's right. And so it's pretty similar to a DORI where, you know, people come and add ideas. You upvote and downvote them.
This is great. It's a great way to just get the group to contribute.
The next one I was going to jump to, back to your video, is consult maximally and get feedback privately. So the one I thought would be most appropriate is this one. And the basic idea here is it's kind of like a little mini poll in your meeting. The idea is that you click this box, it hides everybody but you, I fill in my rating and say, you know, what my comments are, and then you unveil it and you can see everybody. In my mind, you should design Docs the way you design apps. And you should say, here's the behaviors I want to encourage or discourage. And if what you want to encourage is, you know, wide open brainstorming without being influenced by each other, then make sure you hide everybody while they're doing it. Okay, so now explain. So one part of explain is like writing a good explanation, but another part is actually getting it out to everybody. So I'm going to add a pack here. Go through my packs, I find Gmail, and I'm going to sign in. So now in the send by email thing, I'm going to pick an action. So I'm going to say Gmail. Send email. So whoever clicks on this, it's going to use their account, not mine. You got the email? Yeah, it's great. All right, one last step. Ready? Okay. And what I had in mind in this Spade template is, uh, you know, just come up here and I'm going to add a section for the Spade blog. Like, one of the main benefits of when people come, especially from like Google Docs to Coda, is that it feels a little bit like an everything surface. So I can take And, you know, I can organize all my spades in one spot. I'm gonna have a folder of— I'm gonna call these active spades. Oops. Active spades. You'll end up with a separate folder of closed spades. We do this a lot for things that are kind of ongoing processes is we'll use the Slack pack here. I'm gonna come and say send Slack update, and I'm gonna add a button here. And so this button, I'm gonna say The title is Send Slack Update. So I pick my action here, I'm going to pick Slack Post Message.
Looks really good. I actually just, I want this to be approved at Square Ace. I mean, it's so much better. Having seen 100+ Spades over the last 7 years, I can say this is the best instantiation and the easiest way I've seen Spade explained and used. And I really hope across, hopefully at Square and other companies, Yeah, you can use this template.
