Dory and Pulse
Write opinions blind, upvote the questions, and mark each person's decision role.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 92%
Coda's golden ritual for meetings and write-ups. Pulse: everyone writes their opinion and all responses stay hidden until you've finished writing, so nobody anchors on anyone else. Dory: questions get posted to a shared table and up/downvoted so the agenda is chosen by the room, not by whoever speaks loudest. A role column, borrowed from Coinbase, stops the ritual degrading into a vote.
Origin
Pulse emerged organically at Coda when a distributed-team lead, tired of waiting on Zoom for everyone to go around the room, asked people to just write down what they thought. Dory is adapted from a tool Mehrotra used at Google, named after the fish who asks all the questions. The role column (Responsible / Approver / Participant / Informed / Decider) is lifted from Coinbase's 'RAPID' ritual.
Core principles
- 01Writing before seeing others' answers is the cheapest anti-groupthink device available.
- 02Committing your view in writing forces you to be eloquent and on the record about it.
- 03Agenda-setting by upvote beats agenda-setting by whoever speaks first or loudest.
- 04Consensus-building is good; consensus-building to a fault is not.
- 05Feedback without a role attached becomes noise — 30 comments with no weighting paralyses a decider.
- 06Pre-filling what you need from each participant is a tiny detail that materially changes the output.
How to run it
- 1
Pulse — everyone writes, blind
Before discussion, every participant writes down what they think. Responses are hidden from each participant until they have finished writing their own.
Pro tip Being on the record in writing raises the quality of the opinion itself, not just its independence.
- 2
Dory — collect and vote the questions
Rather than letting questions come at random, participants post their questions to a shared table and the group upvotes and downvotes them. The agenda becomes what the room actually wants to discuss.
Pro tip The culture signal matters as much as the mechanics — new hires at Coda routinely report that a question they asked outvoted the CEO's within their first week.
- 3
Add a role column and group the table by it
Next to each participant, record their role in this decision: Responsible, Approver, Participant, Informed, Decider. Group the responses by role so the decider can see whose input is binding and whose is colour.
Watch out Without roles, a Pulse can feel like a vote and a decider drowns in 30 pieces of undifferentiated feedback with no idea whether they need all 30 yeses or a majority.
- 4
Pre-fill what you need from each named person
The meeting owner fills in the role column in advance and states the specific ask: 'you're the budget approver — I need to know whether we have the budget, not a view on everything I'm doing.' 'You're the product approver — tell me whether I'm authorised to change the onboarding flow.'
Pro tip This is the single detail Coda stole from Coinbase, and Mehrotra names it as the clearest example of a small imported detail measurably improving a ritual.
- 5
Templatise it and teach it in week one
Ship it as a template so it's the path of least resistance, and put it in onboarding so a new hire could name it by their first Friday — Bing Gordon's three tests for a golden ritual.
In the wild
Coda is distributed-first, and one team lead grew annoyed at waiting around on Zoom while everyone took turns saying their piece. He proposed simply writing down what everyone thought — and happened to do it in a thoughtful way, hiding responses until each person had written theirs.
→ It spread through Coda, became half the company's golden ritual (Dory and Pulse), and now spreads to other companies through Coda's own blue loop of published docs.
Coda's Pulse was successfully killing groupthink but drifting toward consensus-seeking — deciders faced 30 pieces of feedback with no weighting. Coinbase's RAPID listed everyone's role next to their name and, crucially, had the meeting owner pre-fill what was wanted from each person.
→ Coda added a role column to Pulse and grouped by it. The anti-groupthink property was retained while the paralysing consensus dynamic was removed. Mehrotra: 'we switched it in and it got better.'
Common mistakes
Running a meeting by going round the room
The first speaker anchors everyone else, the loudest voice dominates, and in a distributed setting it simply takes forever. Written-first responses solve all three.
Collecting input without assigning roles
Undifferentiated feedback turns an input-gathering ritual into an implicit vote. The decider can't tell whether they need unanimity, a majority, or just the approvers' sign-off — and stalls.
Not telling each person what you actually need from them
If you don't pre-fill the ask, approvers comment on everything and nobody answers the one question that unblocks the decision.
Is it for you?
Best for
Distributed or hybrid teams whose decision meetings devolve into round-robins, anchoring on the first speaker, or endless consensus-seeking.
Not ideal for
Fast, reversible, single-owner calls where written pre-work is pure overhead, and genuinely creative divergent sessions where you want live building on each other's ideas.
From the transcript
“in our meetings instead of you know going around the room and hearing what everybody thinks we we do this thing called pulse everybody writes…”
“the second thing we do is called dory which is instead of sort of randomly asking questions we ask people to put the questions on…”
“am i supposed to wait for like all 30 of them to be yes am i supposed to wait for it to be a majority”
“column to our pulse which is what is the role and we group the table by that and the other thing that coinbase does it's…”
“i think consensus building is a good thing but consensability to a fault is not”
From the episode
The rituals of great teams
Shishir Mehrotra of Coda, YouTube, Microsoft