The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google)

23:49This 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 just play and all magic happens and it's the best music and thing 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 like really think about how does it act like how close is it to the reality and if it's not actually there like he's like he was saying how like we'll pick two songs that are correct at attend just because we don't really know exactly what you want to hear it now and it's just there's no point trying to design that right now because it's not actually going to be delivering on the promise.

24:27Right, 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 finally mentioned that magically Slack could just tell you in order that you would care about kind of a summary of all the interesting things that have happened and then like you dig it if you want to like your very own kind of like personal chief of staff who knew everything that you cared about and that everything that you could read. I don't think that's going to quite be possible anytime soon, but I think like Spotify heading towards that north star you might have developing I hope a lot of really compelling projects for instance, long away.

25:02Yeah, man, the more you think about it the more the more amazing opportunities exist in Slack it's like all texts amazing. Okay, there's a lot of cool stuff coming I imagine. Yes, I can't wait. Yes, on that on that topic, how do you think about creating teams within Slack and AI specifically are you like recommending each team think about it? 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 keep shipping with your shipping and keep moving your metrics. Moody unfair answer is a hybrid of the two, which is to say we have a kind of central machine learning and search team with a lot of expertise in this field to build infrastructure that everybody can use.

25:41And what we've done is because the spaces of all these so quickly like literally every month like the capabilities are all the risks of trade off sort of all the time what we want to do is actually kind of spin up a couple different teams that are focused on prototyping using that common infrastructure. But in specific directions that are all a little bit different so we've got a common ML let's say search team and now we have a bunch of teams that are kind of working parallel and different kind of customer problems that we're trying to solve using that straight up for structure. So I think this isn't the steady state I think over time it'll probably look like is that all these is the product areas as soon as we kind of know more of the shape of what the technology is capable of will just have you know AI capabilities as part of their remaps just like every product teams are responsible for their own mobile.

26:35So we don't have sources to someone else I think today we think you're moving so quickly you actually want a little bit of more kind of at heart flexible approach to quickly and that toward you. That's kind of what I've been hearing from everyone I've been asking this question the search ranking team is 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. I heard that you have a process internally called complaint storms and I left to understand what that is. It's a certain I want to say back in the 2019 maybe early 2020 and the idea a little bit was how do we help as a team look at the software that we build with fresh eyes because we've been so that slack for a long time and slack many more than almost any other company maybe like Figma's call similar as listening to the podcast just really today where if you want to go to the work on somewhere you work on slack you also live in this back and you live in Figma all day so you can become more of a power user anyone else on earth and what we're realizing especially for people trying to build slack for the next million customers that people have never used back before.

27:45It was becoming increasingly hard to kind of have empathy for what their usage of slack would look like how are they looking at it in a more critical way how are they care less than we care. And so what we started doing was these complaints to our idea was really simple which is we get a team together often Stewart myself would also join and we'd actually start off with other products first like in adjacent spaces and we'd say okay after group we're going to go through like the customer journey from the moment you land on the website through let's say it's a workplace product getting your first account going getting the first couple of years on board getting to the point of value or going to do it on one screen someone's going to project and then we're going to do it.

28:25People are going to fill in every issue everything that's confusing every pin point of buzz but ways in which if you care about the software you work on it what would actually confuse you what would suck in your tracks and from that you want to generate a bunch of amazing inspiration by looking at someone else's product in a really critical way for things you might want to try your own product. Once you get to that then it becomes easier to actually do with your own software but it is a little painful obviously sit to watching usability test to like look at your own you know baby in a way that is okay I'm trying to find all the words I'm trying to find all the problems.

29:02But that's why not being a pretty great source whenever a team I think either get sucked or feels like they reach like a dead end in a direction is doing them playing stores about the product area that they're in or using adjacent products just to get inspiration and then I think it kind of unlocks a lot more kind of creative views and the public space. It's similar to a process that I learned stripe has called friction logging but I love I love the nuance here starting with someone else's product because I totally see how that makes you feel better looking your product and really like it's not like we suck it's okay everyone's so much opportunity.

29:37Exactly. Yeah I heard that from strive to I think it gets a similar place and I think it's the doing I think the byproducts is that you also get like calibration on product pace product quality and as a team you kind of all that together again. So much of the principles it's like how do you get these things that are kind of hard to actually feel collectively on the same page map and how to celebrate another good way to do it. I'm imagining some pms might be hearing this and wonder okay great now the founders and the little execs have all these things would they want us to fix I have like goals to hit I got a roadmap.

30:11How 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 difference in this is a way to inform the roadmap. No I mean I think more broadly I think the way that we think about or I like us to think about our roadmap for any feature to match lock is that it's a portfolio and it's meant to be 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 some other parenting.

30:46Are they are things that are meant to be risky that you aren't sure they're going to work but might have a lot of outside. First things that are kind of known best and then I think often you're kind of balancing are you doing things that are meant to have impact that are you very confident in versus things that are meant to learn about a new possibility space. And so I think for most teams this stuff usually wanted to tactically filling up that bucket of let's make the existing product a little bit better every day for users and at Slack we have this thing called customer love sprints which is an interesting way it teams that are out of get some of the roadmap is it's hard to allocate that works throughout the quarter so what we want to do often is have a team do it to the customer love sprint almost like a hackathon but with that kind of burned down list of what we think is the lowest ever highest impact changes that we can make to generate more love from our customers and whatever that feature is and then people are sprint for two weeks design product engineering and then you have a bunch of things that you sell the end in the goals to ship all them so this is like hacks that you throw away so that's kind of how we're not prioritizing off and that kind of work is actually kind of making it is really fun total change of pace throughout the quarter to not do big feature worth that may take months but to do all a 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.

32:11I love that and how often do you do these sorts of customer love sprints I think teams that work on very easy or 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 kids. 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 pounds hashtag thing and it feels like slack is always invested in delight. How do you operationalize that how do you is it is a these customer love sprints is there something else that's just like we need to allocate some percentage just like make things really fun even though it's not going to move any metric.

32:51I would say it's a little good DNA of the company honestly which is that that for co founders were trying to build that massive online role playing game for many years that was called glitch and their kind of background was all in like building delightful playful experiences which didn't work out but you know the whole backstreet the short version is a tool they built internally that they then want to spin it on a company new from which became a slide I think that DNA we're trying to build. The consumer great experience that just happens to be for work is really raining the company it's also a big part can we hire I would say certainly the majority of pms designers and engineers who joins black had never worked at enterprise offer company before it's not like most people have worked for or for SAP it's most people had worked at consumer companies or game companies and so they believe that focus in the spirit and then into the last bit beyond kind of the principles that are the complaint storms and the customer love.

33:51Is that we have this amazing team that we call the C team the customer experience team and they're kind of in some ways the team that is doing our scale to work but is most often touch with our customers and from the very early days you know people used to do C shifts if you work in products so that you can actually figure out what's what she wants confusing and we have a really great kind of pipeline for getting the insights from the C team or the obstacles the people is the most frequent complaints into the hands of the company. The product teams to be able to prioritize to figure out yeah not all these are going to move a given metric they might not achieve something for the business collectively I think the way that's that thinks about competition is we obsess it up customers we built something they'll love enough to tell their co workers and the rest can take care of takes care of itself.

34:41Speaking of competition something when it's asked you a bit about so early on slack was competing against this product all hip chat and that's actually what I used at our startup and we love hip chat is so hilarious just these means everywhere and their billboards were amazing but then slack a their lunch later on I'm just kind of thinking out loud discord feels like that was the big threat and out Microsoft teams obviously I'm curious just how you think about competition and even just what you've learned about working in space where there's a lot of competition and thinking about that. So that's a long term and even short term.

35:11Yeah I mean each of this is kind of like interesting mini kind of lesson learned about losing I think the through line for all then I would say is still the maximum we have in Toronto which is we're customer obsessed but competitive are aware so I think it's a little bit different I think some companies are like Uber for example I think was a notorious like competitor obsessed and yeah I'm trying to tell the customers when they could I think I don't think slacks sought out to like it'll catch at force where we use I think was about camp higher back in the day for the 37 single people so the whole generation of those products and I think sock came along I think they had a couple of innovations one was they had a great mobile experience that's saved across every client search actually worked and then they brought a lot of the best parts of like consumer messaging into the workplace like the moody and reactions and all those bits and I think it turns out that you know if you're 10x better a couple of those axes then you can see a huge change in behavior and so I think that's what happened with that move from like the head chat camp fire to slack world.

36:15Discord is interesting I mean we keep it where discord but it is so much more focused on the kind of consumer that really is damning out for community space and I think it's like the lesson I would have I think we learned in a good way is we've always been focused on groups of people who are trying to do work together and that one's a completely different audience to build for than communities and so I think that focus has been really helpful and I think discord amazing and many people love it and the people who use discord truly use it in a very different way than people who use slack at work.

36:49I think Microsoft obviously has become over time the biggest competitor there I think the origin of teams really was a defensive move for them to protect office because office is an incredible very profitable kind of monopoly in the in the practical space. And so I think when they built teams it was more of a kind of covering their flank versus slack kind of on the scent I think it's teams has evolved over time it's become much more of a video property product that compete to like zoom and Google meet people who use teams use it completely different than slack where you live and breathe and channels and work and kind of work flows all day long and I think what we've seen there too is that like a lot of customers they have to use both most fortunate 500 companies have either off subscription or work place subscription and all those customers who use those also use slack and we like to say that's black is this connected tissue that makes all the rest of your tools that much better.

37:43So I think there we've kind of taken very much and open ecosystem and platform approach and we've just been focused on how do we keep building the best version of what slack can be as a new category of software for our customers and you know say where our competitors but really obsessed on what are the new ways that we can delight our users as the years go by. 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 a I 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 sort of for innovation along those lines.

38:26I think we were all a little self -delusional because I think everyone who works at slack likes to think that we're still at a small start up and I think keeping that screwed alive honestly culturally has been a big part of it. You know I think good back to the principles early on one of the ones that we talk about literally one of the actual wording is take bigger boulder bets and the idea there is that it's really easy to fall into the trap of just constant incrementalism you know the concept it's a feature team and you have like a TPI and you feel like your whole life is measured by that similar KPI going up.

38:56One percent a quarter and then you kind of lose sight of 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. And the idea is that if you're in a mountain range here maybe in a little valley you can kind of see what's right in front of you but you have no idea how tall the mountains are behind. I think teams can often get lost kind of crawling up that hill not really that there's a huge incredibly beautiful range behind it. So take bigger boulder bets get to the next hill to see what the horizon wants to go around you that's kind of how we think about it strategically.

39:33And then the constructurally the way we approach it is that we've over time -fraided kind of new teams from scratch that you to be in a new area before the areas mature. So we did that with a lot of these kind of native audio visual products like huddles and clips early in the pandemic because our customers were demanding from us. They were like we love living in Slack a day but we feel disconnected from our teammates we can't be in the same physical place like what can you do to help us and match for that came from. And I think in the AI space now it's a similar thing which is what we're trying to hear when customers like what you wish Slack could do and have these new superpowers and let's be keeping a couple teams prototype there and then figure out what teams are going to do.

40:11And then we can get to real product market fit and I think we have those teams I think the pointers give them space to run to give them kind of a get a jail free car from maybe the normal process of. Okay, our planning quarterly reviews and make it feel something that is like the pace of learning is what matters like how fast you've heard type a how fast you're learning from users and then getting to do that publicly and pilot and then get something to launch. It's amazing those people a that's coming from the level we've seen. 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, calm, Kora and modern treasury trust vanta to help build scale manage and demonstrate their security compliance programs and get ready for audits in weeks not months.

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41:40One 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 of things you all maybe do regularly. One of the things that we do is which is kind of always a little bit funny. I mean, it's more of a like emotional thing rather than a practical thing is that at all hands will often wind up taking like specific tweets that people had about the product and you know Twitter people say the craziest things sometimes. And sometimes they're like really a hot war being like customer love but often it's just the the meanest much frustrated complaints that people have and it's honestly meant for us to just have a pulse on like where people actually saying and feeling the wild and not think it's seriously but keeping that sense of you know I think that the distance you have from your user as your user base gets more and more diverse and larger.

42:35I think coming a harder to actually develop the product because you're not designing for yourself anymore and so I think all the ways that we help people around it in like what are actual users actually saying that's that's one big way. The other that reminded me of which is actually probably better if you delete that last one because it's kind of boring. No, it's great. We're not deleting nothing. Fine, you know use it but so I'm a believer in you want to be data you know informed but you don't want to be so data driven that you actually don't have a pulse of what real people feel when they're using your product.

43:12So we're really big into user research not as it gives you the answer but it helps at least cause a lot of questions for you when you watch us on the app to use the software. And historically it's really hard to get pms, let alone engineers actually like attend user research sessions. And so what we wanted doing especially in the pandemic when we first want to promote is you know now we can dial in to use ability sessions and to make it really a drag for the team what we would do is have people live kind of like in a thread right there real time thoughts of so people how they use that I can't believe it is that or that gave me this idea from seeing how they were doing that to do this other thing.

43:50And so then you want to have the pms engineers designers and user researcher all in one slack thread like live or funny or acting for you to believe session. And then suddenly that thread becomes actually the best kind of source of truth for the research report that gets rid of. But it was important it gets the team doesn't the complaint so are actually watching someone else do it like in the shoes of an actual human being trying to use the thing that you thought was so brilliant and it has all these flaws and it's humbling it's filled with humor and also it's I think really constructed for the teams to do it.

44:26I was going to ask where they actually share these thoughts and in slack makes a lot of sense. Yeah I mean to report at some point but literally just link back to the original thread and then you have like you know 100 people's reaction as the report is coming to going. If only there was a AI tool to summarize all of your thoughts. We've got a prototype for that hopefully it will work well with that actually the useful 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 and it wasn't clear why I'm curious just what that period was like and how did you kind of get to the bottom was going on and turn things around.

45:09Yeah I was actually a clear after I joined but it was a point where I was kind of focused on the self service business because we had this period with slack where I would say maybe 2014 to 2017 where it was almost all self service and it was just growing like game buses and then we started spinning up the sales team and an enterprise team which are focusing mostly on that. And I think we kind of you know we sell the team that was working on self serve but it was primarily the company to this was all driving enterprise deals kind of getting to that next level of maturity. And then in 2019 I think we started to see that when we look beneath the surface the you know fund the mentions of the self service business weren't looking as healthy as they used to be.

45:49I think kind of the biggest thing as we kind of do into it was a little bit toward talking about earlier with the motivation and complaints services it was getting harder to understand the next generation slack customers really want the product and whether you're thinking about this as crossing the casin or moving from like really adopters the needs of kind of the more majority of the adopters I think we're at that point where every technologically sophisticated coming up with using slack but most were and we were getting into a market that customers are going to be able to do that.

46:23And so we get a lot easier for you look at all these co work curves which you can imagine suddenly they're like how they're not as healthy as they used to be like what's going on. And I think you know we got that got a bunch of insights on it but I think really what we want to change about how we're operating 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 word in a way. And instead let's come up with a bunch of hypotheses about what to be new levers that can actually help based on the insights that we now have about the next set of customers and we're going to try to quickly learn which of these levers are real and which of these are just totally off the mark.

47:05And you know we kind of had to say for the next like six months we're probably not going to drive any impact at all it's only going to be about learning but at the end of that hopefully we want to find a couple different levers that had years of room to run. And that's what we want to be able to kind of doubling the rate of our new pick customer growth in the year and a couple of years after that and kind of re -excelling the self service business. And I think it really came from stepping back, being humble, not feeling like we deserve to have every company that would sign up and then figuring out how to optimize for the learning so in the long term you can get the impact but knowing that the next couple quarters we're going to sacrifice impact for the sake of learning.

47:45And I think there's a good muscle to build but it was definitely not easy to do at the time. Well the story begs the question what are the levers that worked whatever you can share. One of the big things that we're going to focus on is what we talk about is comprehension and desirability. So the fundamental challenge I think for new users or new teams using our product once you get past the kind of tech early adopters is do the comprehend what this thing is for. Do they understand how it works and then desirability is why should they care. Most people at work are not like hey you know what I want to do today is start using entirely new tool and convince all my co -workers to get on board.

48:21That is not part of your job or job has goals and measurements and everything else. So really deeply understanding that and how do you push on that and then use your experience. It sounds maybe a little bit of a bit of a bit of a freaky product. I thought it was a free tier that you can use but we had never actually figured out a trial strategy where we actually gave you a taste of the paid product. Either we're on the free tier or you have to pay for the paid tier. And that one of being one of I think the right as being does figuring out how to give people a taste of the full premium slag experience so they would never want to go back.

48:56In doing that in a variety of different points in the customer journey. And actually the other biggest thing I would call the one out is we really need to figure out a new North Star metric for motivating the teams across slag. At that point in time we basically had paid customers and then we had created teams which is like the very very beginning very very end of the journey. And we did a lot of quantitative research and data science and one coming up there's new metric we call successful teams which is a little bit you know I feel like I'm going to have this like Facebook's I'm looking number seven or whatever it was.

49:28And that's where what we found was that if you could get five people using slag the majority of the work week to just communicate at all that would be a successful team there are going to be 400 % more likely to upgrade over the next six months. And that seems like a very low bar like five people to use slack throughout the work week not even every day. But it turns out that if you give that little critical mass and the rest would take care of itself and one of motivating not just the team of focus on self service but all these other feature teams across the company to drive more new successful teams knowing that if we can move that which is much better than the funnel but not a couple of them true that it would actually drive upgrades and paid customers and that's revenue long term.

50:13And that was a huge kind of turning point for how we rally product teams around to be what actually drive that self service business. Man this feels like it's own podcast just to analyze the things you learn down this journey and there's so many takeaways here one is just the importance of an activation metric that is predictive of retention so sounds like you landed on five people in a company like DA you basically for a week something like that. 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 or like I still don't think we have product market fit like they're like a billion dollars valuation growing like crazy and like I feel like I product market fit with the current users but I don't with the people I want.

51:00And that's what you're describing right is like the new you stopped having product market fit with people that you wanted next. I think it's exactly right I think it was like product market fit is like you keep stacking these estrus where you get product market fit in a small group and then you suddenly reach like exponential growth because you can crack that whole group that type of audience but then you start to climb as you start hitting the ceiling of like we've got a I don't know what it might be every development team in the US to be using this product. And then you jump up to the next curve which is like how do we get technology savvy teams that aren't developers or how do we get people who are you know in large enterprises who are outside the US these each kind of be these should get new curves that you have to build product market for.

51:45And I think it's all a huge exercise in like being self critical being humble not not presuming that you've practiced thing forever and keeping kind of a very beginners mindset of what is the next audience need they are previous audience didn't need it all. If you think about the pie chart of what you have to change to make it work how much of it was like messaging positioning onboarding optimization versus like product features. I would say maybe 60 40 in the sense of the early journey I mean not just obviously positioning messaging but like the entire fridge of like unboxing slack if you will with your team.

52:23You know we called it the day one journey but it's really kind of like day 30 in reality and it's a single player animal player experience it is really complex. But then I think what we realize is you can make that incredible but a fundamental parts of the product were missing that would make it comprehensive old to the next audience then you're going to have problems so like it sounds maybe impossible to remember but slack used to not have wissy wig message composition use you have to use mark down. And so making that wissy wig was a huge boost making mobile work offline to work no matter where you were in the world was another big one all things are configuring your sidebar notification so that as you scale the use of slack it didn't become overwhelming those are some of the kind of foundational product the missing that we want it making so that that next generation of slack customers could get value and not be overwhelmed or adopted by it.

53:22Maybe one last question along these lines people look at slack is kind of the maybe the first major product led growth success story and they always look at a slack like we just want to grow like slack let's see what they did. For people that are studying slack 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 be thinking about more so versus just like let's just make a freemium product and. Right I mean maybe the most telling thing is when slack started to when I joined so I don't think a word or acronym product like growth existed so it wasn't like we were really good taking this plate of an applying it I think it was more that whole term of art became a thing as many other kind of freemium.

54:08That's products come to call. I really think that I think the court really was building a product that customers loved enough that they would put her social capital in the line to get their co workers on board and that was easy enough to use and get the value from that without it for talking to a sales person you could put a credit card down or expensive if you if you wanted to for just your tea. And I think what people think about this product like growth notion I think there are really two very different audiences and I think slack was able to crack both one is when your team is small and your company small it's it is being tied or company and through an SMB and I think that's almost like slack sweet spot when the original pitch deck came to investors they said slack is for companies of five to 50 people at the time the biggest company imagine using slack was 50 people because I don't know how this is going to work beyond that it will be going to be a lot of work.

55:05And I think that was a very competitive and a very competitive and competitive and obviously that was a initial I think real real strong product could fit. But the other bit which then was what powered the enterprise business was teams of five to 50 people who work to larger companies and I think what went up happening was that you would have teams that was independently at a company like I the end of the year, cap of one of her from IP or Comcast discovering spot using it for themselves because they thought it just makes their working lives similar or pleasant or productive. And maybe not even know that they must have a company was using slack and then by the time you didn't skilled or enterprise sales team.

55:41I mean truly the exercise initially was just take customer domain sort by number of active users and call them in the order of that which is you know hey by the way you have a couple thousand people actually using slack company like do you want to think about a broader deployment or controls or analytics. And so I think that that was it that's consumer greed experience a customer who's love enough to get their forefathers on and pay for themselves and then enterprise companies like having a bunch of different flowers sprouting so eventually you could roll up enterprise wide kind of deal and then was all the tactics but I think that that was worth serving.

56:20The way you described it the beginning of make a product that people want to share with their colleagues reminds me of a as just listening to interview with Seth Godin who's a you know marketing legend he I think he has a new book sees on every podcast and he has this really great quote that the products that winner ones that you want to tell your friends about. And it's a really simple concept and basically it's like it's worth a mouth is how you have to win but but I think that's so true and like every successful company talk to you ends up being like we just want to build something people want to share with their friends even if it's growing some other way as you paid feels like that's always at the root of it is you just want to tell your friends about it because you love it and slack I think is a great example of that.

56:58I think it's true and I mean obviously there are categories of enterprise offered that isn't true for like insecurity or. But even that I think if it's an awesome security product you're like hey you got to check out this like century or whatever or sneak. Yeah like good friend is a dentist you know Christina and I think they've got stories where whoever would have thought like 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 like socks compliance. You got to advance it's amazing so yeah maybe that is true I think especially in this the end age where all the marketing and position channels have been so saturated people are optimizing so much I think it's really hard to like scale big enough business if you don't have some amount of word of mouth it costs real love driven 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.

57:51I remember your 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 do it as this thing and then it did exactly just spread everyone's just like whoa this is cool and they're all telling each other that I 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 a successful product team product business before I move on to another topic. The only thing I think is maybe a little bit interesting in terms of how we develop product and it's a really different change of time which is that obviously the easiest person to build for is yourself and the next easiest is people who look almost exactly like you or you know have some preferences and sophistication and I think in the early is a slack that's basically what we did I mean it was like really just trying to build for small technologically savvy teams in terms of people that pretty big business making great props for them.

58:49Over the years obviously that's changed and so one of the things I think that we've done which is work really well one obviously is we figure out how to experimentation in this ass product which is not always obvious because the metrics are much. While you're term then you know you've landed a checkup page and you check out 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 until we have this really robust program that we call kind of our pilot program where you have thousands of different customers that both sign different agreements now where we can actually roll out to progressively larger user bases because slack is a multiplayer product.

59:30You often have to roll out real net new functionality to a whole company or whole team because otherwise you can't use huddles by yourself for example and then we have a really great program for actually getting feedback from those customers but through slack connect itself through surveys and this one's a being kind of a lifeblood feature teams where you can buy the time actually launch a big net new feature for slack have gone so much customer feedback from people actually using in the wild to get work done. And so much more confidence in what you're building from the metrics and the service that we do that you can guarantee it's going to be hit but you can be really confident not because it just worked well eternally which is no longer that predictive but because it worked well for a thousand different companies 50 different countries and 20 different industries.

1:00:17And so I think you know early on saskam is going to figure that out but I think as you grow and as you have more diverse customer base as you know you said all these saskamers who said hey you got to like keep reestablishing product market fit. I think that is like a programmatic way of being able to do that with your product of order process is pretty interesting. 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 so on and I think you want to pick people who are actually motivated to want to be part of the development process and have a slightly higher risk tolerance.

1:00:58Not every company wants to actually be a test new function that might get removed so making sure we have kind of a does like champion network that we built a people who loves slack enough that they're willing to put up a little bit of pain in that for period or willing to have something that they tried to use and then we decide actually we're going to let teacher before we ever shifted to everybody so diversity and you know pink color. This reminds me of something else the CTO stripe shared of how they build new product which is they pick a couple customers that need a problem solved and they just build it with for them essentially and with them and in B2B 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.

1:01:46Yeah, I definitely was one of those things where if you do it away and they say like I can't live without it like the classic like not like you know do you like it sure but can you can you work without this thing if the answer is definitely not you built something that probably a lot of other companies will want to. Alright, 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 zero this I'd say famous block post on product management called the 10 traits of great product managers and 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 I just kind of run through it because I think it'd be useful for people to hear and I think these are all 100 % true even the 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.

1:02:33Questions on this list these traits are kind of came after I wrote this other thing which like the fact that I listed that product management which are all the things that people think product management is and want to switch to the job and they're disappointed by. And then I was like let me actually write the positive version of this which is the things that the job action is about it's not a career ladder it's not like the you know here's the structured interview things that you should interview for but I think it's the actual job of product management what is it about what a success look like.

1:03:00And I don't think they're really in a particular order in hindsight but I'm over it over so living the future and work backwards I think is very much kind of the idea of as a PM is one thing that responsible for it's kind of having a longer term vision and time rising so having a carve out time to not just be what we do on the next two weeks but six months a year to years from now I'll have you immersed yourself in that and bring ideas back bring inspiration back to the team. I'm just going to throw comments at us you're going through just that to them. So I love that this is like exactly Amazon's like approach of like work backwards working backwards process it are being be this is actually like the main thing Brian want pushed everyone to do is just think about the idealize product of like a magical world world this is totally solid and then work backwards from that and then all Graham talks about this to rate just like live in the future and build it.

1:03:53I definitely ripped off at least a little bit because I've never read that essay of he thinks you never think that you give sort of ideas by like sitting at their co -founder laying the lures parked looking at the sky and like conjuring up the next unicorn or something. Definitely not how that works you have to actually immerse yourself in the problem space and try to imagine what the future will look like and then what's missing for people to get to that future state. So I agree. I also saw great to eat by Shreya's the other day about how if you're working at a company with good leaders they're never going to be sad that your vision is too big and too ambitious if there's you know some reality to it 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.

1:04:38Yeah, I mean that was when I was a fool the thing I took away most from any review and Larry and Sergey was they would ask like how could we get like 100x the scale or how could this work for this would seem like an end is use case that would like push the team to think much further to the future. Yeah, I think that's what I'm going to find out what's what Brian Jessica we said to just like how do we 10x this what would it take the 10x this idea. Yeah, so awesome. Okay. Okay, the second one which is 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.

1:05:13A P .M. role I think can be a little bit unsatisfying for you to or you create things yourself. So you're the one who's amplifying what the work that's being prepared for what else is you have to kind of get into that or facilitate or mindset. What I think about here is a lot of teams like don't want pms other team or don't like pms or don't think pms are valuable. What I find is that just means your pms not good because if you have a good pm they're just going to help you do the best work your life. They're going to help you clarify things, prioritize well on block you all that stuff. Totally.

1:05:46I mean we should find out who wrote that on expression early on of like pms should be in ECOs. I think that's the most dangerous piece of advice ever the history of product management because I think that is how you wouldn't have pms who you try to act like dictators instead of kind of the leaders and facilitators because if you're acting like that, yeah your team can completely reject you. I never want another pm again. Yeah, like so many new pms are just like I'm finally going to have the power. Finally, like if they move from engineering or some other role and then they get there like, oh what the hell.

1:06:17Yeah, I convince everyone of all these things I want to do. That actually I'm going to skip it in a slightly different direction of the word of this post but that the fifth one that were there was your job is a facility, the pace and quality of decision making. And that is very different than you are the person who makes all the decisions. And in fact, I think one of the things that pms struggle with early on is how do you actually get the team to be able to make high quality decisions quickly with that you kind of are truly playing type record all the time. And it's like it's a soft art to be able to do that.

1:06:51But I think that is actually how you have a really healthy team dynamic and set it to one out of say, okay now I turn to get to make decisions definitely out of the jobs. What that makes me think about is I taught a course on product management one point that I pause for now. I've just like like the core job of a pms 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 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. And to do that, this is such an important part of that is just help people make decisions unblock them.

1:07:24Totally. That all kind of combined to these together. So one is you do have to have a peckable execution. This is kind of more of a baseline thing. But I've never seen a pm who is like disorganized or didn't do follow up or wasn't clear about expectations or timelines. It's not high and assholes hierarchy of kind of pm enjoyment. But I do think it's like a baseline expectation. The thing I think is more enjoyable and probably the most important thing in the long term is focusing on impact primarily to the customer experience, but also to the business. And I think there's that same like worth solves all problems.

1:08:02I think impact solves all like pms issues, which is if the team is consistently building things people love and changing the direction of the business. Everything else in this input. And so I think that focus and understanding as each point of the line the tracks is like what direction do you need to go with the team to actually drive an impact that's probably the single thing that pms control. I love that I always recommend exactly that if like 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 like it may be moving moving metric may mean building great product that the founders really love.

1:08:43Yeah, main pack can mean a lot of different things, but it's so true on the execution executing impactably bucket the way I think about that is as a great pm you need to kind of have this aura of I've got this. Any time someone put something on your plate, it's not going to fall off. You're not going to forget about it. And I'm going to let a ball drop that if you the more you can create this or like I got this. The more responsibility we're going to give you the more impact you'll end up having the more people want to work with you and all that. Yeah, Ben Horowitz was a board member back of four square and I just remember you should have the same for you to like of good leaders need to say what they're going to do and then do what they said.

1:09:25And it's they can't then they need to follow up and explain why I mean that's like the memories and I think that is kind of an execution looks like that last point is so important like you may not be able to do all the things in your plate. But just telling people I'm not going to get to this thing let's re -paratize is such a small thing you can do and really creates that or if you got this they're not going to forget about this thing as to do. Yeah, you're coming to the shock absorber for the team you're the thing I build people's confidence that things are going to be running smoothly and you'll get over the netable you know speed bumps and whatever else so.

1:09:58I'll combine two or three of these that are kind of related or just more titles I said right well like I actually think so she's get to more senior positions writing is the only skill away of having influence on a larger larger product word. There's a book called on writing by Stephen King which I recommend it literally everybody you know Stephen King you're like is he he's not maybe the most like literary like critical acclaimed author but he's a prolific author who publishes things that people love and tell their friends about and he has a rich workbook on like the practice of writing high quality high quality production.

1:10:38If we move on all throughout a couple more books that I found useful in my writing 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 and my newsletter and I find 90 % of the time if I just cut the first paragraph of what they first took a crack and jump straight into the thing immediately gets better and this book talks a lot about that. Another book that is amazing for writing better is nobody wants to read your shit.

1:11:12By the guy the world the art of the war of art forget his name but that book is awesome and it's just like nobody wants to read which 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 it's installed by just writing short sentences and that helps. So there you go three more recommendations. Okay I got read the last two I haven't read those but they sound perfect so okay maybe I'll throw one or let's say we talked about earlier but actually what this in the first many years ago is like optimizing for the pace of learning and knowing that long term that's I think that's going to drive impact.

1:11:49I think it can be hard if you're a PM for a future team you're part of a big company and I'm making this up year on the AdWords team at Google and you're responsible for that. You know big input selector or something 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 this team become what else could you drive beyond a thing that's right in front of you. So I'll try to for learning being willing to take those boulder bats knowing you can be wrong in the short term but that you'll learn new levers that will be really fun the long term.

1:12:26It's a portfolio approach to product but I think it really important. I was just interviewing a product leader at a sauna page Castello 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 more experience than her and asked her just how do you how do you do that that he succeeds in that sort of environment and what she's found is just being the person that has the answers and the insights in meetings 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 the space.

1:13:04And then I'll remind the last two just because I know time but the combination of her with data fluency which is not to say that every PM needs to be a statistician. I mean it's great I mean you've had a lot of great post about like how to understand some of the basics of experimentation correlation causation and statistical significance that's all great but by data fluency I think it's more actually you were just saying which is like you know enough about the insights about your customers that can that inform making higher likelihood product bets and that data can be quantitative data can be survey based it can be from doing a hundred meetings with customers yourself those all types of data are inputs.

1:13:44And you said being really fluent and then you can minding that with great product taste I know it's like a controversial statement now let's just say that there is taste for product but I do think in all the love of the frameworks and the analytics and everything else in the field of product I think people sometimes lose sight of it's a creative field it's not our on its own but you can give all the inspiration from our and I actually think you know there's a lot there's a focus it's called like creative slow. I forget the exact name of it about some of the early like iPhone developed the app and working with see jobs there and I'm a role to Apple but actually think it's the best book I read about the just iterative creative work of building new products and what it means to have taste which is to say you've developed some amount of intuition for what people will likely love before you're able to test it.

1:14:41So I think taste plus fluency and data that to the combination is a pretty powerful comment. I'm asking you just a couple questions about this list before we get to very exciting lighting around and I can let you go of these ten attributes say your new product manager if you have to pick 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. I think for early on in your career what is getting great execution it's a thing that you can most control. Then I think building that news for impact even if it impact is more local because that's how you actually will demonstrate momentum and build credibility and then actually doing really on getting really fluent on the data and research side that you can have insights that you can reback your team.

1:15:28Those are to me like the best slam dunk ways of becoming someone who starts to build credibility as a product manager in any organization. Awesome that's what I always tell you PM's to just get really good at execution because that creates that or of this person's just killing it they're just shipping on time people notes happening they're hitting dates things like that. The last question is just say your senior more of a senior product leader say I don't know director. Are there three other attributes you think are ones they should focus on most or maybe passing. I mean I think this is where the piece of quality decision making starts matter a lot more because you're still understance hold sometimes for like teams of teams and you're helping to facilitate high quality decisions often ones that have a lot of uncertainty or risk for a mediator.

1:16:15So how do you keep the organization on block not just a team moving well. I think the living in the future working backwards I think the more senior you get you know it's always going to be the product founder who is responsible for the ultimate vision become more responsible for the meeting the longer term strategy to realize that vision. And so becoming just someone who can dedicate more their time to be out of the fray of the day today and think more about the longer term strategy that you want to pursue. In the last one and we talked just earlier about I think being a really good writer. It is just the highest level of usage of your time if you want to influence an organization at least for one that doesn't just spend all day meetings.

1:17:00But 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 end to do it to that to kind of scale your ability influence the product direction and maybe even the principles and how you develop product at the 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. These are may not be the most unique but I will say that which is. Interest I'm like cleaning Christians in whether you're working a large company and you're suffering it or you're working to start up and you're trying to outflank it and come to it.

1:17:40I still do think that an interiors solution the fall on are the best books on product strategy to read. If you're moving to one of the leadership or management position I think radical candor like Kim Scott. It's just incredible and worth everyone reading. Fred like your PM and you're doing kind of soft kind of influence I think it's really important. And then the third one which is. Maybe a little off the beat of path there's a book called leadership and turbulent times by doors could win. Who's a kind of presidential historian. And it's this amazing book that looks at four of the most notable presidents and how their leadership style evolved when they were in really important.

1:18:23And I think it's actually the best book about like leadership style and how do you evolve and how do you deal with crises which. I get this maybe later on in your career but I look at inspiration from not just reading books about tech and product and I think that's one of the best ones. What is the favorite recent movie or TV show really enjoying 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 you haven't seen it all but they're writing the Shakespearean level drama at all. It's incredible and just part riching that you wind up kind of losing most of the characters that you can't take this out of it.

1:19:03The one that you must come in and I watch right when we started paternity leave is the bear. And I see you heard about it 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 in kitchen and just the piece of it. I think it's just like an incredible piece of art. I don't know if it's the mission or whatever but it is really moving like emotionally like jarring pieces of TV. It's also quite stressful to watch very sure I would not relax to it to see that. But awesome. Okay. Favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates.

1:19:45You know that would depend a lot I think on obviously this and you're a level and things like that but I think the more. I always look at people is what unfair secrets have you learned to improve the velocity and energy level of a product team. In my state unfair and secret agent mean like not something that you probably read on like the medium put the look what did you learn how to do learn it. And how does it work and how do you apply it you also get amazing interesting like bits of inspiration from asking. What is a favorite product you've recently discovered that you love this will also serve for recognition free to be sorry you know thought about it.

1:20:24Apparently it's because none of the products I've learned or love recently I've been like software but they're all made yourself are enabled so. The Nanit which is like the kind of weird name but it's just like AI and able camera for basically you know watching your Bay is asleep. It's like incredible. It's like sleep analytics and like really helps you be a less neurotic parent highly recommended. The new which is basically like this amazing device that can help to your kid when all they need is like a little bit of like. That you know soothing while they sleep so that you can sleep a little bit more you can tell the seniors sleep.

1:21:01And the last one is just coming up with me that has this whole like elaborate shoulder system with interchangeable parts and honestly it's just like incredibly well designed piece of like hardware that works to now the car. So yeah I think I've reappreciated really well designed like her products that are not necessarily hardware from Apple and that has to be what being your parents is about. I have all three also 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.

1:21:40Yeah it turned out as a whole world of baby tech which I had no idea I mean it makes sense that you never know about so your parent and now I'm obsessed. 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 his name in the Nanit so that anytime we go into the room it sends a support shade and 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 to remember we we had like three or four final made contenders and he's the Nanit for but we've just picked a week and said on Monday we're going to like refer to the future baby by that name.

1:22:19The entire week and like give some you know personification to it and that helped us out again down from four to one so yeah. What a right ranging set of pieces of advice we got on this podcast. Two more questions what is something relatively minor you've changed in how you develop product that slack that has had a lot of impact on your ability to execute. By far the biggest thing was a more of cultural shift is that we stop spending so many cycles on design exploration to like static mocks or walkthroughs and to how quickly can we get into prototyping the path in real software even if it's messy and you throw it away at least for something like slack.

1:22:56Like you got to kind of live touch and smell the software you can't just look at it and that's been a huge unlock for avoiding spending months on design debates and just get it well how does suffer feel that's what matters. Speaking of slack final question what is your favorite slack pro tip that people may not be aware of. I'm going to give to because of someone asked me this I'm like these are the two things that if you're not in love of slack you'll be you'll fall in love with slack so the first is. Obviously you have a side bar can be a really but you can customize the side bar into sections and each of the sections you can have settings like show and read only or short by recency or short by alphabet up all whatever might be.

1:23:42And you can collapse the section so you don't see it all at once so having a well -manager side bar which doesn't actually take that long it's like this amazing thing because then all this inbound is structured in order and grouping that fits how you want to see you you're working life so. Customizing side bar and the second thing is just use the quick switcher for everything just hit apple K just start typing. And it feels like you're playing a video game just hopping around channels people file search pretty much all the actions you can take her as well I think most asked products now have borrowed that pattern so you know you can use it in other software but it works particularly well in slack.

1:24:23No I know the last thing you needed was to record a podcast your first week back to work I so appreciate you making a time feels like we're two ships passing in the night from Pat leave into new pet lead. And so do final questions work in folks find you online if they want to reach out learn more and how can listeners be useful to you. I will confess that I haven't used Twitter a month because I was like doing digital detox but still I think at no underscore wise is a pretty good place to find me online and whether they're anywhere else. So love to have people like slack feature requests especially that things that you wish for possible or that would get the rest of your company to join on slack as you love it but you can't convince them.

1:25:00There's always golden nuggets. Awesome Noah thank you so much for being here thank you so much for having me. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast .com. See you in the next episode.