The 10 traits of great PMs, AI, and Slack’s approach to product | Noah Weiss (Slack, Google)

[00:00] We have this mental metaphor that we talk a lot about getting to the next hill. The actual wording is take bigger, bolder bets. [00:06] I think teams can often get lost crawling up that hill, not realizing that there's a huge, incredibly beautiful range behind it. We've over time created kind of new teams from scratch that incubate in a new area before the areas mature. So we did that with a lot of these kind of native audiovisual products like huddles and clips early in the pandemic because our customers were demanding it from us. And I think in the AI space, we're trying to hear from customers. What do you wish Slack could do and have these new superpowers? [00:36] space to run and pilot and then get something to launch that's amazing, blows people away. That's kind of the formula that we've seen. [00:44] Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. [00:53] Today my guest is Noah Weiss. [00:55] Noah is Chief Product Officer at Slack. [00:58] where he spent the last seven years. Prior to that, he was head of product at Foursquare, [01:02] which is near and dear to my heart, as you'll hear at the top of this episode, [01:06] Prior to that, he was a PM at Google and at Fawcreek Software. And in our conversation, we cover the 10 traits of great product managers, how to work effectively with strongly opinionated and product-minded founders, what Noah has learned about working effectively with AI in your product over his last 15 years at Google and Foursquare and now at Slack.

[01:36] and what they took away from that experience. Also, how he thinks about competition with Microsoft Teams and Discord. Also a bunch of new data advice, which I found very helpful. This was such a great in-depth conversation about all things product and leadership. And I'm really excited for you to hear this episode. With that, I bring you Noah Weiss after a short word from our sponsors. [01:57] This episode is brought to you by Sidebar. Are you looking to land your next big career move or start your own thing? One of the most effective ways to create a big leap in your career, and something that worked really well for me a few years ago, is to create a personal board of directors. A trusted peer group where you can discuss challenges you're having, get career advice, and just kind of gut check how you're thinking about your work, your career, and your life. This has been a big trajectory changer for me, [02:27] Senior leaders are matched with highly vetted, private, supportive peer groups to lean on for unbiased opinions, diverse perspectives, and raw feedback. Everyone has their own zone of genius, so together we're better prepared to navigate professional pitfalls, leading to more responsibility, faster promotions, and bigger impact. Guided by world-class programming and facilitation, Sidebar enables you to get focused, tactical feedback at every step of your journey. If you're a listener of this podcast, you're likely already driven and committed to growth. [02:57] you [02:57] A Sidebar personal board of directors is the missing piece to catalyze that journey. Why spend a decade finding your people when you could meet them at Sidebar today? Jump the growing waitlist of thousands of leaders from top tech companies by visiting sidebar.com slash Lenny to learn more. That's sidebar.com slash Lenny. This episode is brought to you by Superhuman. How much time do you spend in email each day? How about your team?

[03:27] time. Superhuman is blazingly fast email for high performing teams. Built to work with Gmail and Outlook, teams who use Superhuman spend half the time in their inboxes, respond to twice the number of emails, and save over four hours a week. That's over a month of save time per year. With Superhuman, you can split your inbox into streams or VIPs, team members, and emails from your favorite products to reduce context switching and make sure you never miss an important email. [03:57] You can follow up and never drop the ball on an email thread. You can also work faster than ever before with powerful AI features like writing, editing, summarizing, and even translating. Join the ranks of the most productive teams and unleash the power of Superhuman. Try one month free at superhuman.com slash Lenny. That's superhuman.com slash Lenny. [04:19] Noah, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to finally get to join and be a long-time listener. [04:29] I feel the same way in reverse. I'm really excited that you're finally on the podcast. [04:33] And I don't know if you know this, but this is actually going to be the last podcast I'm recording before I go on Pat leave. This is going to play while I'm on break. [04:42] Coincidentally, you're actually just returning from bat leave is what I just learned. Yeah. And so... [04:47] Let me ask you a question. What advice do you have for someone about to enter the beginning of baby life from someone that is exiting that and going back to work? So first off, I mean, obviously, congratulations. You're about to go on a roller coaster of emotion, sleep and everything else.

[05:02] I literally went back to work two days ago. So I think my maybe advice about being a new parent is better than my advice about being a PM right now. [05:10] Here are the three, my wife and I wound up with three maxims that we want to be using throughout the first two months to keep ourselves grounded. [05:19] First one, I would say a little bit better every day. [05:22] No matter how many books you read, you know, how much Emily Oster you consume, there's nothing like actually doing it. [05:29] And it's a physical thing, being a new parent. [05:33] And so getting a little bit better every day, giving yourself permission to be like, that didn't go great and that's okay. [05:38] That's number one. [05:39] Number two, [05:41] Don't over extrapolate from the early days. [05:44] Like they are, you know, the fourth trimester is a real thing. These babies come out, they are not fully baked. They can't even support their own heads. [05:51] So if you try to extrapolate everything, the next 18 years are going to be like the first 18 days. [05:57] It's going to be sobering, so keep that perspective. They develop so much every week with Part of the Sun. And then the third thing, which I got advice from this from a good friend, is [06:07] you've got to fully get into it as a parent. There's nothing that replaces, actually, you've got to change the diapers, you've got to do the feeds. [06:15] When they're up, even though they can't talk, you gotta talk to them. You gotta listen to what they're saying. [06:21] and just be fully kind of present near the moment. [06:23] I realized for myself, basically at full digital detox, you saw how long it took for me to reply to your emails, [06:29] I was like, put all the devices away, just kind of be fully with our daughter, Willow, and our family.

[06:35] And I feel like it was so much more rewarding. I feel really connected with her now after just a couple months. So... [06:40] It's a crazy time. You're going to love it. It's going to drive you mad at times as well. And that's all okay. [06:47] All right, we're going to be pivoting this podcast into a parenting podcast. This is awesome advice. I wrote everything you just said on this little post-it as you're talking, so I'm going to put that up in our nursery and see how it all goes. One thing that's tough about my career path in this weird life is I don't get a nice paid pat leave from a big company. So I've actually been working on stacking guest posts and podcasts ahead of my leave so that I can actually, exactly as you said, just get fully into it. [07:17] posts come in. All these podcasts are backlogged, so I'm hoping it all works out. That's a smart way to do it, yeah. [07:23] On a totally different topic, [07:25] You're head of product at Foursquare, and I don't know if you know this, I actually built a startup on Foursquare's API. There's a company called LocalMind, and for folks that don't know about it, the way it worked is it basically let you talk to someone, checked in on Foursquare, anywhere in the world, if you're thinking about going there. So you could be like, is this bar fun right now? What's happening there before you actually... [07:44] show up. And we ended up selling the company to Airbnb. It ended up not being a big problem for enough people. And that's how I ended up at Airbnb. But it was quite magical and API was amazing. And so I just want to say thank you for building an awesome product and awesome API. Thank you for being a developer on top of the ecosystem. I mean, it's interesting with Foursquare, we'll talk about this I'm sure later, I feel like

[08:06] I have more lessons learned and more scar tissue from the crazy up and down [08:13] of [08:14] I don't know, what it was, 2010 to 2015, roughly, [08:18] And [08:19] I think there's an action where you learn more from the things that don't fully work out or don't quite achieve what you want it to achieve. [08:26] You actually have a feedback loop where you get a lot of negative signal about, "Okay, that didn't work, that didn't work." [08:31] What can I actually learn to take away from that? So it's still great. I still love using Foursquare. I think we got caught in the Death Star Instagram ascent. [08:40] back in 2012, 2013, [08:43] But I hope a product like that exists forever in the future. And I'm glad you got to build a company and land an Airbnb through it. It's a great story. [08:52] Looking back at Foursquare, do you think there was a path to building a massive consumer app type business or is that just never going to work out? And I know they went in the direction of B2B data sort of business. So I guess was there a path or was it just like, no, that was never going to work out? [09:08] It's tricky. I mean, I'm not going to do like 30 minute postmortem because I'd probably bore everyone. But I've thought about this. We've all thought about this a lot kind of on the early team there. [09:16] I think the biggest probably lesson learned, frankly, is that [09:20] We were really close to the Instagram folks early on. They were like big developers on our platform. They used the Foursquare API before they were bought by Facebook. [09:28] And I think... [09:29] In hindsight, we were a little bit mistaken to believe that the idea that the atomic unit would be... [09:35] a person talking about a place that they're at, and you have to have a physical place to tie it to, versus a person sharing a moment or an experience that they're having in the world, and sometimes that might have a place connected to it. I think that one change in framework, what you would say the customer actually wanted to do,

[09:53] That probably was the thing that took us away on the social side. [09:56] I think on the more local discovery side, it's actually what people want to be using the product much more for over time, getting personalized recommendations and getting tips when you go to a place and all the push notifications. [10:09] But I think there, again, it was kind of hard to stay ahead, I think, specifically of Google [10:15] because they had billion plus Google Maps [10:18] users distributed on Android and iOS, [10:20] And even though they might only [10:22] take a couple of years, eventually they would wind up replicating a lot of the functionality [10:27] And I think it's hard to regain that momentum. [10:30] You know, so much of this stuff is luck and timing and just coincidences of history. [10:37] I think there was a path. I think [10:40] In the end, we lost our social sales, and then Google was able to catch up on the utility side. Now, the company's built a really valuable B2B API company, which offers a story. [10:52] In some ways, it pivot, obviously, from a consumer company to a B2B company. [10:55] But yeah, that's my mini postmortem on what could have been with Foursquare. [11:00] It's interesting how many consumer companies pivot to B2B because it turns out that's where the money ends up being. [11:05] Yeah, and I think the feedback that you get from are people willing to pay for the product that you're building is so much faster than can I build a large scale consumer business and one day hope to have enough reach to then slap ads onto it. That's a much more of a kind of try to hit a home run and hope it works out. But yeah.

[11:24] you don't really know if you're doing it along the way. [11:27] So yeah, I think B2B is easier to have an incremental, successfully business than pure consumer. [11:33] Okay, so speaking of Foursquare, Dennis Crowley was the CEO and founder, a very strong product-minded founder. I know you've worked with a number of very strong product-minded founders, including Stuart Butterfield, Dennis, obviously, we just talked about, maybe others. I'm curious what you've learned as a product leader working with very opinionated founders. And I think this is [12:00] product minded CEOs, but also as a first PM at a startup, you're often put in this tough spot of just like the founders just telling you what to do and you have to go build it versus having a lot of say in agency. So I'm curious what you learned about working and being successful in that position, which is often really hard. I'll kind of say to folks in general, if you're joining a company and the CEO does the role that is your functional area of expertise, [12:21] It's probably [12:23] the area where you'll learn the most, because they're hopefully world class at it, but also when will you be the most frustrated at times? [12:30] because you're going to feel like you have less agency. [12:32] And so you just know that going into it. If you go to a company that's run by a former marketer and you're [12:36] in marketing. [12:37] they'll probably want to have a lot of say and influence over that. And I think just going into it knowing that is good. [12:42] Looking back, I'd say probably two main things stand out of what's really worked with both Dennis and Stuart, not just for me, but I think for the teams that kind of work with them as well. [12:52] The first is, [12:53] I think as much as possible, I think maybe we'll talk about this a little bit later as well, is kind of getting to the point where you have alignment on the principles for what it means to build a great product of that company.

[13:03] not just about intuition and taste and gut, but how do you distill that into principles that become the language of the company so that everybody else can start thinking through a similar frame or similar lens when you're designing a product? [13:17] Because otherwise, it can feel a little bit kind of Goldilocks every time a team builds something, they take it to the CEO, the CEO's like, "No, not quite right." Again, "No, not exactly that." And then you don't have the language to actually have a more constructive review. [13:28] and then doing that as a little strategy as well. [13:31] The product founder CEO is always going to be the holder of the vision for the company. I'm sure at Airbnb, [13:37] I imagine Brian was very much like that as well. Absolutely. I think it's actually great to say, okay, the overall vision for the company is if the responsibility of any one team [13:47] everyone buy into that vision, but then to have space for [13:51] teams to be able to actually do creative work, do explorations, because you know that it's aligned with that high level vision. [13:57] So if you can get that alignment and you can get those principles as the common language of what great software looks like, [14:03] I think you can have a really good working relationship. [14:07] And then the other bit I would just say is, I think when to involve the founder CEO in a project is really important. [14:14] And the short version I think that works the best is almost like a U-curve where the X-axis is time and the Y-axis is level of involvement. [14:22] I think you want to get the founder's CEO really involved early on, especially if it's a big new project to make sure that, [14:28] There's strategic buy-in, you agree on the principles for aggregate approach, you agree on the goals and the anti-goals,

[14:34] getting that to them that you can run and explore and then i think at the very end [14:38] You want them to really be bought in that, did you build something that's up to the quality of the company? [14:43] Is this something that's going to like customers, like literally taste the soup? [14:46] What's missing in it? [14:47] And I think at most companies that have a maniacally [14:51] kind of customer focused founder [14:53] If you don't do that last step, it's going to be much more painful after you launch because they weren't part of that co-creation of the team. [15:00] And so I think that kind of formula winds up working pretty well if you throw in that kind of alignment of principles and vision. [15:08] That U-shape sounds nice in theory, but I often imagine you get to that final step, and the founder is like, "What the hell is this?" [15:16] This is not at all what I was hoping it'd be. Is there an example of that that comes to mind where you maybe went through that and then it's just like, no, that did not work out the way we expected? And if not, no problem. [15:26] Yeah, I mean, I think that does happen. The end of the year is kind of like the level of engagement and often that last level of engagement, that's where there's actually the most rapid refining that you're doing. And I think what's important there is that hopefully you're refining in code and you're not still at like static design mocks because [15:44] Using the software is so different than looking at what the software will be. [15:48] visually appear. [15:50] And so I think [15:51] What we would want to do with Steward at Slack, for example, is we would get the entire development team. [15:57] engineers, design, product, user research, and steward together in a room, [16:02] and we kind of almost do like a bug bash together.

[16:04] And the idea was like, we're doing it all together. We're trying to make the best product possible. [16:08] Making great software is really messy, and we're all trying to kind of clean up the mess together. [16:14] Sometimes you might find things like, "Okay, this entry point really isn't working. Maybe we have to move this entry point. That's maybe a bigger change." [16:21] But I think often what you'd find is just all those bits of polish and refinement and [16:26] doing the little delightful things that might otherwise be missing to kind of raise that craft bar and doing a real collective way. So it doesn't just feel like the team says we want to ship. [16:35] And the founder says, "No, it's not ready." [16:38] Ideally, as a group, you're saying, we want to get it to a bar that's going to delight our users, and here's the gap from where we are today to what we want to shift. [16:48] I think that mentality winds up being a lot more constructive, but that's not always easy to do. [16:54] You talked about creating these principles, which is an awesome approach of just creating guardrails for the team so they think the way the founder and the head of product think. What are some examples of principles you have and had early on maybe at Foursquare or Slack? I mean, Slack, I think, is where we kind of enshrine them much more because we scaled the org so much more that we needed principles. [17:15] And I think for us, they were really about unpacking just the mission, which for Slack is making people's working lives simpler, more pleasant, more productive. [17:24] That's the mission of the company. [17:26] The question is, [17:27] "How does software help do that?" That's what principles are there to answer. So for us, we've got five core principles.

[17:34] They've largely stayed the same. Some of the language has changed over the last couple of years, but at least for the last four or five years we've had these. [17:41] So the first is be a great host, which is all about kind of that level of craft, the relinquency, so the saving people steps. [17:49] If you're, let's say, hosted at Airbnb, it's like putting clean towels on the bed. [17:53] So no one has to wonder, are these for me? [17:55] that type of foresight. That's actually a value at Airbnb, exactly. It's actually be a host at Airbnb is one of the four core values. Right. So maybe we borrowed that or someone was inspired by it, but be a great host sounded aspirational. I love that. Yeah, yeah. It's a little bigger. There's a famous user design book called Don't Make Me Think, which we sold the title of for our next principle. [18:18] And that's really just about [18:20] As people building the software, you know how it works so well. You care about all the nuances and intricacies, and you really want your users to love it as much as you do. [18:32] But often actually that kind of owner's delusion that someone else will care as much about the software that you built as you do prevents you from actually making something that's simple, comprehensible, understandable. [18:43] And so one of the core tenets of Slack is pretty complex under the surfaces. [18:47] How do we actually make people not have to think? [18:49] How do we not relint the wheel if there's existing design patterns to use? [18:53] How do we actually wind up designing for people who come from many different backgrounds and we kind of cater to their needs in ways that don't make them have to customize them too much? [19:03] There's a saying we also have, which is more clicks can often be okay.

[19:07] You're often having... [19:09] optimization experimentation circles, like, oh, every click, remove it, [19:13] But I actually think in a lot of software, when it's not transactional, [19:17] helping people understand what they're doing, giving them confidence, helping them have trust in the steps. [19:22] We've seen that that can actually be a better experience. So that's another example of [19:27] Don't make it stressful. [19:28] Help people chill out when they're using this offer. That's the idea behind that one. [19:32] Shifting a little bit, I know you guys have been working on a bunch of [19:35] AI stuff at Slack. And I believe you've been working on AI related stuff for many years. I think at Google, you worked on a lot of AI-related products. I feel like a lot of people are just getting into this and trying to figure out how do we integrate AI and ML and [19:50] LLMs into our product and how do we not just waste our time chasing things? So I want to ask you just [19:56] in your time working with AI over the many years you've been doing it and share, [20:00] a little bit about what you've been doing there. [20:02] What are some things you've learned about how to be actually effective and build valuable products and not just kind of fall for the shiny object issue and trap? I mean, it's almost 15 years ago now that I was working at Google in search on what later became called the knowledge graph. So this idea of building kind of a canonical repository of data. [20:23] information that people, places, things in the world and relationships between them. [20:27] and back then it was a lot of the same ideas but obviously the techniques have gotten a lot more mature so we used [20:34] natural language processing to extract all this information from the web and try to build this kind of database of facts.

[20:41] An idea then was, could you take queries people have, like, what are the tallest fountains in Europe, or what are the most popular beaches in Southern California, and be able to actually give answers, not just 10 blue links. [20:52] I think the thing that's really changed and super exciting in the last 6-12 months with LLMs and [20:59] ChatGPT and everything else is, [21:01] the idea that now you can take not just knowledge about the world but actually have natural language generation [21:08] where suddenly the computer can talk back to you in a way that feels extremely human. [21:13] And then the creative applications of that are pretty massive and exciting. [21:18] So that's kind of, I guess, the lineage there. I think from over the years back at Google, at Foursquare we did a lot of personalization and recommendations, at Slack we have, you know, [21:28] search in an L that's going to be used to the product, [21:30] I think a couple things come out as kind of, I guess, maybe principles that we've kind of used over the years. [21:36] Back then at Google, one of the big ones was that the promise of the UI [21:40] has to match the quality of that relying data. [21:43] which is to say... [21:44] And I think there's actually one of the failings of the various LMs right now is [21:48] they all appear supremely confident, even when they're completely hallucinating. And I think that's going to be something that people are going to have to work on a lot, [21:56] figure out how to be not so faultless to acknowledge when you're not sure, because otherwise it under, [22:01] minds the trust people have in the system. [22:04] Using a lot of transparency about where the data comes from, so people can actually build credibility in the tool is really important. [22:11] And then I think making sure that as you're designing the products that you have virtuous cycles that are naturally part of the project experience where you can get training data.

[22:20] as a byproduct of people naturally using the software, and then can make the model that you're building behind the scenes [22:26] smarter, more accurate, more predictive. So a classic example of that would be Netflix back in the day of their reading system, [22:33] they actually had a feedback loop from their customers, then made the system better at connecting. [22:37] I think people are still trying to figure out what does that look like in this world of LLMs. [22:41] Something I hope that you're all building at Slack is a way to ask... [22:45] a bot questions based on all the conversations in the Slack. I've been looking for that product for a while now. I can safely say we have a lot of prototypes internally where we are playing with this and I think [22:56] It's actually funny as an aside, in one of the original Slack, I don't know, [23:00] product vision decks back in 2014. There's our whole strategy, there's four parts. And then part number four, which was [23:08] A joke at the time was, [23:10] then do magic AI stuff on top. [23:13] And I guess we didn't even know what the state of AI would be by the time, hopefully, companies had their collective knowledge in Slack. [23:18] And now we're finally at the period where the magic AI stuff seems finally perfect. [23:23] pretty amazing, pretty magical. So yeah, we're doing a lot of prototyping internally and also trying to work with the ecosystem around as well, 'cause there's so many companies doing amazing work in this space. [23:33] so that if you work at a company where you have so much knowledge in your Slack channel repository, [23:39] that you can certainly get amazing leaps in productivity [23:42] to help you better do your job, because that knowledge is in Slack, but it's sometimes hard to reach. And I think these technologies can make that possible. [23:49] This reminds me of something Gustav, the CPO and CTO and co-president of Spotify, share that they always have a deck and a vision of just like a play button within Spotify. You just play and all magic happens and it's the best music and exactly what you want to hear and just how that isn't actually possible. And it's still not possible. And so exactly to your point, you have to really think about how does it act? How close is it to the reality? And if it's not actually there, he's like,

[24:16] He was saying how we'll pick two songs that are correct out of 10 just because we don't really know exactly what you want to hear right now. There's no point in trying to design that right now because it's not actually going to be delivering on the promise. Right. Yeah. I think I love that. Our version of that has always been that you open up Slack and suddenly instead of having to read through dozens of channels or find all these mentions that magically Slack could just tell you in the order that you would care about, kind of a summary of all the interesting things that have happened and then let you dig in if you want to. [24:45] your very own personal chief of staff, who knew everything that you cared about and read everything that you could read, [24:52] I don't think that's going to quite be possible anytime soon, but I think like Spotify heading towards that North Star, you wind up developing, I hope, a lot of really compelling projects for instance along the way. Yeah, man, the more you think about it, the more amazing opportunities exist in Slack. It's like all text. It's amazing. Okay, there's a lot of cool stuff coming, I imagine. Yes. I can't wait. Yes. On that topic, how do you think about it? [25:15] creating teams within Slack and AI. Specifically, are you like, [25:19] recommending each team think about how AI can make their stuff better? Or are you dedicating, here's the AI team and they're going to work on stuff and you guys just keep shipping what you're shipping and keep moving your metrics? I think the unfair answer is a hybrid of the two, which is to say we have a kind of central machine learning and search team, but a lot of people have expertise in this field to build infrastructure that everybody can use. [25:42] And what we've done is, [25:43] Uh, [25:45] because the space is evolving so quickly, literally every month, the capabilities are evolving,

[25:50] The risks and trade-offs are evolving a ton. What we want to do is actually kind of spin up a couple different teams, [25:56] that are focused on prototyping using that common infrastructure [26:01] but in specific directions that are all a little bit different. So we've got a common ML, let's say, search team, [26:08] And now we have a bunch of teams that are kind of working in parallel in different [26:12] kind of customer problems that we're trying to solve using that shared infrastructure, [26:16] So I think this isn't the steady state. I think over time, what it'll probably look like is that all the existing product areas, as soon as we kind of, [26:24] know more of the shape of what the technology is capable of we'll just have [26:29] AI capabilities as part of their roadmaps, just like every product team is responsible for their own mobile roadmap. They don't outsource it to someone else. [26:38] But I think today when things are moving so quickly, you actually want a little bit of a [26:42] more kind of ad hoc, flexible approach. [26:46] to move quickly, and that's what we're doing. [26:48] That's kind of what I've been hearing from everyone I've been asking this question. The search ranking team always seems to be the center of all this, and then it's a few experiments here and there. So that's an interesting pattern I've been noticing. Good to know. [26:59] I heard that you have a process internally called complaint storms, and I'd love to understand what that is. It's something that started, I want to say, back in the end of 2019, maybe early 2020. [27:12] And the idea a little bit was, how do we help [27:15] as a team look at the software that we build with fresh eyes, because we've been at Slack for a long time,

[27:21] And Slack, maybe more than almost any other company, maybe like Figma is probably similar. I was listening to the podcast just earlier today, where if you work on Figma or you work on Slack, you also live in Slack and you live in Figma all day. So you can become... [27:34] more of a power user than anyone else on Earth. [27:37] And what we're realizing, especially for people trying to [27:40] build Slack for the next million customers, the people who have never used Slack before, [27:45] it was becoming increasingly hard to kind of have empathy for what their usage of Slack would look like. [27:51] How would they look at it in a more critical way? How would they care less than we care? [27:55] And so what we started doing was these complaint storms. And the idea was really simple, which is we'd get a team together [28:00] Often Stuart or myself would also join [28:03] And we'd actually start off with other products first, like in adjacent spaces. [28:08] And we'd say, okay, as a group, we're going to go through the customer journey from the moment you land on the website through, let's say it's a, [28:15] workplace product. [28:16] getting your first account going, getting the first couple of users on board, getting to the point of value, we're gonna do it, [28:22] on one screen, someone's gonna project, and then people are gonna fill in every issue, everything that's confusing, every pain point, not bugs, but ways in which, if you care about the software, you don't work on it, [28:34] What would actually confuse you? What would stop you in your tracks? [28:37] And from that, you went generating a bunch of amazing inspiration by looking at someone else's product in a really critical way for things you might want to try on your own product. [28:48] Once you get to that, then it becomes easier to actually do with your own software, but it is a little painful, obviously. Same with watching usability tests.

[28:55] to look at your own baby in a way that is, okay, I'm trying to find all the words, I'm trying to find all the problems, [29:03] But that's one of being a pretty great source whenever a team, I think, either gets stuck or feels like they reach like a dead end in a direction. [29:09] is doing complaint stores about the product area that they're in, or using adjacent products [29:14] just to get inspiration, [29:17] And then I think it kind of unlocks a lot more kind of creative views on the problem space. [29:22] It's similar to a process that I learned Stripe has called friction logging, but I love [29:27] I love the nuance here of starting with someone else's product because I could totally see how that makes you feel better looking your product in real life. It's not like we suck. It's, okay, everyone has so much opportunity. Exactly. Yeah, I've heard that from Stripe, too. I think it gets a similar place. And I think the byproducts is that you also get calibration on product taste, product quality. And as a team, you kind of develop that together. [29:57] page about and how to calibrate. It's another good way to do it. [30:01] I'm imagining some PMs might be hearing this and wonder, "Okay, great. Now the founders and the execs have all these things that they want us to fix. I have goals to hit. I got a roadmap." How do you think about prioritizing things that come up in these sorts of sessions for the team and how do they mix and match versus all the other stuff they want to do? Or is it just like they don't actually have a huge roadmap and this is a way to form the roadmap? No, I mean, I think more broadly, I think the way that we think about or I like us to

[30:29] our roadmap for any feature team at Slack is that it's a portfolio. [30:33] And it's meant to be a portfolio that's diversified a couple different ways, right? I think one is you want to diversify things that are meant to be new capabilities versus making the thing you've already built a little bit better every day, similar to parenting. [30:46] Are there things that are meant to be risky that you aren't sure are going to work but might have a lot of upside? [30:53] There's things that are kind of known vets. And then I think often you're kind of balancing, are you doing things that are [30:58] meant to have impact that you're already very confident in versus things that are meant to learn about a new possibility space. [31:05] And so I think for most teams, this stuff usually wind up tactically filling up that bucket of, let's make the existing product a little bit better every day for users. [31:15] At Slack, we have this thing called customer love sprints, which is [31:20] An interesting way teams are trying to get this on the roadmap is [31:23] It's hard to allocate that work throughout the quarter, so what we wind up doing often is have a team do a truly customer-love sprint. [31:30] almost like a hackathon, but with that kind of burndown list of [31:34] what we think is the lowest effort, highest impact [31:37] that we can make to generate more love from our customers and whatever that feature is. [31:42] and then people just sprint for two weeks, design, product engineering, [31:46] and then you have a bunch of things that you sell there at the end, and the goal is to ship all of them. [31:49] So this isn't like hacks that you throw away. So that's kind of how we're prioritizing it off in that kind of work is, [31:55] actually kind of making it this really fun total change of pace throughout the quarter to not do big

[32:02] feature work that may take months, but to do all these small, delightful things that you know customers are going to love at the end. So that's the other way that we kind of figure out how to balance it in. [32:11] I love that. And how often do you do these sorts of customer-love sprints? I think teams that work on very user-facing products do it at least once a quarter. So, I think other teams that work on maybe less user-facing might do it maybe twice a year, but quarterly is a pretty healthy cadence. [32:26] Wow, I didn't know about that. And that kind of connects to Slack has always been a very delightful product. I remember early on the animations were so awesome. The little twirly, I don't know, pound hashtag thing. And it feels like Slack has always invested in delight. [32:42] How do you operationalize that? How do you, is it, is it these customer-love sprints? Is there something else that's just like, we need to, [32:48] allocate some percentage, just make things really fun, even though it's not going to move any metric. I would say it's a little bit of the DNA of the company, honestly, which is that four co-founders were trying to build a massive online role-playing game for many years that was called Glitch. Their background was all in building delightful, playful experiences. [33:10] Glitch didn't work out, but there's a whole long backstory. But the short version is a tool they had built internally that they then wound up spitting out a company from [33:17] which became Slack, I think that DNA, we're trying to build a consumer-grade experience that just happens to be for work. [33:24] is really bringing the company [33:26] It's also a big part of how we hire, I'd say, [33:29] Certainly the majority of PMs, designers, and engineers who will

[33:33] joined Slack, had never worked at an enterprise software company before. [33:37] It's not like most people had worked at Oracle or SAP. It's most people had worked at consumer companies or game companies. [33:43] And so they bring that focus and spirit. [33:46] And then I would say the last bit beyond the principles of the complaint storms and the customer love is that we have this amazing team that we call the CE team, the customer experience team. [33:56] And they're kind of, in some ways, the team that is [33:59] doing our scale support, but is most often in touch with our customers. [34:02] And from the very early days, people used to do CE shifts if you worked in products so that you can actually figure out what's frustrating, what's confusing. And we have a really great kind of pipeline for getting the insights from the CE team. [34:16] What are the obstacles, the pain points, the most frequent complaints? [34:20] into the hands of the product teams to be able to prioritize to figure out, yeah, not all these are going to move. [34:25] a given metric, they might not achieve something for the business, but collectively, [34:30] I think the way that Slack thinks about [34:32] Competition is we obsess about customers. [34:35] We build something they'll love enough to tell their co-workers, and the rest takes care of itself. [34:40] Speaking of competition, something I wanted to ask you a bit about. So early on, Slack was competing against this product called HipChat. And that's actually what I used at our startup. And we loved HipChat. It was so hilarious. Just these memes everywhere and their billboards were amazing. But then Slack ate their lunch. [34:56] Later on, [34:57] I'm just kind of thinking out loud. Discord feels like that was the big threat and now Microsoft Teams, obviously. I'm curious just how you think about competition and even just what you've learned about working in a space where there's a lot of competition and thinking about that long term and even short term. Yeah, I mean, each of those is kind of like an interesting mini kind of lesson learned about those. And I think the through line for all of them, I would say, is still that.

[35:20] The maximum that we have in Toronto, which is we're customer obsessed, but competitor aware. [35:25] So I think it's a little bit different. I think some companies are like, [35:28] Uber, for example, I think was notorious, like competitor obsessed, and they tried to delay customers when they could. [35:35] I don't think Slack saw it out to kill HipChat. At Foursquare, we used, I think it was called Campfire back in the day, for the 37 single people. So the whole generation of those products. [35:47] Slack came along and I think they had a couple of innovations. One was they had a great mobile experience that synced across every client. [35:53] search actually worked and then they brought a lot of the best parts of like consumer messaging [35:59] into the workplace, like emoji and reactions and all those bits. [36:03] I think it turns out that if you're 10x better on a couple of those axes, [36:08] then you can see a huge change in behavior. And so I think that's what happened with that move from like the hip chat campfire to Slack world. [36:16] Discord's interesting. I mean, we keep aware of Discord, but it is so much more focused on the kind of consumer. It really was gaming now for community space. And I think at Slack, the lesson I would have, I think we learned in a good way is, [36:28] We've always really been focused on groups of people who are trying to do work together. [36:33] and that ends up being a completely different audience to build for than communities. [36:38] And so I think that focus has been really helpful. And I think Discord's amazing and many people love it. And the people who use Discord certainly use it in a very different way than people who use Slack at work. [36:49] I think Microsoft obviously has become, over time, the biggest competitor there.

[36:54] The origin of Teams really was a defensive move for them to protect Office, because Office is an incredible, very profitable monopoly in the productivity space. [37:03] And so I think when they built Teams, it was more of a kind of covering their flank versus Slack kind of on the ascent. [37:10] I think as Teams has evolved over time, it's become much more of a video conferencing product that competes with Zoom and Google Meet. [37:16] The people who use [37:18] Teams use it completely different than Slack where you live and breathe in channels and work in workflows all day long. [37:25] And I think what we've seen there too is that a lot of our customers, they have to use both. [37:30] Most Fortune 500 companies have either an Office subscription or a Google Workplace subscription [37:36] and all of those customers who use those also use Slack, and we like to say that Slack is this connected tissue that makes all the rest of your tools that much better. So I think there we've kind of taken very much an open ecosystem and platform approach, [37:49] We've just been focused on how do we keep building [37:51] the best version of what Slack can be is a new category of software for our customers, and staying aware of our competitors, but really obsessed on [38:00] What are the new ways that we can delight our users as the years go by? [38:04] So Slack is kind of a big-ish company within now, let's say, a big company, but it feels like you still are launching really interesting stuff. You launch huddles, clips. There's this AI stuff coming, sounds like. I'm curious what you have done at Slack to enable these sorts of zero-to-one bets and what you've seen is important to allow for innovation along those lines. I think maybe we're all a little self-delusional because I think everyone who works at Slack likes to think that we're still at a small startup.

[38:34] Honestly, culturally has been a big part of it. I think going back to the principles early on, one of the ones that we did talk about, literally one of the actual wording is take bigger, bolder bets. [38:44] and the idea there is that it's really easy to fall into the trap of just constant incrementalism [38:49] You know the classic, it's a feature team, and you have a KPI, and you feel like your whole life is measured by that similar KPI going up. [38:56] 1% a quarter, [38:58] And then you kind of lose sight of [39:00] what's beyond the horizon? And so we have this kind of mental metaphor that we talk a lot about getting to the next hill. [39:07] The idea is that if you're in a mountain range, you're maybe in a little valley, [39:11] You can kind of see what's right in front of you, but you have no idea how tall the mountains are behind. [39:16] I think teams can often get lost. [39:18] kind of crawling up that hill, not really. There's a huge, incredibly beautiful range behind it. [39:25] so take bigger boulder bets get to the next hill to see what the horizon is like around you that's kind of [39:30] how we think about it strategically, [39:32] And then I think structurally the way that we've approached it is that we've [39:35] over time created new teams from scratch that incubate in a new area before the areas mature. [39:41] So we did that with a lot of these kind of native audiovisual products like Huddles and Clips. [39:46] early in the pandemic because our customers were demanding it from us. [39:49] They were like, "We love living in Slack all day, but we feel disconnected from our teammates when we can't be in the same physical place." [39:55] Like, what can you do to help us? And that's where that came from. [39:59] And I think in the AI space now, it's a similar thing, which is what we're trying to hear from customers like, [40:03] What do you wish Slack could do if it had these new superpowers? And let's incubate a couple of teams to prototype there, and then figure out what can get to real product market fit.

[40:13] And I think when we have those teams, I think it's important to just give them [40:16] space to run to give them [40:19] kind of a get out of jail free card for maybe the normal process of, [40:23] you know, okay, our planning quarterly reviews and make it feel something that is like the pace [40:29] of learning is what matters. Like how fast are you prototyping, how fast are you learning from users? And then [40:34] getting to do that publicly in pilot and then get something to launch that's amazing, blows people away. [40:40] That's kind of the formula that we've seen. [40:42] This episode is brought to you by Vanta, helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate your growth. Thousands of fast growing companies like Gusto, Com, Quora, and Modern Treasury trust Vanta to help build, scale, manage, and demonstrate their security and compliance programs and get ready for audits in weeks, not months. [41:01] By offering the most in-demand security and privacy frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, and many more, Vanta helps companies obtain the reports they need to accelerate growth, build efficient compliance processes, mitigate risks to their businesses, and build trust with external stakeholders. Over 5,000 fast-growing companies use Vanta to automate up to 90% of the work involved with SOC 2 and these other frameworks. For a limited time, Lenny's podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. [41:31] Vanta.com slash Lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash Lenny to learn more and to claim your discounts. Get started today. [41:40] One of the things I love learning about from product teams is their unique rituals and traditions. And I'm curious, what's maybe the most interesting or unique or fun or funny ritual or tradition on the product team, things you all maybe do regularly? One of the things that we do, which is kind of always a little bit funny, I mean, it's more of a like a emotional thing rather than a practical thing is that at all hands, we'll

[42:05] wind up taking specific tweets that people had about their product. And Twitter, people say the craziest thing sometimes. And sometimes they're really heartwarming customer love, but often, [42:16] It's just the meanest, most frustrating complaints that people have. And it's honestly meant for us to just have a pulse on, like where people are actually saying and feeling in the wild and, [42:26] Not thinking too seriously, but keeping that sense of, [42:30] I think that the distance you have from your users as your user base gets more and more diverse and larger, [42:35] I think it can make it harder to actually develop the product because [42:39] You're not designing for yourself anymore. [42:41] And so I think all the ways that we help keep people grounded in like, what are actual users actually saying? [42:48] That's one big way. The other that reminded me of, which is actually probably better, maybe a [42:53] delete that last one because it's kind of worrying. - No, it's great. We're not deleting nothing. - Fine. You know, usable, so I'm a big believer in [43:01] You want to be data informed, but you don't want to be so data driven that you actually don't [43:08] have a pulse on what real people feel when they're using your product. [43:12] So we're really big into user research, not as it gives you the answer, but it helps at least pose a lot of questions for you when you watch how someone actually uses the software. [43:21] And historically, it's really hard to get PMs, let alone engineers, to actually attend user research sessions. And so what we wound up doing [43:29] especially in the pandemic when we first went remote, is now we can dial into usability sessions. And to make it really interactive for the team, what we would do is have people live in a thread

[43:41] write their real-time thoughts of, "So people have to use that," or, "I can't believe they missed that," or, "Oh, that gave me this idea from seeing how they were doing that to do this other thing." [43:50] And so then you wind up having the PMs, engineers, designers, and the user researcher all in one Slack thread, like live responding, reacting to usability session, [43:59] And then suddenly that thread becomes actually the best kind of source of truth for the research report that gets rid of. [44:06] But I think most importantly, it gets the team, almost like the complaint storms, but actually watching someone else do it. [44:11] like in the shoes of an actual human being, trying to use the thing that you thought was so brilliant, and yet has all these flaws. [44:20] It's humbling. [44:21] It's filled with humor and also it's, I think, really constructive for the teams to do it that way. [44:26] I was going to ask where they actually share these thoughts in Slack. It makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I mean, it turns into a report at some point, but literally just link back to the original thread, and then you have like 100 people's reactions as the [44:38] report is kind of ongoing. [44:40] If only there was an AI tool to summarize all of your [44:44] Thoughts? We've got a prototype for that. Hopefully it'll work well enough that actually will be useful for customers too. You tweeted once about how, I think maybe around the time you joined Slack around 2019, that the self-service business of Slack basically plateaued. [45:01] And it wasn't clear why. [45:03] I'm curious just what that period was like and how did you kind of get to the bottom of what was going on and turn things around? Yeah, it was actually a couple years after I joined, but it was a point where I was kind of

[45:14] focused on the self-service business because we had this period with Slack where [45:18] I would say maybe 2014 to 2017, where it was almost all self-service and it was just growing like gamebusters. [45:25] And then we started spinning up the sales team and the enterprise team, we started focusing mostly on that. [45:30] And I think we kind of, you know, we saw the team that was working on self-serve, but it was [45:35] primarily the company's focus was all driving enterprise deals, kind of getting to that next level of maturity, [45:41] And then in 2019, I think we started to see that when we look beneath the surface, [45:45] The fundamentals of the self-service business weren't looking as healthy as they used to be. [45:50] I think kind of the biggest thing as we kind of dug into it was [45:53] A little bit to what we were talking about earlier with the Motivation Act and Plainstorms is, [45:57] It was getting harder to understand what the next generation of customers really want from the product. [46:02] and whether you're thinking about this is crossing the chasm or moving from like kind of early adopters the needs of kind of [46:08] the majority or later adopters, [46:10] I think we're at that point where [46:12] Not every technologically sophisticated company on Earth was using Slack, but most were. [46:17] and we were getting into a market that customers just had different needs, they had different levels of [46:21] sophistication [46:23] And so we get a lot of user research. We look at all these cohort curves, which you can imagine. [46:28] Suddenly they're like, oh, they're not as healthy as they used to be. Like, what's going on? [46:32] And I think [46:33] You know, we got that. [46:35] got a bunch of insights on it, but I think really what we want to change about how we were operating [46:39] was instead of to continue to try to optimize the things that had worked over the last couple of years, we said, "Okay, let's kind of throw the whole roadmap away."

[46:48] Instead, let's come up with a bunch of hypotheses about what could be new leverers [46:52] that can actually help [46:54] based on the insights that we now have about the next set of customers. And we're gonna try to quickly learn [47:00] which of these levers are real, and which of these are just totally off the mark. [47:04] And [47:05] We kind of had to say for the next six months, we're probably not going to drive any impact. [47:09] at all. It's only going to be about learning. But at the end of that, hopefully, we wind up finding a couple different levers that had years of room to run. [47:17] And that's what wound up happening. We wound up kind of doubling the rate of our new paid customer growth, [47:22] in the year and a couple years after that, and kind of reaccelerating the self-service [47:26] And I think it really came from [47:28] stepping back, [47:30] being humble, not feeling like we deserve to have every company on Earth sign up, and then figuring out how to optimize for learning so that in the long term you can get the impact. [47:39] But knowing that for the next couple quarters, we're going to sacrifice impact. [47:43] for the sake of learning. [47:44] And I think there's a good muscle to build, but it was definitely not easy to do at the time. [47:48] Well, this story begs the question, what are the levers that worked? Whatever you can share. [47:53] One of the big things that we wound up focusing on is what we talked about as comprehension desirability. So the fundamental challenge, I think, for new users or new teams using your product, once you get past the kind of tech early adopters is [48:06] "Duly comprehended what this thing is for, [48:09] Do they understand how it works? And then desirability is why should they care? [48:14] Most people at work are not like, "Hey, you know what I want to do today is start using an entirely new tool and convince all my coworkers to get on board." That is not part of your job. Your job has goals and measurements and everything else.

[48:26] So really deeply understanding that, and how do you push on that in that new user experience? [48:31] It sounds maybe a little ludicrous, but Slack has a freemium product. Obviously, there's a free tier that you can use. [48:38] But we had never actually figured out a trial strategy where we actually gave you a taste of the paid product. [48:44] either run free tier or you have to pay for the paid tier. [48:47] And that one being one of the ripest veins is figuring out how to give people a taste of the full premium Slack experience so that they would never want to go back. [48:56] and doing that at a variety of different points in the customer journey. [48:59] And then I say the other biggest thing I would call them out is, [49:02] We really need to figure out a new North Star metric [49:05] for motivating the teams across Slack. [49:09] At that point in time, we basically had paid customers, and then we had creative, which is like the very, very beginning, very, very end of the journey. [49:16] and we did a lot of quantitative research and data science and wound up coming up with this new metric we called successful teams. [49:23] which is a little bit, you know, I feel a lot of companies have this, like Facebook's, I don't know, lucky number seven or whatever it was, [49:28] where what we found was that if you could get [49:30] five people [49:32] using Slack the majority of the work week to just communicate at all, that would be a successful team. They're going to be 400% more likely to upgrade over the next six months. [49:42] And that seems like a very low bar, like five people to use Slack throughout the work week, not even every day. [49:49] But it turns out that if you get that level of critical mass, [49:52] kind of the rest would take care of itself. And we want to motivate not just the team that was focused on self-service, but all these other feature teams across the company to drive more and more successful teams.

[50:03] knowing that if we can move that, which is much earlier in the funnel, but not a top of funnel entry, that it would actually drive upgrades and pay customers and less revenue long term. [50:14] And that was a huge kind of turning point for how we rally product teams around to be able to actually drive that self-service business. [50:22] Man, this feels like its own podcast just to analyze the things you learned down this journey, and there's so many... [50:27] takeaways here. One is just the importance of an activation metric that is predictive of retention. So sounds like you landed on... [50:33] five people in a company like DAU basically for a week, something like that. [50:38] Thank you. [50:39] That's awesome. And then the other interesting takeaway here is I'm actually doing a bunch of interviews with founders of the most successful B2B companies. And interestingly, they all, not all, maybe half are like, I still don't think we have product market fit. Like they're at like a billion dollars valuation, growing like crazy. And like, I feel like I have product market fit with the current users, but I don't with the people I want. [51:00] And that's what you're describing, right? It's like the new, you stopped having product market fit with people that you wanted next. I think that's exactly right. I think of like product market fit is almost like you keep stacking these S curves where you get product market fit in a small group and then you suddenly reach like exponential growth because [51:18] you can crack a call group, that type of audience, [51:21] But then you start declining because you start hitting the ceiling of like, we've got a, [51:24] I don't know what it might be, every development team in the U.S. to be using this product. And then you jump up to the next S-curve, which is like, how do we get technology savvy teams that aren't developers? Or how do we get...

[51:36] people who are in large enterprises who are outside the US. These each become new curves that you have to build product market fit for. And I think this is all a huge exercise in technology [51:49] like being self-critical, being humble, not presuming that you've cracked this thing forever and keeping kind of a very beginner's mindset of, [51:57] What does the next audience need that your previous audience didn't need at all? [52:01] If you think about the pie chart of what you had to change to make it work, how much of it was like messaging, positioning, onboarding, optimization versus like product features? [52:10] I would say maybe 60-40 in the sense of the early journey. I mean, not just obviously positioning messaging, but like the entire threads of like unboxing Slack, if you will, with your team. [52:23] uh, you know, we, we called it the day one journey, but extended to really kind of like day 30 in reality. And it's, [52:29] a single-player and multiplayer experience, it is really complex. [52:33] But then I think what we realized was, you can make that incredible. [52:37] But if fundamental parts of the product were missing that would make it comprehensible to the next audience, then you're going to have problems. So like. [52:45] It sounds maybe... [52:47] and impossible to remember, but Slack used to not have WYSIWYG message composition. You used to have to use Markdown, [52:55] And so making Matt WYSIWYG was a huge boost, making mobile work offline to work no matter where you were in the world. [53:03] was another big one. All the things about configuring your sidebar notification so that as you scale your issues, it didn't become overwhelming.

[53:11] Those are some of the kind of foundational product investments that we wound up making. So that next generation of Slack customers, [53:18] could get value and not be overwhelmed or daunted by it. [53:22] Maybe one last question along these lines. People look at Slack as kind of maybe the first major product-led growth success story, and they always look at Slack like, oh, we just want to grow like Slack. Let's see what they did. For people that are studying Slack's journey and success, what do you think Slack did right early on that maybe people don't recognize or don't appreciate enough that founders today should do? [53:44] be thinking about more so versus just like, "Let's just make a freemium product." Right. I mean, I think maybe the most telling thing is when Slack started, it's really when I [53:54] I don't think a word or acronym product-like growth existed. So it wasn't like we were really good at taking this playbook and applying it. I think it was more [54:03] that whole term of art became a thing, as many other freemium [54:08] SaaS products kind of took off. [54:11] You know, I really think [54:13] Not to be repetitive, but I think the core of it really was [54:17] building a product that customers loved enough that they would put their own social capital on the line to get their coworkers on board, [54:25] and that was easy enough to use and get the value from that without ever talking to a salesperson. [54:30] You could put a credit card down. [54:32] or expensive if you wanted to. [54:34] for just your team. [54:36] And [54:37] I think [54:39] when people think about this product-led growth notion, I think there are really two very different audiences, and I think Slack was able to crack both. One is...

[54:46] When your team is small and your company is small, it is the entire company if you're an SMB. [54:51] And I think that's almost like Slack's sweet spot. When the original pitch deck came to the investors, they said, [54:56] Slack is to companies of five to 50 people. [54:59] At the time, the biggest company of Azure using Slack was 50 people because I don't know how this is going to work beyond that. It'll become pandemonium. [55:07] Obviously, that was the initial, I think, real, real strong product market fit. [55:11] But the other bit, which then was what powered the enterprise business, was [55:15] teams of five to 50 people who work at larger companies. [55:19] And I think what wound up happening was that you would have teams independently at a company like IBM or Disney or Capital One or whatever it might be or Comcast. [55:29] Discovering Slack. [55:30] using it for themselves because they thought it would just make their working lives simpler, more pleasant, more productive, and maybe not even know that anyone else at the company was using Slack. [55:39] And then by the time we then scaled our enterprise sales team, [55:42] I mean, truly, the exercise initially was just [55:45] take customer domain, sort by number of active users, and call them in the order of that. [55:51] which is, hey, by the way, you have a couple thousand people actually using Slack at your company. Do you want to think about a broader deployment or controls or analytics? [56:00] And so I think that that was it. [56:02] consumer-grade experience that customers love enough to get their co-workers on and [56:06] pay for themselves. [56:07] And then at enterprise companies like [56:10] having a bunch of different flowers sprouting so that eventually you could roll up it enterprise-wide [56:15] kind of deal and then there's all the tactics but i think that that was where it started

[56:20] The way you described it at the beginning, make a product that people want to share with their colleagues reminds me of a, I was just listening to an interview with Seth Godin, who's this marketing legend. I think he has a new book, so he's on every podcast. And he had this really great quote that the products that win are ones that you want to tell your friends about. And it's a really simple concept. And basically, it's like, it's word of mouth is how you have to win. But I think that's so true. And like every successful company I talk to ends up being like, we just want to build something people want to share with their friends. [56:50] it's growing in some other way, SEO, paid... [56:52] It feels like that's always at the root of it. You just want to tell your friends about it because you love it. Slack, I think, is a great example of that. I think that's true. Obviously, there are categories of enterprise software that isn't true for security or data management. I think if it's an awesome security product, you're like, "Hey, you got to check out this Sentry or whatever or Sneak." [57:13] - Yeah, I'm good friends with Advante CEO Christina, and I feel like they've made a lot of those stories where whoever would have thought a compliance company would be something that people raved about to their other startup friends like, oh my god, you don't want to deal with Sox compliance? You got you in Advante, it's amazing. [57:29] So yeah, maybe that is true. [57:31] especially in this day and age where all the marketing acquisition channels have been so saturated, people have optimized them so much. [57:37] I think it's really hard to scale big enough business if... [57:40] you don't have some amount of word of mouth and customer love driven, [57:45] growth, I think it's hard to scale it on like we're going to just play the cat game and hope that the numbers work out. I remember Slack rolling out at Airbnb and all the designers getting so excited about it, creating their channels. And everyone's just like, what the hell are they doing? What is this thing? And then it did exactly what you're describing, just spread. Everyone's just like, whoa, this is cool. And they're all telling each other that how useful it is to them and spread like crazy. I love that. Is there anything else on Slack that you think would be interesting to share in terms of what makes it?

[58:14] it a successful product team, product business before I move on to another topic. The other thing I think is maybe a little bit interesting in terms of how we develop product and it's really different in exchange over time, which is that, [58:28] Obviously, the easiest person to build for is yourself, and the next easiest is people who look almost exactly like you. [58:35] or have similar preferences and sophistication, [58:38] And I think in the early days of Slack, that's basically what we did. I mean, it was like, [58:42] really just trying to build for small technologically savvy teams in terms of you could build a pretty big business making a great product for them [58:49] Over the years, obviously, that's changed. And so one of the things I think that we've done [58:54] Oh, cheers. [58:54] work really well. One obviously is we figured out how to do experimentation in a SaaS product, which is not always obvious because the metrics are much [59:02] longer term than you land at a checkout page and then you hit checkout. But I think the other thing is we figure out how to scale up getting real customers using Slack in the wild for new functionality. [59:15] And so we have this really robust program that we call our pilot program where we have [59:20] probably thousands of different customers that have all signed different agreements now where we can actually roll out to progressively larger user bases. And because Slack is a multiplayer product, you often have to roll out real net functionality to a whole company or whole team, 'cause otherwise you can't use huddles by yourself, for example. [59:38] And then we have a really great program for actually getting feedback from those customers, both through Slack Connect itself, through surveys, and this winds up being kind of a lifeblood of

[59:48] feature teams where you can, by the time you actually launch a big net new feature for Slack, [59:54] have gotten so much customer feedback from people actually using in the wild to get work done. [59:59] and so much more confidence in what you're building from the metrics and the surveys that we do. [1:00:03] that you can't guarantee it's gonna be a hit, but you can be really confident [1:00:07] not because it just worked well internally, which is no longer that predictive, but because it worked well for a thousand different companies, [1:00:14] 50 different countries, [1:00:16] in 20 different industries. [1:00:17] And so I think, you know, early on, SAS companies don't need to figure that out. But I think as you grow and as you have a more diverse [1:00:25] customer base, as you said, all these SaaS founders who said, "Hey, you got to keep reestablishing product market fit." [1:00:31] I think [1:00:32] That is like a programmatic way of being able to do that with your product development process. It's pretty interesting. [1:00:37] Any tips for how to choose who to include in this group if someone wants to build something like this for themselves? I think the two most important things are you want a lot of diversity in terms of industry, company size, location and so on. [1:00:51] And then I think you want to pick people who are actually motivated and [1:00:54] to want to be part of the development process and have a slightly higher risk tolerance. [1:00:59] Not every company wants to actually be beta testing new functionality that might get removed. [1:01:04] So making sure we have kind of a champion network that we built with people who [1:01:09] love slack enough that they're willing to put up with a little bit of pain in that rougher period or are willing to have something [1:01:15] that they tried to use, and then we decided actually we're going to fill that feature before we ever ship it to everybody. So diversity and

[1:01:22] you know, pin tolerance, [1:01:24] This reminds me of something else the CTO of Stripe shared of how they build new product, which is they... [1:01:29] pick a couple customers that need a problem solved, and they just build it for them, essentially, and with them. And in B2B, [1:01:36] Generally, it's a lot easier to build something people really want because they are very motivated for you to solve their problem and they're going to put in the time. And there's like you don't need thousands of people involved. You just need a couple. [1:01:46] Yeah, I definitely think it's one of those things where [1:01:49] If you could do it away and they say, I can't live without it, like the classic. Do you like it? Sure. But can you work without this thing? [1:01:58] If the answer is definitely not, you built something that probably a lot of other companies will want to. [1:02:03] All right, I'm going to shift to a totally different topic, which could also be its own whole podcast, but let's just see how it goes. So you wrote this... [1:02:10] I'd say famous blog post on product management called the 10 traits of great product managers. And [1:02:17] I want to just try to go through this list briefly and just see how it goes. I don't want to, you know, this could be an hour of conversation, but let's just kind of run through it because I think it'd be useful for people to hear. And I think these are all 100 percent true, even though you wrote this number of years ago at this point. And just let's just see what comes up. And then I have a few follow up questions on this list. These traits are kind of came after I wrote this other thing, which is like the five minutes about product management, which are all the things that people think product management is and why they switch to the job and they're disappointed by. [1:02:44] And then I was like, let me actually write a positive version of this, which is the things that the job actually is about. It's not a career ladder. It's not like the... [1:02:52] you know, here's the structured interview things that you should interview for. But I think it's,

[1:02:56] the actual job of product roundup. What is it about? What does success look like? And I don't think they're really in a particular order in hindsight, but I'll read it in order. So live in the future and work backwards. [1:03:08] I think it's very much kind of the idea of as a PM, [1:03:11] one thing they're responsible for, it's kind of having a longer term vision and time horizon. So how do you carve out time to not just be, "What are we doing over the next two weeks?" [1:03:21] six months, a year, two years from now, how you immerse yourself in them and bring ideas back, bring inspiration back to the team. I'm just going to throw comments out as you're going through them, just add to them. So I love that this is like exactly Amazon's like approach of like work backwards, working backwards process. At Airbnb, this is actually like the main thing Brian pushed everyone to do is just think about the idealized product of like a magical world where this is totally solved and then work backwards from that. And then Paul Graham talks about this too, right? [1:03:51] live in the future and build it. I definitely riffed off at least the Paul Graham thing, because I remember reading an essay of, he thinks, everyone thinks that you get certified leaders by like, [1:04:00] sitting with their co-founder, laying in Dolores Park, looking up at the sky and conjuring up the next unicorn or something. [1:04:06] Definitely not how that works. You have to actually immerse yourself in the problem space [1:04:11] and try to imagine what the future world looks like, and then what's missing? [1:04:16] for people to get to that future state. So yeah, I agree. [1:04:19] I also saw a great tweet by Shreyas the other day about how if you're working at a company with [1:04:24] good leaders, they're never going to be sad that your vision is too big and too ambitious. If there's some reality to it.

[1:04:32] that often they want that just like let's go let's think bigger let's how do we how do we change the way we think about the future of all this stuff yeah i mean that was when i was at google the thing i took away most from any review in larry and survey was [1:04:43] they would ask like, [1:04:45] "How can we get 100x the scale?" Or, "How could this work for this?" What seemed like an outlandish use case, but would push the team to think much further into the future. [1:04:54] I think that's what the founders always want. [1:04:56] That's what Brian Chesky always said too, just like, how do we 10x this? What would it take to 10x this idea? [1:05:00] - Yeah. - So, awesome, okay. - Okay, the second one, which is maybe obvious, but thinking about how do you actually amplify your team? So how do you facilitate ideas? How do you create energy? How do you create momentum? [1:05:13] A PM role, I think, can be a little bit unsatisfying if you're used to a role where you create things yourself. [1:05:18] as opposed to you are the one who's amplifying what the work that's being done by everyone else is. So you have to kind of get into that. [1:05:24] more of a facilitator mindset. What I think about here is a lot of teams like don't want PMs on their team or don't like PMs or don't think PMs are valuable. What I find is that just means your PM is not good because if you have a good PM, they're just going to, [1:05:38] help you do the best work of your life. [1:05:40] They're going to help you clarify things, prioritize well, unblock you, all that stuff. Totally. We should find out who wrote that expression early on of PMs should be mini-CEOs. [1:05:52] I think that's the most dangerous piece of advice ever in the history of product management, because I think that is how you wind up having PMs. [1:06:00] who try to act like dictators instead of [1:06:02] kind of leaders and facilitators, because if you're acting like that, yeah, your team can completely reject you and say, I never want another PM again.

[1:06:09] Yeah, so many new PMs are just like, "I'm finally going to have the power." Finally, if they move from engineering or some other role and then they get there and they're like, "Oh, what the hell? I have to convince everyone of all these things I want to do." That actually, I'm going to skip in a slightly different direction of the order of this post, [1:06:24] The fifth one I wrote on there was [1:06:27] your job is to facilitate the pace and quality of decision-making. [1:06:32] And that is very different than you are the person who makes all the decisions. [1:06:36] In fact, one of the things that PM struggled with early on [1:06:39] is [1:06:40] how do you actually [1:06:41] get the team to be able to make high-quality decisions quickly without you arbitrarily playing tiebreaker all the time. [1:06:48] And it's a soft... [1:06:50] to be able to do that, but I think that is actually how you have a really healthy team dynamic. [1:06:55] Instead of PM2, want to say, okay, now it's my turn to get to make the decision. It's definitely not what the job is about. [1:07:00] What that makes me think about is I taught a course on product management at one point that I paused for now. I've just like, like the core job of a PM is to figure out what's next for every single person on the team. And you're this, there's this meme or gif of a, [1:07:13] a dog on a train and he's just laying the tracks as the team is moving forward ahead of them just one step at a time. [1:07:19] And to do that, this is such an important part of that, is just help people make decisions, unblock them. Totally. I'll combine two of these together. One is you do have to have impeccable execution. This is more of a baseline thing, but I've never seen a PM who was disorganized or didn't do follow-up or wasn't clear about expectations or timelines. It's not high in ASL's hierarchy of PM enjoyment, but I do think it's a baseline expectation.

[1:07:47] The thing I think is more enjoyable and probably [1:07:50] the most important thing in the long term is [1:07:53] focusing on impact primarily to the customer experience, but also to the business. [1:07:58] And I think [1:07:59] There's that saying like growth solves all problems. [1:08:03] impact solves all PM issues, which is [1:08:08] If the team is consistently building things people love and changing the direction of the business, [1:08:13] Everything else is just an input. [1:08:15] And so I think... [1:08:17] That focus and understanding, as you're pointing out, laying the tracks is like, what direction do you need to go as a team to actually drive that impact? That's probably the single thing that PM can most control. [1:08:28] I love that. I always recommend exactly that. If your career is not going as well as you'd hoped, or you're not getting promoted, it's usually you're not delivering impact, whatever that means to the company. It may be moving a metric, it may mean building great product that the founders really love. It may impact, it can mean a lot of different things, but it's so true. On the execution, executing impeccably bucket, the way I think about that is, as a great PM, you need to have this aura of, "I've got this." [1:08:55] anytime someone puts something on your plate, it's not going to fall off. You're not going to forget about it. You're not going to let a ball drop. The more you can create this aura of, like, I got this, the more responsibility people were going to give you, the more... [1:09:09] impact you'll end up having, the more people want to work with you and all that. [1:09:12] Yeah, Ben Horowitz was a board member back at Foursquare. I just remember he used to have this saying, very Yoda-like,

[1:09:19] You know, good leaders need to say what they're gonna do, [1:09:23] And then do what they said. [1:09:26] And if they can't, then they need to follow up and explain why. I mean, that's like the amendment. And I think that is kind of what good execution looks like. [1:09:33] That last point is so important. You may not be able to do all the things on your plate, [1:09:37] But just telling people, hey, I'm not going to get to this thing. [1:09:40] Let's reprioritize is such a small thing you could do and really creates that or of you got this, that you're not going to forget about this thing I asked you to do. Yeah, you're the shock absorber for the team. You're the thing that builds people's confidence that things are going to be running smoothly. [1:09:54] you'll get over the net, but we'll, you know, speed bumps and whatever else. So, [1:09:58] I'll combine two or three of these that are related or just more skills. [1:10:03] I said, write well. I actually think [1:10:07] So if you get to more senior positions, writing is the only scalable way of having confluence on a larger and larger product org. [1:10:15] There's a book called On Writing by Stephen King, which I recommend to literally everybody. You know, Stephen King, you're like, he's not maybe the most literary, critical, acclaimed author, but he's a prolific writer. [1:10:27] author who publishes things that people love and tell their friends about and he has a great short book i'm like [1:10:33] the practice of writing [1:10:35] high-quality, high-volume production. Before you move on, I'll throw out a couple more books that I found useful in my writing. [1:10:42] One is actually called On Writing Well. So that's kind of funny that they're so similarly titled, which basically every chapter is just another way to cut more from your writing, like more and more parts you should cut. And interestingly, I do have a lot of guest posts on my newsletter and I find it.

[1:10:57] 90% of the time, if I just cut the first paragraph of what they first took a crack at and jumped straight into the thing, it immediately gets better. And this book talks a lot about that. [1:11:06] Another book that is amazing for writing better is Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit by the guy that wrote The War of Art. [1:11:16] I forget his name, but that book is awesome, and it's just like nobody wants to read what you're writing. Here's how to maybe make it something people want to read. And then recently I read one called Several Short Sentences or something like that, and it's all about just writing short sentences, and that helps a lot. So there you go. Three more recommendations. Okay. I got to read the last two. I haven't read those, but they sound perfect, so... [1:11:36] Okay, maybe I'll throw a little more, let's say, we talked about this earlier, but actually we had this in the 50 years ago. [1:11:43] Optimizing for the pace of learning, [1:11:45] And knowing that long term, that's the thing that's going to drive impact. [1:11:49] I think, [1:11:50] It can be hard if you're a PM for a feature team, you're part of a big company, I don't know, making this up, you're on the AdWords team at Google and you're responsible for the... [1:12:00] you know, bid input selector or something. And it probably is a whole team, honestly, now at this point. You've got such a set of blinders on that I think it can be hard to think about, like, what else could [1:12:12] this team become? What else could you drive beyond a thing that's right in front of you? [1:12:16] So, authorizing for learning, being willing to take those bolder bets, knowing you can be wrong in the short term, but that you learn new levers that will be really fruitful in the long term. [1:12:26] It's a portfolio approach to product, but I think a really important one.

[1:12:30] I was just interviewing a product leader at Asana, Paige Costello, and we were talking about how she's often the youngest person in the room and often manages people that are much older than her and more experienced than her and asked her just how do you. [1:12:42] How do you do that? How do you succeed in that sort of environment? And what she's found is just [1:12:48] Being the person that has the answers and the insights, [1:12:51] In meetings, [1:12:52] People obviously run run to her like, hey, what do you think of this? Because she just knows what people are going to need. And so I think that's exactly what you're talking about here is just be the person that knows the most about the problem customers. [1:13:03] the space. Yeah. And then I'll remind the last two, just because I know on time, but the combination of data fluency, [1:13:11] which is not to say that every PM needs to be a statistician [1:13:14] I mean, it's great. I mean, you've had a lot of great posts about how to understand some of the basics of experimentation, correlation, causation, and statistical significance. That's all great. [1:13:23] But by data fluency, I think it's more actually what you were just saying, which is like, [1:13:26] you know enough [1:13:28] about the insights about your customers that can then inform making [1:13:33] higher likelihood product bets. [1:13:35] And that data can be quantitative, that data can be survey based, it can be from doing a hundred meetings with customers yourself. Those are all types of data inputs to me, so being really fluent. [1:13:46] And then it's combining that with [1:13:48] great product taste. I know it's like a controversial statement now to say that there is [1:13:52] taste for product. [1:13:54] But I do think... [1:13:56] In all the love of the frameworks and the analytics and everything else in the field of product,

[1:14:01] People sometimes lose sight of [1:14:03] It's a creative field. [1:14:05] It's not art on its own, but you get all the inspiration from art. [1:14:09] And I actually think there's a book, I think it's called Creative Selection, I forget the exact name of it, about... [1:14:16] some of the early, like, [1:14:18] iPhone development teams at Apple and working with Sue Jobs there. And I never worked at Apple, but I actually think it's the best book I've read about. [1:14:26] the just iterative creative work of building new products [1:14:30] and what it means to have taste, which is to say [1:14:33] you've developed some amount of intuition for what people will likely love. [1:14:38] before you're able to test it. [1:14:41] So anyway, I think taste plus fluency and data, that too is a combination is a pretty [1:14:46] powerful [1:14:48] Let me ask you just a couple questions about this list before we get to a very exciting lighting round and I can let you go. Okay. Of these 10 attributes, say you're a new product manager. [1:14:58] If you had to pick... [1:15:00] two or three that you think are most important to get right and focus on in your early career, which would you say they would be? [1:15:05] I think for early on in your career, what I would say is getting great at execution, it's a thing that you can most control. [1:15:13] Then I think building that news for impact, even if the impact is more local, because that's how you actually will demonstrate momentum and build credibility. [1:15:21] And then actually do you think early on, getting really fluent on the data and the research side so that you can have insights that you can bring back to your team? [1:15:29] Those are to me like the most slam dunk ways of,

[1:15:32] of becoming someone who starts to build credibility as a product manager in any organization. [1:15:37] Awesome. That's what I always tell in UPMs too, just get really good at execution because that creates that aura of this person's just killing it. They're just shipping on time. People know what's happening. [1:15:47] They're hitting dates, things like that. Yeah. The last question is just, say you're a senior, more of a senior product leader, say, I don't know, director. [1:15:54] Are there three other attributes you think are [1:15:57] ones they should focus on most or maybe the same? - I mean, I think this is where the pace and quality decision-making starts to matter a lot more, because you're still unresponsible sometimes for like teams of teams, [1:16:09] and you're helping facilitate high-quality decisions, often ones that have a lot of uncertainty or risk or ambiguity. So how do you keep the organization unblocked, not just a team moving well? [1:16:21] I think the living in the future and working backwards, I think the more senior you get, [1:16:26] It's always going to be the product founder who is responsible for the ultimate vision, but you become more responsible for [1:16:32] the medium and long-term strategy to realize that vision. [1:16:35] And so becoming just someone who can dedicate more of their time to the out of the fray of the day to day and [1:16:43] Think more about the longer term strategy that you want to pursue. [1:16:47] And the last one, and we talked about this earlier, but I think being a really good writer [1:16:52] It is just the highest leverage usage of your time if you want to influence an organization, at least for one that doesn't just spend all day meetings. [1:17:01] But I think it's really hard to dedicate the time to it because you're probably spending most of your day in meetings. So it's the antidote to that to kind of scale your ability to influence.

[1:17:10] the product direction and [1:17:12] maybe even the principles and [1:17:14] how you develop product at a company. Well, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got six questions for you. Are you ready? Let's do it. What are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? [1:17:26] These may not be the most unique, but I will say them, which is, in a resume by claiming Christiansen, whether you're working in a large company and you're suffering it, or you're working in a startup and you're trying to outflank an incumbent, [1:17:40] I still do think that and every solution, the following are the best books on product strategy to read. [1:17:47] If you're moving to one of the leadership or management position, I think Radical Candor by Kim Scott, [1:17:51] It's just incredible and worth everyone reading. [1:17:55] Frankly, if you're a PM and you're doing kind of soft kind of [1:17:59] I think it's really important. And then the third one, which is... [1:18:04] Maybe a little off the beaten path. There's a book called Leadership in Turbulent Times by Doris Goodwin. [1:18:09] who's a kind of presidential custodian, [1:18:12] And it's this amazing book that looks at four of the most notable presidents and [1:18:17] how their leadership style evolved when they were in really critical, hard times in their presidency. [1:18:23] And I just think it's actually the best book about leadership style and how do you evolve and how do you deal with crises, which, again, is maybe later on in your career. But I love getting inspiration from not just reading books about tech and product. And I think that's one of the best ones. [1:18:40] What is a favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed? The obvious answer, which I'm sure many people would say, would be Succession. I'm not going to ruin anything for the finale because people haven't seen it all, but the writing, the Shakespearean level drama of it all, it's just incredible. And just heart-wrenching that you wind up kind of losing most of the characters, but you can't take yourself out of it. The one that's going to be less common, and I watched right when we started paternity leave,

[1:19:08] is the bear. I don't know if you heard about it. [1:19:11] The restaurant. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a sucker for like incredible cinematography and just like what they do. And they say the single room of this restaurant and kitchen and just the pace of it. [1:19:23] I think it's just like an incredible piece of art. I don't know if it's the best show ever, but [1:19:27] is a really moving like emotionally [1:19:31] like jarring piece of TV. [1:19:34] Also quite stressful to watch. Very stressful. I would not relax to go to see that. [1:19:39] But awesome. Okay. Favorite interview question that you'd like to ask candidates? [1:19:45] That would depend a lot, I think, on obviously the seniority level and things like that, but I think the more general and I always love to ask people is, [1:19:54] What unfair secrets have you learned to improve the velocity and energy level of a product to you? [1:20:01] Am I unfair or in secret, I usually mean not something that you probably read on a medium, but what did you learn, how did you learn it? [1:20:09] And how does it work and how do you apply it? [1:20:12] You also just get amazing, interesting bits of inspiration from asking that. [1:20:17] Thank you. [1:20:17] What is a favorite product you've recently discovered that you love? This will also serve for recommendations for you based on our email thread about parenting products. None of the products I've learned or loved recently have been like software. But they're all maybe software enabled. [1:20:32] The Nanet, which is a weird name, but it's just [1:20:35] AI-enabled camera for basically watching your baby as they sleep.

[1:20:41] it's like incredible look at you like sleep analytics and like really helps you be a less neurotic parent i would highly recommend it [1:20:48] The SNHU, which is basically like [1:20:50] this amazing device that can help soothe your kid when all they need is like a little bit of like [1:20:56] that, you know, soothing while they sleep so that you can sleep a little bit more. You can tell the steam here is [1:21:01] Sleep. [1:21:02] And the last one is there's this chemical up a baby that has this whole like elaborate stroller system with [1:21:07] interchangeable parts and [1:21:09] Honestly, it's just like [1:21:10] an incredibly well-designed piece of hardware that works in and out of the car. So yeah, I think I've re-appreciated [1:21:18] really well-designed, [1:21:20] like hard products that are not necessarily hardware from Apple. [1:21:24] and that has been what Begin Your Parents is about. [1:21:26] I have all three. Also, a huge shout out to the Nanit team who sent me a Nanit and all the stuff around the Nanit. So thank you. I'm not going to name the specific PM who sent it to me because I don't remember his name off the top of my head. But thank you, Nanit. Yeah, it turned out there was a whole world of baby tech, which I had no idea. I mean, it makes sense that it exists, but you never know about it until you're a parent. [1:21:47] And now I'm obsessed. [1:21:49] One tip that we, for Nanit, so my wife and I have been playing with different names for our kid, and we have been changing names. [1:21:57] his name in the Nanit, so that anytime we go into the room, it sends us a push, "Hey, there's activity in the room," with the name, so that we can kind of feel the different names. I love that. Yeah, my wife and I did something similar where we had like three or four final name contenders.

[1:22:11] We didn't use the nanoford, but we just picked a week and said on Monday, we're going to refer to the future baby by that name for the entire week. [1:22:20] and give some personification to it. And that helped us get down from four to one. [1:22:27] What a wide ranging set of pieces of advice we got on this podcast. [1:22:31] Two more questions. What is something relatively minor you've changed in how you develop product at Slack that has had a lot of impact on your ability to execute? By far, the biggest thing, which is more of a cultural shift, is that we stopped spending so many cycles on design explorations of static mocks or walkthroughs. [1:22:49] and said, how quickly can we get into prototyping the path in real software, even if it's messy and you throw it away? [1:22:55] at least for something like Slack. [1:22:57] Like you got to kind of live and touch and smell the software. You can't just look at it. And that's been a huge unlock for avoiding spending months [1:23:06] on design debates and just getting to well how does software feel that's what matters [1:23:12] Speaking of Slack, final question, what is your favorite Slack pro tip that people may not be aware of? I'm going to give two because if someone asks me this, I'm like, these are the two things that if you're not in love with Slack, you'll fall in love with Slack. So the first is... [1:23:28] Obviously, you have the sidebar, it can be unruly, but you can customize the sidebar into sections. In each of those sections, you can have settings like [1:23:37] show unread only or sort by recency or sort by alphabetical, whatever it might be.

[1:23:42] and you can collapse the section so you don't see it all that ways. [1:23:45] So having a well-managed sidebar, which doesn't actually take that long, [1:23:49] It's like this amazing thing because then all this inbound is structured in an order and a grouping that fits how you work. [1:23:57] One is you, your working life. So customize the sidebar. And the second thing is, [1:24:02] Just use the quick switcher for everything. Just hit App OK. Just start typing. [1:24:06] and it feels like you're playing a video game, just hopping around, channels, people, files, search, [1:24:12] Pretty much all the actions you can take are done as well. I think most SaaS products now have borrowed that pattern [1:24:18] So, [1:24:19] Yeah, you can use another software, but it works particularly well in Slack. [1:24:23] No, I know the last thing you needed was to record a podcast your first week back to work. I so appreciate you making the time. It feels like we're two ships passing in the night from pet leave into new pet leave. And so two final questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and learn more? And how can listeners be useful to you? I will confess that I haven't used Twitter in months because I was doing digital detox. But still, I think at no underscore wise is a pretty good place to find me online. [1:24:49] and whether they're anywhere else, [1:24:51] So I'd love to have people's Slack feature requests, especially about things that you wish were possible. [1:24:56] where that would get the rest of your company to join on Slack because you love it, but you can't convince them. [1:25:01] Those are always golden nuggets. [1:25:04] Awesome. Noah, thank you so much for being here. [1:25:06] Thank you so much for having me. [1:25:07] Bye, everyone.