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Noah Weiss

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2023-07-23
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2023-07-23
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  1. “I will confess that I haven't used Twitter in months because I was like doing digital detox, but still I think at no underscore Weiss is a pretty good place to find me online and whether there or anywhere else. Still love to have people's like Slack feature requests, especially about things that you wish were possible where that would get the rest of your company to join on Slack because you love it, but you can't convince them those are always golden nuggets.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Well, I think most SaaS products now have borrowed that pattern. So you can use it in other software, but it works particularly well in Slack.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Going to give two because if someone asked me this, I'm like, these are the two things that if you're not on look of Slack, you'll fall in love with Slack. So the first is obviously you have the sidebar. It can be unruly, but you can customize the sidebar into sections. And each of those sections, you can have settings like show and read only or sort by recency or sort by alphabetical, whatever it might be. And you can collapse a section so you don't see it all at once. So I think having a well managed sidebar, which doesn't actually take that long, it's like this amazing thing because then all this inbound is structured in an order, in a grouping that fits how you want to view your working life. So customize on the sidebar. And the second thing is just use the Quick Switcher for everything. Just hit Apple K and just start typing. And it feels like you're playing a video game, just hopping around channels, people, files, search, pretty much all the actions you can take are known.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “By far the biggest thing was in more cultural shift is that we stopped spending so many cycles on design explorations of like static mocks or walkthroughs and said 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, like you got to kind of live and touch.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I love that. Yeah, my wife and I did something similar where we had like three or four final name contenders and we didn't use the nanophore, but we just picked a week and said on Monday we're going to like refer to the future baby by that name for the entire week and like give some personification to it. And that helped us get down from four to one.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “It turned out there was a whole world of baby tech, which I had no idea. I mean, it makes sense that it exists, but you never know about so your parent. And now I'm obsessed.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Honestly, it's just like an incredibly well designed piece of hardware that works in and out of the car. So yeah, I think I've reappreciated really well designed hard products that are not necessarily hardware from Apple. And that has been where Bingan is about.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “This will also serve for recommendations for you based on your threat about parenting products because none of the products I've learned or have loved recently have been like software, but they're all maybe software enabled. So the Nanic, which is like a kind of weird name, but it's just like AI enabled camera for basically watching your beta as they sleep. It's incredible. It gets to sleep analytics and really helps you be a less neurotic parent. I highly recommend it. The snoo, which is basically like this amazing device that can help soothe your kid when all they need is like a little bit of soothing while they sleep so that you can sleep a little bit more. You can tell the steam here is sleep. And the last one is just comical up a baby that has this whole like elaborate stroller system with interchangeable parts.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “That would depend a lot, I think, on obviously the seniority level and things like that. But I think the more general, and I always love to ask people, is what unfair secrets have you learned to improve the velocity and energy level of a product team? I say unfair in secret, I usually mean not something that you probably read on a medium post, but what have you learned? How did you learn it? And how does it work and how do you apply it? You also just get amazing, interesting bits of inspiration from asking that.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “A sucker for incredible cinematography and just like what they do and basically the single room of this restaurant and kitchen and just the pace of it, I think it's just like an incredible piece of art. I don't know if it's the messenger or it is a really moving emotionally like jarring piece of TV.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “The obvious answer, which I'm sure many people would say, would be succession. I'm not going to ruin anything for the finale in case people haven't seen it all, but they're writing Shakespearean level drama of it all. It's just incredible and just heart-wrenching that you wind up kind of loathing most of the characters, but you can't take yourself out of it. The one that's going to be less common, and I watch right when we started paternity leave, is the bear. I don't know if you heard about it.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “In their presidency. And I just think it's actually the best book about leadership style and how do you evolve and how do you deal with crises, which again, this may be later on in your career. But I love getting inspiration from not just reading books about tech and product. And I think that's one of the best ones.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “These may not be the most unique, but I will say them, which is Inner Islema by Clinton Christensen, whether you're working in a large company and you're suffering it or you're working a startup and you're trying to outflank an incumbent, I still do think that an innovative solution, the follow-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 by Kim Scott is just incredible and worth everyone reading. Frankly, if you're a 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 in Turbulent Times by Jorge Goodwin, 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 critical hard times.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I think the living in the future, working backwards, I think the more senior you get, it's always going to be the product founder who is responsible for the ultimate vision, but you become more responsible for the medium and longer term strategy to realize that vision. And so becoming just someone who can dedicate more of your time to be out of the fray of the day to day and think more about the longer-term strategy that you want to pursue. And the last one, and we talk about just earlier, but I think being a really good writer, it is just the highest leverage usage of your time if you want to influence an organization, at least for one that doesn't just spend all day in meetings. But I think it's really hard to dedicate the time to it because you're probably spending most of your day in meetings. So it's the antidote to that to kind of scale your ability to influence the product direction and maybe even the principles and how you develop product at a company.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I mean, I think this is where the pace and quality decision making starts to matter a lot more because you're still responsible sometimes for teams of teams and you're helping to facilitate high quality decisions, often ones that have a lot of uncertainty or risk or ambiguity. So how do you keep the organization on block, not just a team moving well?”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I think for early on in your career, what I'd say is getting rid of execution, it's a thing that you can most control. Then I think building that nose for impact, even if the impact is more local, because that's how you actually will demonstrate momentum and build credibility. And then actually do you think early on getting really fluent on the data and the research side so that you can have insights that you can reback to your team? Those are to be”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Analytics and everything else in the field of product. I think people sometimes lose sight of it's a creative field. It's not art on its own, but you get all the inspiration from art. And I actually think there's a called Creative Selection. I forget the exact name of it about some of the early iPhone development games at Apple and working with Steve Jobs there. I've never worked at Apple. Actually, I think it's the best book I've read about just iterating the 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. So, anyway, I think taste plus fluency and data is a combination. Is it a pretty powerful”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “And then I'll combine the last two just because I know on time, but the combination of around 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 posts about how to understand some of the basics of experimentation, correlation, causation, statistical significance. That's all great. But by data fluency, I think it's more actually what you were just saying, which is like you know enough about the insights about your customers that it can then inform making higher likelihood product bets. And that data can be quantitative. That data can be survey basic. It can be from doing 100 meetings with customers yourself. Those are all types of data inputs to me. So being really fluent. And then combining that with great product taste, I know it's like a controversial statement now to say that there is taste for product. But I do think in all the love of the frameworks and the”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Okay, I got to read the last one. I haven't read those, but they sound perfect. Okay, maybe I'll throw what or let's say we talked about this earlier, but actually wrote this in the post many years ago is like optimizing for the pace of learning and knowing that long term, that's the thing that's going to drive impact. I think it can be hard if you're a PM for a feature team, you're part of a big company, I don't know, making this up, you're on the Adwards team at Google and you're responsible for the bid input selector or something. And 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 the thing that's right in front of you? So optimizing for learning, being willing to take those bolder bets, knowing you can be wrong in the short term, but that you'll learn new levers that will be really fruitful in the long term. It's a portfolio approach.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “You're kind of the shock absorber for the team. You're the thing that builds people's confidence that things are going to be running smoothly and you'll get over the NEV will speed bumps and whatever else. I'll combine two or three of these that are kind of related or just more skills. I said write well I actually think association get to more senior positions. Writing is the only scalable way of having confluence on a larger, larger product org. There's a book called On Writing by Stephen King, which I recommend to literally everybody. You know, Stephen King, you're like, he's not maybe the most 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 great short book on like the practice of writing high quality, high volume production.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Ben Horowitz was a board member back at Foursquare. And I distinguished this saying it's very yodel-like of good leaders need to say what they're going to do and then do what they said. If they can't, then they need to follow up and explain why. I mean, that's like the amendment. And I think that is kind of a good execution looks like.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “And understanding as a 2.0 laying the tracks is like, what direction do you need to go as a team to actually thrive that impact? That's probably the single thing that PM can most control.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Totally, I'll kind of combine two of these together. So one is you do have to have impeccable 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 in Azzo's 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 saying like growth solves all problems. I think impact solves all like PM issues, which is if a team is consistently building things people love and changing the directory of the business, everything else is just an input. And so I think that focus.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “That actually, I'm going to skip into site direction of the order of this post, but the fifth one I wrote on there was your job is to facilitate 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 PM struggled with early on is how do you actually get the team to be able to make high quality decisions quickly without you kind of arbitrarily playing tiebreaker all the time? And it's a soft art to be able to do that. But I think that is actually how you have a really healthy team dynamic instead of PM2 want to say, okay, now it's my turn to get to make the decisions. It's definitely not what the job is about.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Totally, we should find out who wrote that expression early on of like PMs should be mini CEOs. I think that's the most dangerous piece of advice ever the history of product management because I think that is how you end up having PMs who try to act like dictators instead of kind of leaders and facilitators. Because if you're acting like that, yeah, your team can completely reject you and say, I never want another PM again.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “The second one, which is maybe obvious, but thinking about how do you actually amplify your team? So how do you facilitate ideas? How do you create energy? How do you create momentum, a PM role, I think can be a little bit unsatisfying if you're useful where you create things yourself, as opposed to you are the one who's amplifying the work that's being created by everyone else is. So you have to kind of get into that more of a facilitator mindset.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah, I mean, that was when I was at Google, the thing I took away most from any review that Larry and Sergei was they would ask like, how could we get 100x the scale? Or how could this work for this, what seemed like an outlandish use case, but would like push the team to think much further into the future? I think something when the founders always want.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I definitely riffed off at least the Paul Grim thing because I remember reading that essay of he thinks everyone thinks that you get sort of ideas by like I don't know sitting with their co-founder or laying in Delors Park looking up at the sky and like conjuring up the next unicorn or something definitely not how that works you have to actually like immerse yourself in the problem space and try to imagine what the future world looks like and then what's missing for people to get to that future state so yeah i agree”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “These traits are kind of came after I wrote this other thing, which is like the five minutes about product management, which are all the things that people think product management is and why they switch to the job and they're disappointed by. And then I was like, let me actually write a positive version of this, which is the things that the job actually is about. It's not a career ladder. It's not like the, 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 success look like? And I don't think they're really in a particular order in hindsight, but I'll read them in order. So living the future and work backwards, I think it's very much kind of the idea of as a PM, the one thing they're responsible for. It's kind of having a longer term vision and time horizon. So how do you carve out time to not just be what are we doing over the next two weeks, but six months, a year, two years from now, how do you immerse yourself and that and bring ideas back, bring inspiration back to the team.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Yeah, I definitely think it was one of those things where if you could 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 work without this thing? If the answer is definitely not, you've built something that probably a lot of other companies will want to.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “I think the two most important things are you want a lot of diversity in terms of industry, company size, location, and 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. Not every company wants to actually be beta testing new functionality that might get removed. So making sure we have kind of this champion network that we built of people who love Slack enough that they're willing to put up with a little bit of pain in that rougher period or are willing to have something that they tried to use and then we decided actually we're going to kill that feature before we ever ship it to everybody. So diversity and pink tolerance.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Predictive, but because it worked well for a thousand different companies, 50 different countries, and 20 different industries. And so I think early on, SaaS companies don't need to figure that out, but I think as you grow and as you have a more diverse customer base, as you said, all these SaaS founders who said, hey, you got to keep reestablishing a product market. I think that is like a programmatic way of being able to do that with your product development process. That's pretty interesting”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Really robust program that we call kind of our pilot program where probably thousands of different customers have all signed different agreements now where we can actually roll out to progressively larger user bases. And because Slack is a multiplayer product, you often have to roll out real net neutrality 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, both through Slack Connect itself, through surveys. And this winds up being kind of the lifeblood of feature teams where you can by the time you actually launch a big net new feature for Slack have gotten 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 surveys that we do that you can't guarantee it's going to be a hit but you can be really confident not because it just worked well internally which is no longer that”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “The other thing I think is maybe a little bit interesting in terms of how we develop product, and it's really different in exchange over time, which is that obviously the easiest person to build for is yourself. And the next easiest is people who look almost exactly like you or have similar preferences and sophistication. And I think in the early days of 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 you could build a pretty big business making a great product for them over the years, obviously, that's changed. And so one of the things I think that we've done, which has worked really well, one obviously is we've figured out how to do experimentation in a SaaS product, which is not always obvious because the metrics are much longer term than you land at a checkout page and then you hit checkout. But I think the other thing is we figure out how to scale up getting real customers using Slack in the wilds for new functionality. And so we have this.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Yeah, like I'm good friends as Vancouver CEO Christina. I feel like they run those stories where whoever would have thought of 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 gotcha, Mante. It's amazing. So yeah, maybe that is true. Especially in this day and age where all the marketing acquisition channels have been so saturated, people have optimized them so much, I think it's really hard to scale big enough business if you don't have some amount of word of mouth and customer love driven growth. I think it's hard to scale it on like we're going to just play with CAC game and hope that the numbers work out.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “I think that's true. I mean, obviously, there are categories of enterprise software that isn't true for insecurity or even that, I think”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “It's consumer great experience that customers love enough to get their coworkers on and pay for themselves. And then at enterprise companies like having a bunch of different flowers sprouting so that eventually you could roll up at enterprise-wide kind of deal. And then there was all the tactics. But I think that that was where it started.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Obviously, that was an initial, I think, real, real strong product market fit. But the other bit, which then was what powered the enterprise business, was teams of five to 15 people who worked at larger companies. And I think what wound up happening was that you would have teams independently at a company like IBM or Disney or Capital One or whoever it might be or Comcast discovering Slack using it for themselves because they thought it would just make their working lives simpler, more pleasant, more productive and maybe not even know that anyone else in the company was using Slack. And then by the time we then scaled our enterprise sales team, I 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 at your company. Do you want to think about a broader deployment or controls or analytics? And so I think that that was it.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “You know, I really think not to be repetitive, but I think the core of it really was building a product that customers loved enough that they would put their own social capital on the line to get their coworkers on board. And that was easy enough to use and get the value from that without ever talking to a salesperson. You could put a credit card down or expense it if you wanted to for just your team. I think when people think about this product-led growth notion, I think there are really two very different audiences. And I think Slack was able to crack both. One is when your team is small and your company is small, it is the entire company if you're an SMB. And I think that's almost like slack sweet spot when the original pitch deck came to the investors. They said, Slack is for companies of 5 to 50 people. At the time, the biggest company I imagine using Slack was 50 people because I don't know how this is going to work beyond that. It'll become pandemonium.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Right. I mean, I think maybe the most telling thing is when Slack started, it's really when I joined still, I don't think a word or acronym product-led growth existed. So it wasn't like we were really good at taking this platebook and applying it. I think it was more that whole term of art became a thing as maybe many other kind of freemium SaaS products kind of took off.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “I would say maybe 60, 40 in the sense of the early journey. I mean, not just obviously positioning, messaging, but like the entire series of like unboxing Slack, if you will, with your team, we call it the day one journey, but extend it to really kind of like day 30 in reality. And it's a single player and multiplayer experience. So it is really complex. But then I think what we realized was you can make that incredible. But if fundamental parts of the product were missing that would make it comprehensible to the next audience, then you're going to have problems. So like it sounds maybe impossible to remember, but Slack used to not have WYSIWYG message composition. You used to have to use Markdown. And so making Matt WissyWig was a huge boost, making mobile.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “I think that's exactly right. I think of product market fitism as like you keep stacking these esc curves 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 declining as you start hitting the ceiling of like we've got in, 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 S curve, which is like, how do we get technology savvy teams that aren't developers? Or how do we get people who are in large enterprises who are outside the US? And these each kind of new curves that you have to build product market fit for. And I think it's just all a huge exercise in being self-critical, being humble, not presuming that you've cracked this thing forever and keeping kind of a very beginner's mindset of what is the next audience need that your previous audience didn't need at all.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “That if we can move that, which is much earlier in the funnel, but not a complenometric, then it would actually drive up freights and paid customers and thus revenue long term. And that was a huge kind of turning point for how we rallied product teams around somebody who would actually drive that self-service business.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “At that point in time, we basically had paid customers, and then we had created Tues, 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 wounded up coming up with this new metric we called successful teams, which is a little bit, you know, I feel a lot of companies have this like Facebooks. I'm looking at number seven or whatever it was, where what we found was that if you could get five people using Slack, the majority of the work week to just communicate at all, that would be a successful team. There were 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 could get that level of critical mass, kind of the rest would take care of itself. And we want to motivating not just the teamos focused on self-service, but all these other feature teams across the company to drive more new successful teams knowing”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “Being one of, I think, the ripest veins is figuring out how to get people a taste of the full premium slack experience so that they would never want to go back and doing that in a variety of different points in the customer journey. And then I think 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 Slack.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “One of the big things that we wound up focusing on is what we talk about as comprehension desirability. So the fundamental challenge, I think, for new users or new teams using your product, once you get past the kind of tech early adopters, is do they comprehend what this thing is for? Do they understand how it works? And then desirability is why should they care? You know, 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 coworkers to get on board. That is not like part of your job. Your job has goals and measurements and everything else. So really deeply understanding that and how do you push them that new user experience. It sounds maybe a little ludicrous, but Slack always has a freemium product. Obviously, there's 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 had to pay for the paid tier. And that went up.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Let's come up with a bunch of hypotheses about what could be relevers that could 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 what these levers are real and which of these are just totally off the mark. And 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 wind up finding a couple different levers that had years of room to run. And that's what wind up happening. We wound up kind of doubling the rate of our new paid customer growth in the year and a couple of years after that and kind of reaccelerating the self-service business. And I think it really came from stepping back, being humble, not feeling like we deserve to have every company on Earth sign up and then figuring out how to optimize for learning so in the long term you could get the impact. But knowing that for the next couple quarters, we're going to sacrifice impact for”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Little bit to what we're talking about earlier with the motivation and plane storms is it was getting harder to understand what the next generation slot customers really wanted from the product. And whether you're thinking about this as crossing the chasm or moving from early adopters that need the more majority or later adopters, I think we're at that point where not every technologically sophisticated company on Earth was using Slack, but most were. And we were getting into a market that customers just had different needs, they had different levels of sophistication. And so we get a lot of user research. We look at all these cohort curves, which you can imagine. Suddenly they're like, oh, they're not as healthy as they used to be. Like what's going on? And I think we got that, got a bunch of insights from it. But I think really what we want to change about how we were 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 roadmap away. And instead,”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Yeah, it was actually a couple years 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 busers. And then we started spinning up a sales team and an enterprise team. We started focusing mostly on that.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Yeah, I mean, it turns into a report at some point, but literally just link back to the original thread and then you have like 100 people's reactions as the report is kind of ongoing.”

    2023-07-23 · Lenny's Podcast · The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source