YouSaid · the spoken record

April Underwood

lines on the record: 102
first: 2018-09-05
most recent: 2018-09-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No plans. I think I've got plenty of work cut out for me. I have the best job that I've ever had in my career, and I think I also have the best product job in the industry. So I'm good.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and that's what we see. And when people start working in this way, they see results. Know 90% of our paid customers report that communication is easier because they use Slack. Two-thirds of them report that they're more productive. I'd like those numbers to be 110%. But I think that we're off to a good start. And so it is a fundamental change in the way that people are working and it's going to take some time, but we're going to be driving it.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People will have access to the information that they need to do their work in an unprecedented way. They're going to have control over how that work interrupts them and how that information is presented to them that allows them to do their best work and to stay focused and really do the work that only humans can do, the creative work, the collaborative and communicative work. And they're going to do it across just an ever-growing number of tools. And so, you know, that's what we see, and that's why.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They don't all work with each other, and they have more access to information than they've ever had before, so they need ways to control that into figure out how to harness it. And so that's where I think things are going. I think that, you know, people are going to be expecting to use a suite of tools at work that are easy to use, that work with each other. I think a number of other companies, you know, I would include, you know, I would include outlasting with what they do for developer tools, but I would also include, you know, Zoom. We are, you know, Zoom customers at Slack, and they've built a really great product there. Certainly everything that's being done at Dropbox and so forth. Yeah. So, I mean, this whole suite of tools, they're run by a bunch of independent companies, but they need a place to work together. And so I think the future is one in which.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Expectations from users are higher. Companies believe that there's something to this idea of giving their employees access to the context that they need to be able to do their best work. You layer on top of that the fact that the number of software tools is just exploding. So this proliferation of enterprise software, what it means is that people have the best tools they've ever had.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Leads to better outcomes. And so there's sort of like the macro trends around what users expect and that they expect to use software at work that they can figure out how to use without taking a training module. Like I think that's a pretty clear bar that most enterprise software. Yeah, exactly.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, messaging is the default mode of communication. I mean, it is for us, but also like. Roughly half the workforce will be millennials by 2020 indefinitely as that audience evolves. So you've got that piece of it. You've got the cultural aspects that I already alluded to, which I've literally lived myself, which is that companies have realized that more transparency, matching their tools to sort of the implicit organizational structure rather than like hard coding them to the explicit organizational structure.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, yeah. No, it's complicated. How depressing. No, it is. It's interesting. I just did an interesting podcast with Jaron Lanier and he was talking about that never before has all of humanity been able to talk to each other and maybe we're not ready for it. And I was like, I think you've really got it. It's an unprecedented experiment on humanity. Oh, absolutely. To be doing this. But let's finish up talking about Slack. Let's get back to Slack. So when you do that, you also are trying to free corporations. And so I'd love to get your thoughts just briefly in the last few minutes. We have where businesses are going and how work is changing and what you guys do to contribute to that. Because there's definitely in this use case scenario, it's pretty much all good. Like it makes a better corporation of people talk more. It eases the wheels and things like that. I can't think of a huge amount of downside for psych except people use it a lot and spend a lot of time on it. It's a little slightly addictive, but not that bad.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really punching through in a number of ways. And now we end up hearing, and actually it turns out that I don't know the bad guys are able to use the tools just as well or better than the good guys.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think. Consider myself to be fairly self effacing. I think I'd be completely insane to think that I have some answer that smart people that have been thinking about it don't have. I think we're at a really interesting point as a country in the world, which is that the tools may to some extent be against ahead of where we are in terms of regulation and in terms of the definitely the psyche. I mean, I think also one of the biggest things that is most jarring about all this is to find out that this was always here. Like this hate was always there. And now it's had the opportunity. Yeah, exactly. But the thing is, it also, those tools also create an opportunity for like this amazing slew of candidates that are running for election to be able to reach people. And all I mean by that is that there were a lot of really great things that had come out of these tools. And then we were in this period where it like looked like the world. We were through the hard part of human history. Like we were really.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About this issue So, I do think it's the damage that has been done in the process of their learning experiences. Do you know what I mean? And it's an irresponsibility that, and you don't want to be their scold, but on some levels, it's they've took the money, they took the fame, they took everything else and they didn't fix this one thing that is causing all kinds of pain. You know what I mean? And then when you pointed out to them, they're like, don't be mean to me. Or I tried my best. And, you know, I try my best. It's really not an answer I particularly like. I get it, but you're not children and it's not. You don't get an A for effort kind of stuff. And so, I mean, these are tough times. What would you do if you were running Twitter?”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're not building a platform that enables that. But the thing I do want to say about that, about all of this is maybe I still bleed a little bit blue for my five years at Twitter. You're really, really close to these things and you're having to make hard decisions about what to do in a specific scenario. And that's what you do every day. You have a lot more information than the rest of us and you know about some hard decision that we made and some different country somewhere else in the world that you that like none of us in America like even care about right now. And so I think that that is part of the practice of being of having to make some of these hard decisions is that like you are you are you are very very close to it you know now I'm a little, I mean, I'm further away because I've been you know gone from Twitter for three years, but I think in general I think all of these companies, I do think they have very smart people who actually care very deeply about this issue and I wish that the punchline could be like and I figured out what they need to do and it's A, B, and C. I mean, that's the one thing that gives me comfort is just like”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, how did we get here? Yeah. That's what all of us are asking. So I ask that. I mean, as it relates to Slack, you know, I'm not trying to sort of dodge it for us because I think every, you know, every company intack should be thinking about this, but it really hasn't because we're building tools for teams at work. I'm sure.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are now is the dark timeline. No, you're right. There is a paragraph in the New York Times say that I never thought I'd read The New York Times. It was like, Mr. Trump who worked on the apprentice and Stormy Danos, who made this movie, and it was like, and they watched Shark Tank before they had sex. And you're like, this is in the New York Times. Like, are you kidding me? Yeah. How did we get here? Yeah. Well, I think that's what all of us are asking.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like where we are now is the dark timeline. So, like, it would have been a 0.00001 was a chance that we would have ended up exactly where we are today. No, you're right”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And even if people had run tabletop scenarios of here are all the things that could possibly happen, this would have been like the”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and that's great. And I wish maybe you did. You know, I do think that just where we were in the world in 2012, I mean, you think about all the amazing things that were happening, like we're getting ACA and we, I mean, my numbers, the exact years maybe off, but during that period, like we're getting ACA, you know, gay marriage is being legalized. There were like all these, people were getting maternity leave benefits. There were a number of amazing things that were happening. Yes, 100%.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. Just run it I have to take a step back, and I can't help but think a little bit like, could this have been predicted?”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doing things The best that I could. Try to be one of the guys It's also having a responsibility to actually be able to do something at a company. And then I think it gets heavily put on women at the top to do something versus everybody, to do something which is interesting. I mean, and being aware of those conversations that people aren't being part of. It's a really interesting question. One of the reasons I became a boss is because I wanted to run the conversation. So I'll just run it. And you can't have other conversations except the ones I decide on, which I think matter. I think it just does matter. So when you think about that, I want to get to the bigger issue right now because SlackSnot is dragged into this, but the image of Trek has gotten terrible now all the stuff that's going on on Facebook and Google and other places has really dragged down the concept. How do you look at how tech is looked at? Because you worked in all these various different...”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a lot of people that are speaking up and bringing this to attention. I think the fact that even I have the awareness that it's not quite right for me to think of myself as an underdog anymore, not only because I'm the chief product officer at Slack, but because actually maybe things have improved for the group that I'm in much more than they have for other groups. And I think that you can get into that sort of underdog mindset and it can be a little bit hard to flip.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's one of the biggest things that I've come to a deeper realization about over the last few years is that actually you can't really. I think that, you know, being a woman in tech for so long, I felt like an underdog. I felt like everybody else was having a conversation or like knew a way of doing things, et cetera. And I didn't. And I mean, it's funny. I mean, I feel like I in many ways assimilated to the best that I could try to be one of the guys, whatever it was. But I do think that, I mean, for reasons that are definitely coming from a dark timeline in our country and in the world, you know, times up me too, like I do think a lot of this is being brought to light right now, but I can't, I'm not convinced that the impact or the ways in which it's improving are evenly distributed. And so I think that's a big open question for us. And I think that there's a lot of.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, and look at my career. I mean, I have, you know, made changes over time. And I wouldn't say that that was directly the factor that there was like some environment along the way that was really bad, but there have been times at which it has felt like the growth opportunities for me sat outside of the company. Right. Has that changed?”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think he was successful. That's the absolute problem. I mean, besides, I think people get the issue of recruiting people. I think getting people to stay is, I think, or providing management structure around them to be able to succeed.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know Tough graders on ourselves. You know, I'm not necessarily peg to a single number, but what I will say is we've always focused on it and there's always more work to do. And, you know, not only do we want to have an employee base that's as representative as we possibly can of our customer base, of the populations of places where we have offices, like all of that sort of stuff. But we also want Slack, we definitely want to avoid Slack being a place where people would decide to exit from the industry. And that's the piece I think a lot of companies are thinking about now, which is like, even if you manage to do the work to get the right people in place, how can you make sure that they can be successful? That's the absolute problem.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel really fortunate today to get to be a leader at a company that is focused on, that has focused on diversity and inclusion since early on. I mean, founders and just people in the world often ask me, you know, what should we do about D&I? And of course, the truth is I don't consider myself an expert in it, but because I'm a woman, I do get asked about that. And the main thing that we hashtag angels would tell our founders is to start early, start focusing in on it early. And I think that Slack is a factor in joining Slack that Slack is a company that has done that. They'd already done the first report and offered transparency into the employee base when I joined. And, you know, we've quadrupled since then and we continue to do it.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's smart too. But there is a camaraderie and a kinship that comes with being perhaps the only woman in the room in your own room and knowing those other women who are having that experience. Absolutely. I mean, at every company I've worked at, I've come away with a number of connections that are quite deep with other women there. And there's no doubt it's due to shared experience.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, why started angels with all women is oddly enough that I think the other five women I started with are really damn smart. And really good.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, we're, you know, we're making those decisions on our own. But the other thing that we've started doing is talking a little bit about what we call the gap table and just trying to bring more education to the industry. We're focused on women, but generally to the way that the cap table works and the way that that distributes wealth in the industry and why one might want to do something like angel investing, but also potentially just have a better understanding of sort of their day job and that role.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right after we announced, we started seeing deal flow not just from founders, but from sometimes the firm's seed stage and later looking to see if we would want to join them on deals. And then we also heard from another audience, which was a lot of women, mostly operators, but also some of the female investors as well, who are like just glad that we were there and like, how can we get involved? How can we help? And also, you know, especially amongst operators, like I would like to do this and I have no idea how to do it. I see the men that I've worked with doing it, but I don't know how to get involved. And so we started bringing people together. And so we've created some community around it. We've held a bunch of events. Incidentally, the venture firms have been very happy to partner with us on many of those events. But we've done all that. We've backed. I looked in the spreadsheet last night. We've backed, you know, like 70 or 80 companies between the six of us. Writing our own checks, we didn't raise a”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we work together at Twitter over the course of those five years. And as some of us were thinking about what we were going to do next, we all had an interest in angel investing. So we have this thesis that if we came together as a group, we would have more to offer the companies that we backed because we would do that for one another anyway. But I think, frankly, Angel Investing is a little bit like a not well understood sort of, you know, job, as it were in practice. And so, you know, we just wanted to make that explicit, which is that if, you know, Katie Stanton or Chloe Slaton called me and said, hey, I'm going to back this company, like, would you be interested in investing with me? Will you check them out? Tell me what you think. I would have done that anyway. But the six of us decided to come together. It was also a little bit of thesis that if you write a medium post and say that your angel investors, then your angel investors. And I would say that that thesis proved true, which was really amazing.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, but I mean, there are use cases out there. I mean, like I mentioned earlier, the Jackson Hole Wildlife Refuge, they go out in the field and they take photos, whatever photos they need to take and then they post them to channel. So actually, you know, I mean, there are lots of design organizations as well where there's a lot of sharing of photos or even video. So, I mean, like anything, it depends on the use case, which is why we need to be, you know, as flexible as possible.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Google doesn't Google has obviously done the math. They don't see more value if you spend more time looking at the Google Doc. Like we're all trying to solve, we're trying to help companies be productive and efficient. So there's not this like eyeballs and time on site and that sort of stuff at all. And so those simple things go a long way because they're useful by a really wide audience of people and they just allow you to get through some of those distractions and help you focus on deeper work.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a small percentage of the company that make use of all of the vast majority of the features, the configuration, the provisioning, all of these business rules, et cetera. But most people interact with it in that they get a notification and they need to take action upon it. And bringing those simple things into Slack have been some of the things that people have been most excited about to date, including things like, I think it was just last week, very recently we have launched the next stage of our integration with Google Drive. And so if you live in Slack and then you check your email and you realize somebody had a comment to you in a Google Doc four hours earlier, that can be, that's not a great experience. And it's not a great experience from how you feel about Google Apps or how you feel about Slack. So, you know, we've worked with Google in a really great partnership we have. And so now you can receive those comments inside Slack and you can actually reply to them from within Slack. So that's an example where, you know,”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a great question because it's really, we have such a diverse audience that there's, I wouldn't say there's necessarily one thing. But I would say that simple things go a long way. So, you know, concur, which is owned by SAP, them building, along with other tools like Workday, where 80, 90, 95% of the employees interact with that software in a fairly narrow way. And as it should be.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, when we build those new capabilities beyond the most foundational things that, frankly, it would be really hard for somebody else to do on top of our platform, we expose those along to parties as well.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. The channels, the ability to communicate, the ability to set notifications on top of it. I mean, those are many of just the core elements. All of our platform developers get to plug into that and they get to play along with that. So for example, we added a status. So you can say, you know, I'm at the doctor or whatever and you can pick an emoji and you can say where you are. We expose that via the API because if you are an enterprise tool that helps people manage their vacation, then pre-populate that, for example. So generally we don't have as many hard questions like that. I think we have our own calling features, for example, but we also have all of the major calling providers have apps on top of the Slack app directory and we've made it possible for teams to select one of those as the default. And so, you know, so we are a platform like, you know, through and through.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Of effort that they put into whatever it is. And what about when those veer into people who are on your platform, the developers too? Because some of it you're going to have to own yourselves. What are the critical things you need to own yourself?”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, and there can be some real benefits. Yeah, there's cultural benefits to that. And like, there's actually efficiency to that as well. But, you know, one of the things you asked, you know, sort of what are people asking for? One of the things people want is they want the tools to be able to very easily express themselves in a way that reflects their intelligence and the amount of effort that they put into whatever it is that they're doing. And so we added, for example, you can do Control B or Control. You can actually start to add a little bit more of that formatting without understanding markup. That's a good example where here in our world, it can make a lot of sense to edit, to format your message using Markup.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It needs to reflect. Well, Slack has actually taken that away. People are a little too loose on Slack. They think of it as Facebook. They think of it as it's really interesting. Well, and there can be some real benefits. Yeah, there's”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, and I think there's that culture, which is that if you're doing this really important work that the way you communicate it needs to reflect.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, one area that I'm thinking a lot about right now is just how do we make it possible for people to express themselves inside Slack in a way that, you know, that reflects the effort and hard work that they put into whatever it is that they're saying, you know, in email culture, there's this world where you actually like start the email in like a doc or something and you spend all this time editing it and you get other people to review it before you like hit send and it's this like”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Need to establish how we do things. And doing all three, you have to do all three things at the same time. They're dependent on each other. So I would say, you know, the opportunities for how we help more companies understand how to get the most out of Slack. They're very, very clear. We just need to go do them. What if those innovations?”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. It often starts there, but then it starts spreading. And we launch shared channels last year. Do you know what shared channels are? So shared channels are a way for you to be able to have a channel that is shared with another company. And that's increasingly important in a world in which companies don't work as islands. They work with vendors and partners. And they may do joint work with customers even at times. And so Slack can facilitate that work and bring the same benefits to your internal communication that you get there. The biggest challenge there is, I think, a little bit around just we've, this has all happened really fast for us. I mean, as a company, the product's been in market for about four years. You know, you have to build the product, but you also have to build the business. We've been fortunate, like the Freema model that we approach has been working. And now we've added to it, you know, our sales driven model for the larger companies. But then you also need to build a company, you need to build a healthy company and you need to build the leadership.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, the most customers are smaller just by the small and medium size. But 65% of the Fortune 100 are paid customers of Slack.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, I think it's a little bit different than box. Man, I can't speak to where boxes focus is, but we have a really wide breadth of customers in fact. Where's the most?”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to enable more people to be able to make that case. Not every single person is prepared to make the case for why the company should work differently and use this new tool. And I think there's more we could do to help them.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has expanded really quickly, and we are so far beyond the companies that look like us now. We've got Target and like I mentioned Capital One and we've got these large organizations that are quite different than tech companies in Silicon Valley. And within those companies, there are tons of employees that are that need to understand more about how to make use of a product like Slack. And it's not even so much about Slack. It's about how do I transition to this new way of working. It's cultural. It's about transparency. It's tactical about just like literally how do I make use of this tool. And so that's a lot of what we're focused on is just we've been really, really lucky that Slack has been this movement where people fight to bring it in their organizations. They start using it within their organizations. And then over time, you know, the IT teams can see the value because it's so obvious to them. And so then it becomes an official supported tool.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have so much further that we want to go with the product. There's so many opportunities for us to help teams be able to work together more effectively. I mean, in a world in which there's software that makes so many of the tasks that used to take up a lot of people's time so much faster, you know, from expense reporting software to design tools to operations tools for supply chain, you know, like there's software for everything now. And what that means is that people have a lot more, like really spend much more of their time coordinating and collaborating, communicating with other people. That's where that's both the bottleneck, but it's also just literally where people, where the work is. And so we need to keep helping people get the full value out of what they can do with Slack. And I'd say that actually points more to it's less about do we have ideas, like do we have innovative ideas for how we can do that? We've got loads of them. The trick is that our”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“God bless Enterprise Software. Yeah, I mean, I'd say the thing I think about the most is a little bit different. So I'll come back to that. But I think that so security is absolutely, I mean, it's table stakes for what we're doing. And so both the way in which we work as well as the expectations we have for developers that build apps that go into our app directory are very high. So we take an approach which is that we review those applications. We do a variety of testing around them. We make sure that our customers understand what information is or isn't being shared with them. So that's the approach that we take, which is quite hands-on and is also just, you know, it's exactly what you would expect given the job that we're doing. In terms of innovation, I don't really worry about that that much. Like we have.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, absolutely, but it's structurally just so completely different. We got a number of folks that work at Slack on platform that have worked on other platforms and in consumer platforms and in consumer products in general, you already have a challenge, which is a product and a strategy challenge, which is that you want to offer the best experience around the organic content. And then you also need to get ads in front of people. And that's already a challenge, even if there was no third party involved. We don't have that dynamic with Slack. We sell our software to teams to use at work. So our job is to build the best software for them and to offer the best service that we possibly can for them. And we share that goal with the developers.”
2018-09-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT