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Merci Grace

lines on the record: 59
first: 2022-07-11
most recent: 2022-07-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Oh, that's nice. So you can find me online. Twitter, I think, is probably my best sort of public inbox, my DMs are open. I do respond to them, especially if it's something direct that I can be helpful with. If you are a woman in product management, go to womenandroduct.com and you can apply to join our community. We've been going since 2015 and there's many people who are in it as well. And then, yeah, if you're interested in growth, more generally go to panobi.com.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we're really early, and I'm not exactly sure when this podcast is coming out, but if you go to Penobi.com, it's P-A-N-O-B-I.com. There is either a real landing page there, or today there is just a Google form for you to fill out that will ask you a few questions about product-led growth, which is the area that we're building in. And if you're someone who is curious about product-led growth, If you're ahead of growth at a company, if you're a CEO or a founder or investor who's interested in finding out more, picking up, you know, maybe even a tool to help you be successful at it, go to anobi.com and you can also just DM me on Twitter.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's funny. I've often been the only woman on a team at a startup or literally at the startup, entirely. And there is a huge difference I found between being the only woman and being one of even two women. The tone really changes people then are like, oh, now we have like women co-workers. It's not just mercy who also plays D&D and, you know, curses at the office or whatever. It is like women is this more general class. And so they start to honestly be like more respectful and kinder to each other and treat each other better too. And so I think that's like the other thing. It's not like it's better for anyone to be in a homogenous group. I think it's actually better for everyone to be in a more diverse group because the sort of baseline for how you treat each other goes up.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We spent a lot of time on that pipeline making sure that there were a lot of people who got interviewed and it was never like an excuse, you know, was to not like not find someone. And then that kind of inertia that can make you end up with a company of 50 white men because they were for their friends, the people who they naturally feel comfortable with and things like that, that can also work in your favor if early on you just hire more women and you hire more people of color, they'll feel more comfortable because they're not the only one. And then they'll refer their friends as well.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I sort of like blame it on the pipeline, you need to actually go seek them out and find them. And then once you do, it can be this really self-reinforcing mechanism in the way that a lot of diversity initiatives that companies work is that, you know, it's one thing to have a team of all like white men, but if you have like two African American people in your first like 20 people, you could have a lot more diversity and not even amongst just that one group. Like women want to work with other women, but like men of all races, I think look at an organization that let's say it's all white people, but there's a few women, they may look at it as just like a more diverse, more friendly place and be less intimidated to be, for instance, the first person of color who works there.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the interesting things that I've seen about firing women is that women do tend to be less aggressive and risk-seeking than men do. I really didn't want that to be true. And I think I'm an outlier in being very, you know, multiple time founder or things like that. I have a risk profile that I have been bummed to see as not something that's like widely shared by other women. And so I think part of it is that you, if you're just looking at passive inbound or, you know, through referrals or things like that, you're just going to end up with fewer women in your pipeline and you are going to close women, I think, at a lower conversion rate than you close men, especially if you're an earlier or riskier business. And so in order to offset that, you just need to go interview a lot of women and not.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's funny. I don't think it's always hiring more women because not all women are friends to other women. And they may, in fact, relish their position as the only girl. If I think on Reddit, it's like the, I'm not like the other girls name or whatever. You could easily get someone in like that and she can actually actively turn off other women.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of trust of a company and who really loves and understands your customer. Because a lot of the growth stuff is pretty straightforward. It's a funnel, right? There's a lot of fantastic classes like reforge. There's a lot of writing on the internet about how to do it. But to a certain extent, everyone is inventing the specific things that work really well for their customer and their product.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Yeah. It is time to start working on growth. When you feel like you have product market fit, it doesn't have to be totally perfect because you absolutely use the growth team to really accelerate and improve your product market fit that is a part of the value of a growth team. But you do need to feel like, okay, once we, even if it's do a white glove onboarding with people, If I spend 20 minutes with you and I show you my tool and I explain how it works, wow, you really get it. You want to pay me money for it. You're still using it six months later. You're ready for a grift team. You don't have to have all of your ducks in a row. You don't have to have everything instrumented. And then what I often tell people is that your first BM to touch growth or just engineer or PMM to work on it should be someone who has a”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's still probably that way. It was a huge part of the culture, you know, when I was there, when it was the kind of initial founding team and an independent company as well. So who knows what will be successful for them within Salesforce. I think it's like quite literally a different company now.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A compelling story was huge, especially at Slack, which was a very product driven company, a very narrative-driven company. If you were going to present data, it needed to be within a very specific context. And it wasn't a company where the number always won. It was a company where the story always won. And so if someone did a great job of structuring a narrative, they had technically possible but also creative solutions. And they picked one for good reasons. They would know how to measure it and how to build something like that. They were just going to be much better than someone who didn't hit literally every single one of those things at a high level.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The quality of the solution, something like Slack is not like a deeply technical product, but I was a little bit surprised to see the number of smart people who'd worked at good companies who decided that, okay, it's like magic wand time. And now that, you know, assuming that, for instance, Flackbot was like a state machine that had a bunch of context and would have this almost like NLP sort of driven conversation with you. So that was like a big bread flag to me for someone just not. And it's funny because like I'm not like an engineer and I wouldn't even think of myself as like a quote unquote like technical PM, but PMs have to know basics of how the tools work and like what would work in the tool. So that's a big one. Whether someone was able to tell”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ideally, to pick not one that's assigned to them, but here's three different problems because you learn a lot about someone from every choice that they make. I think that's probably my most controversial hiring topic, but I found a very direct relationship between the people who just really kicked ass on those and went on to be very successful and lead organizations at Slack.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just in the last, I don't know, five or six years, I feel like people are really pushing back on doing what they think unfairly characterized as like free work for a company. And I tweeted this out, but I mean, if you don't want to even do three hours of like free work for a company, you probably don't want to work at that company. It's this weird, like, if you need to be paid for every second of effort that you're putting in, I mean, you probably shouldn't be near a startup in that case because I hate to break it to you, but the startup that you're at might not be successful. And then you will have, you know, done all of this work for photovote nothing. And so I really use that as a way to see into how someone thinks the quality of the solutions that they bring, how they communicate. There's just so much bundled up in giving someone, you know, an actual problem.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I always ask people to do, you know, for an ICPM world, it's different if you're hiring a director or a VP for kind of standard PM role. I always make people do work. I think we've gone back and forth on Twitter about this. And it's funny, it's definitely something that it's like.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think a lot of it is the approach is not an exam that I'm proctoring, right, when I'm hiring a role. I'm not sitting in an ivory tower, like in the seat of judgment. What I'm trying to do is to make sure that whoever I offer the role to wants to take it and will thrive at the company, that they're the right kind of person for the role, especially in product where You know, someone who's a super successful PM list is not necessarily going to be a super successful PM at Slack or at Airbnb or at Pinterest, even though if you think about that class with that cohort of company, Do the whiteboarding exercise, and I'm going to talk down to you. You never end up sort of finding out about something.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And those are, of course, the salespeople's favorite person to talk to. It was like anyone. It's like you want to talk to someone who actually wants to talk to you.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really wanted to have a conversation with someone before they continue to spend a lot of money on their product. And I think that's one of the things that maybe younger vetters or people who haven't worked at enterprise companies before can discount is the customer preference. And then actually there's a whole set of customers that literally have to talk to someone before they can buy anything or just really want to.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I know. And here we are again. It's all in that initial network, right? So the founder is all as the first salesperson. So in that way, it is often the case that, you know, one of the first three or four people who work at a big company is actually a salesperson. But the point at which you should start to hire someone else to do them is when you as the founder absolutely cannot meet the demand, you know, even though you're getting up really early and staying really late and building your investing deck on the weekend instead so you can continue to meet with customers. And then the other time to do that apart from just being maxed out is when you are moving into and usually up to a customer that both once and expects to meet with a salesperson. And that was what we went through at Slack was moving from that engineer driven SMB motion to then getting adopted at companies that”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so founders are always selling. So even from the time that you have your very first Alflek customers, and it's funny because I often reference actually the post that you did about how to find your first Fast B2B customers.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is not something that can be chroniclin because people, you know, there's like product led in one direction. There's product led back out that same direction. And that can be the frustrating part about product-led growth is that the easier you make it to come in, also the easier it can be to leave.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, the other one that I don't hear people talk about very often is whether there's really day zero value in the tool. This is something that came up for me a lot when I was looking at a lot of these sort of like video apps, both the kind of presence app where you're replicating a kind of office experience or pre-pandemic. No, I think this use case a little more obvious, but pre-pandemic, you know, getting on video chat with someone and what it does is, you know, creates an automatic transcript of your meeting. There isn't necessarily a lot of day zero value from doing one meeting on a tool like that, but often the pitch would be, hey, in six months or three months, you'll be glad that you recorded the transcripts for all of these interviews that you did because of XYZ reason. That is not, you know, something that is valuable after you've been using it for months.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A range and a bunch of other ones, whereas a manager is running their one-on-ones, getting feedback from their team, et cetera, using this tool, that's a product-led tool often, but that's not really bottoms up. Because in order to grow that tool, you need to do a very good job of finding where managers are in businesses, targeting them, retargeting and doing things to specifically reach out to someone in that particular function. Whereas bottoms up should be like literally anyone at a 500 company could start using this.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, for product led, I think about it being, you know, something that anyone can get value out of your tool immediately and that the tool doesn't need to be augmented by a conversation or a webinar or anything like that with someone else in order for them to get to a certain threshold of value. Often you learn a lot as a business from doing like a white glove onboarding for certain personas and they didn't need you to do that, but you wanted to do it. So that's still really product-led. And then it's funny, bottoms up is often used exactly the same way, but I would think of bottoms up as being not just product led, but also something that can be adopted by anyone at any level within the organization. So there's tools for people managers.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are probably the most successful product led growth companies that we don't talk about being product-led, but that's totally how they grow. Junior engineer or really senior engineer can pick up some DevTool and play around with it and start using it, decide to take it into work or not. So anything that you can pick up without needing to have the sort of keys to dad's Porsche in order to test out can be product-led. More and more, I'm also seeing companies that have an enterprise sales motion to capture the customer at the point of adoption, but then they want to use product-like growth sort of frameworks or tools to expand their usage to either drive up retention or to actually expand the number of seats and the number of departments that are using that tool.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ideally, that's something that you thought about pretty deeply before you even started to code the product because whether you thought about it consciously or not, you have already decided whether it is going to be product letter or sales led. If it is the type of solution that you need buy-in from the head of HR to use because you need to integrate with systems that have a lot of PII in them and no IC has the keys to that system at any size of a company, boom, you know, you have a sales-led motion. That is what it is. And so I think just having that sort of like objective distance to your own product is always like a fruitful kind of place to begin. If it's something, if you have a product that even if it's for a specific function, but kind of anyone at any seniority level and that function could pick it up to use it. So DevTools.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you haven't been able to talk someone out of it, you can always show them. So I'm a huge fan of learning without shipping and building paper prototypes or building a prototype in Figma or protopy or something like that and just do a bake-off and prove the point, not with you saying, hey, like CEO, you're wrong about XYZ. We shouldn't have this three image carousel. Just come up with some different alternatives, you know, like tool tips that are embedded in product things that are obvious next steps that you can guide people to within a sort of like constrained user experience. And then you'll just be able to actually compare whether people understood it experience A or whether more people understood experience B. And it can be shockingly clear.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The carousel is in a product where that's the modality of the product. So, you know, I could see a carousel honestly working for something like Tinder, where that's basically what the product is, right? You're swiping through it. Sure. You can use a carousel for that, right? But only because it matches the user experience of the core product. But most apps that use carousels at the beginning, it is actually this pain that's built to be dismissed quickly.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of investment in our product that we are, which is just categorically false. You have to understand that people have really limited attention and no one cares about your product the way that you do. And so it can feel like you're dumbing it down or oversimplifying. And if you don't feel that way, you know, about your onboarding, about the growth work that you're doing, it's probably too complex.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. So one of the most common things that I see folks do when they haven't had much experience really simplifying onboarding down or something like that is they'll often have an idea of, okay, here are the seven things that you have to know about our product. And one of those is usually some power user feature that an executive really likes or something. And they'll have this idea that they want to have like a carousel that meets you when you open up the product and it takes you through all of these like informational pains. And what's funny is that then if you were to talk to those same people in a usability study for some other product, they'd be like, oh yeah, no, click. You know, I'm not going to read that. But again, that's that sort of like we have this expectation of our users that they're going to give a shit. That they're going to read the text, that they're going to be at the level.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm sorry. It turns out it's just hard work. And the other thing that people don't do enough is stay in touch with the real human experience of what onboarding is for you. Pile of people wending their way through, you're kind of actually made up benchmarks for them. And it is messier and way more awkward to talk to human beings, but absolutely necessary. You want to hear the tone of voice. You want to see the expression on their face. So once a month, ideally, you should just have some sort of a schedule for yourself where if you're at a larger company and you have a user researcher, you can recruit people for you, that's great. But if not, just go find people who either fit the demographic for your user or even are your user and have them, you know, sign up from the account and walk you through it. And it is embarrassing, but very educational.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the ones that I really find a lot of delight and tend to be ones that are deeply intertwined with the product. So it's the product throughout the course of using the product you learn, you get onboarded to the value of it. Probably the clearest tools in which you can see this dynamic are things like to-do lists where there will be an item on the to-do list that says, you know, click the square next to this to mark this task as complete. And now you've just completed your first task and it's really in there and it doesn't feel like this fake kind of veneer on top of it. I really like something that is not kind of pasted on top of the experience, but something that uses the product to teach someone else how to use the product.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you're designing the product. And unfortunately, many people think about onboarding at the last minute, and it ends up being the final piece of product work. Or, you know, and this may be a little bit controversial of an opinion, but I'm not a fan of the plug and play frameworks for onboarding for that reason. I've seen them advertised actually using like, here's how to replicate Slacks onboarding in using our tool and things like that. And I'm like, oh God, don't do that because what worked for Slack won't necessarily work for you. And it certainly won't be like native and feel deeply tied into the product experience, which it absolutely should be.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, my thoughts and feelings that onboarding really go back to my experience designing games where I would design the game from the onboarding experience. So there wasn't a sense of, okay, here's exactly, you know, the game and all of the game dynamics, but how you introduce something, how you frame something matters a lot, how will someone discover this? And so if you can think about even an online product that you're working on from that first introduction, what will it be like for someone to come in here? What will I be asking them to integrate with? Will I be asking them to upload something to invite someone else? What are the steps between the user and the full value of your app is something that's very useful to think about literally from the first day?”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. I think people often, and this is probably even a larger statement about human beings, but we're so focused on ourselves, right? And I think that's one thing that parents tell middle schoolers is like, I know you feel really awkward right now, but so does everyone else. No one's thinking about you. They're just thinking about themselves and how they come off. And then we'll do that to our own detriment in business where you'll set up something like a find trial and say, okay, well, I want to start getting revenue as soon as possible. So we'll just let people have this for a week. But the truth is, for every week that you continue to let people use it, you get incrementally more people who do convert because their timing on buying your product has nothing to do with your schedule or how quickly you want revenue and everything to do with where in the quarter is it for them. Do they have a new project that they can use to try?”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, I'm never a dark pattern. Person. I think it was Marco Polo, the kind of async video chat app, did a bunch of dark pattern stuff. I remember maybe three or four years ago where they would auto select a ton of people and send them a text message that looked like it was from you. It was really awful. So definitely not a dark pattern growth at any cost kind of a person, but it is like, you know, have the invites there for the people who will want to and the people who, even though they sound pretty offended in their chunk of voice when they talk about it, it's not enough for them to, you know, not engage with your product.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. And it's knowing the persona, and then it's also doing things like making sure that someone has multiple opportunities to invite, even though it's a counterintuitive thing across many types of products. I have seen user interviews where people are going through an onboarding experience and they come to, you know, the invite screen and they say, I would never invite someone. I haven't seen the inside of this product. I wouldn't do this, et cetera. And that is advice to not listen to. You need to have invites early and often so that you catch people who want to share it, are social people, and then for the people who would never participate in that, they can ignore it or skip it. But that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be all over the entire product.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, one of the big ones in that regard is the understanding that there are people who are just more social, right? I'm sure you're this kind of person. You're a connector and you know a lot of people, you love introducing them, bringing them together. We are who we are fundamentally. And so within any population, including in user base, there will be people who are more likely to invite other people to the product or to bring people around into it, especially if it's something like a collaboration product. And so I saw it was much easier to get those people to share the product with bigger groups of folks than it would be to get someone who's just not like that, who never is the host, who doesn't invite people to stuff. It's a lot easier to get someone to send more invites than it is to get someone who's a little shy to even send one.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it is. It's funny how it's just a little too much architecture, a little, yeah, too big of a house for two people kind of.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We never talk about it. Yeah. And now it's funny, I'll see some of the media that gets created or the television commercials. And I'm like, You know, balls moving around and little grooves and stuff. And I'm like, I'm not sure what they're supposed to be comparing themselves to. Maybe just themselves.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One on one email conversation. It's totally fine. It's this year. It's of letters back and forth. As soon as you add one more person to that, it gets a lot messier.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a conservation metric that we got to through some initial regression analysis. And then we tested the hypotheses that we developed from that regression analysis and made it into the product. And so for us, it was three people, real human beings, not bots, and 50 messages, real messages, not people, because that was our real messages, not messages. Three people ended up being the lowest number at which things do start to break. So having a one-on-one conversation is a lot easier. Having, you know, one-on-one text message or email, any of things is going to be more straightforward. There's almost nothing, and especially when we were comparing ourselves so actively and successfully at the time to email, there is nothing broken about, you know, a 35 message.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We're all trying to learn, you know, and I think it is very dangerous to say this specific metric is a North Star for every business. I think one of the most surprising things, and of course when something's true, it becomes obvious, and this is all surprising. But we had thought of Slack as a sync, but also async kind of a platform. But then over the course of a bunch of experimentation and user research saw that a bunch of the things that moved the needle for us were about getting people into their new Slack team at the same time. So Jules Walter, PM on the roof team did some experiments around push notifications on mobile, just getting people in. It's still live in the product today because it was, it turns out, massively successful. It really matters, you know, that someone is there to greet you when you join.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too light, there were too many of them. And I remembered my first few weeks doing customer support in Zendesk, and I would get screenshots from people reporting some unrelated bug and notice this person has been a user for six months, and I can see they still have these little throbbers all over the place. Okay, this is not working. People don't understand that they're supposed to click on them. I think Discord has a similar design, but they use the little World of Warcraft style exclamation point, which I'm sure is much more effective. But it was hilarious. Also kind of sad to watch people trying to replicate things in our products that actually weren't even working for us, but they had no insight into that.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. You know, I think one of the best things that we did is that we really started with curiosity first and we weren't like, okay, here are all of our baseline metrics. We already know what's important. Let's just do this because April Underwood, you know, former CPO at Slack, had this great line that she would say internally, which is no one has built Slack before. And I really loved that as this kind of like mental starting place where it's like there isn't going to be this cookie cutter thing. And it was funny too in the experience of building out onboarding and running all these experiments at Slack to see people copy things from the product that we knew were not working. And so I think when I first joined early 2015, we had an onboarding experience that had these little circles that would animate. And it was very”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a great product, and we had product market fit. That was pretty obvious at the time. And so how do we help sort of clear away the fog of war and let people see the map that is here's Slack and here's where everything is and here's how you can get started using it.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So early on, I mean, I definitely got the job that I got at Slack because I had been a game designer. And Stuart Butterfield, the CEO and founder, and I knew each other from our shared time, having both run, it turned out very unsuccessful gaming companies. And being people, I think, who have the same weird taste and kind of indie games and things like that. And so he knew, and this was part of our discussion, that I would bring a familiar sensibility to the role I was hired to, which wasn't called growth at first. It was new user experience. So it was the onboarding experience, you know, signing up, getting started, and that's really where we started with it, was coming at it from not trying to do a specific number or anything like that, but a belief that”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Using it and discord. I know. I still have the women in product community on Slack as well for that same reason. And because it's professional and adjacent and it is tied into your professional identity as a person, but also, yeah, you're already on it. So reengaging your community is more a question of like an at channel or a mention than it is like having to re-engage using an email campaign or something like that in order to get someone's attention.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's interesting. So, you are participating in kind of like this creator economy that wasn't around at the same level in 2015, the kinds of communities that were happening on Slack would be a Burning Man community, an open source community that was massive and everyone had a weird Linux setup. And so it was usually time consuming for our support team to help get people's machines working and things like that. So I don't know because what you have is a little bit of a prosumer use case, right? Where people have a personal but also, you know, very much a professional community with you as well. And I think that Discord is moving more in that direction. It's a little bit more of a natural step for them to take, I think. And it's funny because for me, you know, Slack doesn't exist anymore in the way that it did, even a few years ago. It's not an independent company anymore. And so I think.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That the fact that it was, you know, such an open conversation at the company really helped me see that it wasn't obvious to everyone that Slack was a work tool because it feels so social and it feels so fun.”
2022-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source