YouSaid · the spoken record

Noah Weiss

lines on the record: 92
first: 2023-07-23
most recent: 2023-07-23
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

“To hear as designers and the user researcher all in one Slack thread, like live response you're acting for usability session. And then suddenly that thread becomes actually the best kind of source of truth for the research report that then gets rid of. But I think most importantly, it gets the team almost at the complaint storms, but actually watching someone else do it in the shoes of an actual human being trying to use the thing that you thought was so brilliant and yet has all these flaws. It's humbling it's filled with humor and also I think really constructive for the teams to do it that way.”
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
“So I'm a big believer in you want to be data informed, but you don't want to be so data driven that you actually don't have a pulse on what real people feel when they're using your product. So we're really big into user research, not as it gives you the answer, but it helps at least pose a lot of questions for you when you watch how someone actually uses the software. And historically, it's really hard to get PMs, let alone engineers, to actually like a 10 user research sessions. And so what we wound up doing, especially been in the pandemic when we first went to Remote, is now you can dial into usability sessions and to make it really interactive for the team, what we would do is have people live kind of like in a thread write their real-time thoughts of so painful how they use that. I can't believe they missed that or, oh, that gave me this idea from seeing how they were doing that to do this other thing. And so then you wind up having the PM.”
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
“One of the things that we do, which is kind of always a little bit funny. Amy, it's more of a emotional thing rather than a practical thing, is that at all hands, we'll often wind up taking specific tweets that people had about their product. And, you know, Twitter, people say the craziest thing sometimes. And sometimes they're really heartwarming customer love, but often it's just the meanest, most frustrating complaints that people have. And it's honestly for us to just have a pulse on where people actually saying and feeling in the wild and not thinking too seriously, but keeping that sense of, you know, I think that the distance you have from your users as your user base gets more and more diverse and larger, I think, kind of make it harder to actually develop the product because you're not designing for yourself anymore. And so I think all the ways that we help keep people grounded in like what are actual users actually saying that's one big way. And the other that reminded me of what”
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
“Space to run to give them kind of gonna jail free card for maybe the normal process of OKR planning, quarterly reviews, and make it feel something that is like the pace of learning is what matters. Like how fast you prototyping, how fast are you learning from users and then getting to do that publicly and pilot and then get something to launch that's amazing blows people away? That's kind of the formula that we've seen.”
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
“Incredibly beautiful range behind it. So take bigger boulder bets, get to the next hill to see what the horizon looks like around you. That's kind of how we think about it strategically. And then I think structurally the way we've approached it is that we've over time freighted kind of new teams from scratch that incubate in a new area before the area is mature. So we did that with a lot of these kind of native audiovisual products like huddles and clicks early in the pandemic because our customers were demanding it from us. They were like, we love living in Slack all day, but we feel disconnected from our teammates when we can't be in the same physical place. Like, what can you do to help us and match where that came from? And I think in the AI space now, it's a similar thing, which is what we're trying to hear from customers like, what do you wish Slack could do if it had these new superpowers? And let's incubate a couple teams to prototype there and then figure out what can get to real product market fit. And I think when we have those teams, I think it's important to just give them”
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
“I think maybe we're all a little self delusional because I think everyone who works at Slack likes to think that we're still at a small startup. And I think keeping that spirit alive, honestly, culturally has been a big part of it. You know, I think going back to the principles early on, one of the ones that we did talk about, literally, one of the actual wording is take bigger boulder bets. And the idea there is that it's really easy to fall into the trap of just constant incrementalism, you know, the class. It's like a feature team and you have like a KPI and you feel like your whole life is measured by that similar KPI going up 1% a quarter. And then you kind of lose sight of what's beyond the horizon. And so we have this kind of mental metaphor that we talk a lot about getting to the next hill. And the idea is that if you're in a mountain range and you're maybe in a little valley, you can kind of see what's right in front of you. But you have no idea how tall the mountains are behind. I think teams can often get lost kind of crawling up that hill, not really there's a huge.”
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
“And the productivity space. And so I think when they built teams, it was more of a kind of covering their flank versus Slack kind of on the ascent. I think as teams has evolved over time, it's become much more of a video conferencing product that competes with Zoom and Google Meet. The people who use Teams use it completely different than Slack where you live and breathe in channels and kind of workflows all day long. And I think what we've seen there too is that a lot of our customers, they happily use both. Most Fortune 500 companies have either off subscription or a Google workplace subscription and all of those customers who use those also use Slack and we like to say that Slack is this connected tissue that makes all the rest of your tools that much better. So I think there we've kind of taken very much an open ecosystem and platform approach and we've just been focused on how do we keep building the best version of what Slack can be as a new category of software for our customers and staying aware.”
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
“A couple of those axes, then you can see a huge change in behavior. And so I think that's what happened with that move from like the hitchhat campfire to Slack world. Discord's interesting. I mean, we keep aware of Discord, but it is so much more focused on the kind of consumer. Originally it was gaming out for community space. And I think at Slack, the lesson I would have, I think we learned in a good way is we've always really been focused on groups of people who are trying to do work together. And that winds up being a completely different audience to build for than communities. And so I think that focus has been really helpful. And I think Discord is amazing and many people love it. And the people who use Discord certainly use it in very different way than people who use Slack at work. I think Microsoft obviously has become over time the biggest competitor there. I think the origin of Teams really was a defensive move for them to protect Office because Office is an incredible, very profitable kind of monopoly.”
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
“Yeah, I mean, each of those is kind of like an interesting mini kind of lesson learned about those. And I think the through line for all of them, I would say, is still the maxim that we have in Treillon, which is we're customer obsessed but competitor aware. So I think it's a little bit different. I think some companies are like, I don't know, Uber, for example, I think was notorious competitor obsess. And they tried to delay customers when they could. I think Hip Chat, I don't think Slack sought out to kill Hip Chat at Foursquare we used, I think it was called Campfire back in the day. I think it was 37 signals people. So there was a whole generation of those products. And I think Slack came along and I think they had a couple of innovations. One was they had a great mobile experience that synced across every client search actually worked. And then they brought a lot of the best parts of like consumer messaging into the workplace, like emoji and reactions and all those bits. And I think it turns out that, you know, if your 10x better...”
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
“To the last bit beyond kind of the principles and the complaint storms and the customer loves is that we have this amazing team that we call the CE team, a customer experience team. And they're kind of in some ways the team that is doing our scale support, but is most often in touch with our customers. And from the very early days, people used to do CE shifts if you worked in products so that you can actually figure out what's frustrating, what's confusing. And we have a really great kind of pipeline for getting the insights from the CE team of what are the obstacles, the pain points that most frequent complaints into the hands of the product teams to be able to prioritize to figure out, yeah, not all these are going to move a given metric. They might not achieve something for the business, but collectively, I think the way that Slack thinks about competition is we obsess it up customers. We build something they'll love enough to tell their coworkers, and the rest kind of take care of itself.”
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
“I would say it's a little bit the DNA of the company, honestly, which is that four co-founders were trying to build a massive online role-playing game for many years that was called Glitch. And their kind of background was all in building delightful, playful experiences. Glitch didn't work out, but there's a whole long back story. But the short version is a tool that built internally that they then wound up spitting out a company from, which became Slack. I think that DNA, we're trying to build a consumer great experience that just happens to be for work is really right on the company. It's also a big part of how we hire, I would say certainly the majority of PMs, designers, and engineers who join Slack had never worked at enterprise software company before. It's not like most people had worked at Oracle or SAP. It's most people had worked at consumer companies or game companies. And so they bring that focus in the spirit.”
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
“I would think teams that work on a very user facing products do it at least once a quarter. So I think other teams that work on maybe less user-facing might do it maybe twice a year. But quarterly is a pretty healthy cadence.”
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
“No, I mean, I think more broadly, I think the way that we think about or I like us to think about our roadmap An interesting way team to figure out how to get this on the roadmap is it's hard to allocate that work throughout the quarter. So what we wind up doing often is have a team do a truly customer love sprint, almost like a hackathon, but with that kind of burn down list of what we think is the lowest effort, highest impact changes that we can make to generate more love from our customers and whatever that feature area is, and then people just sprint for two weeks, design, product engineering, and then you have a bunch of things that you celebrate at the end. And the goal is to ship all of them. So this isn't like hacks that you throw away. So that's kind of how we end up prioritizing it off and that kind of work is actually kind of making it this really fun total change of pace throughout the quarter to not do big feature work that may take months, but to do all a small delightful things that you know customers are going to love at the end. So that's the other way that we kind of figure out how to balance it in.”
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
“Exactly. Yeah, I've heard that from Shrek too. I think Gits is a similar place. And I think the byproducts is that you also get calibration on product pace, product quality. And as a team, you kind of develop that together. Again, similar to the principles, it's like, how do you get these things that are kind of hard to actually feel collectively on the same page about and how do you calibrate? It's another good way to do 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
“To look at your own baby in a way that is, okay, I'm trying to find all the wards. I'm trying to find all the problems. But that's wind up being a pretty great source whenever a team, I think, either gets stuck or feels like they reach a dead end in a direction is doing complaints terms about the product area that they're in or using adjacent products just to get inspiration. And then I think it kind of unlocks a lot more kind of creative views on the problem space.”
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
“Authent Stewart for myself would also join. And we'd actually start off with other products first, like an adjacent spaces. And we'd say, okay, as a group, we're going to go through the customer journey from the moment you land on a website through, let's say it's a workplace product, getting your first account going, getting the first couple of users on board, getting to the point of value. And we're going to do it on one screen. Someone's going to project. And then people are going to fill in every issue, everything that's confusing every pain point, not bugs, but ways in which if you care about the software, you don't work on it, what would actually confuse you? What would stop you in your tracks? And from that, you wind up generating a bunch of amazing inspiration by looking at someone else's product in a really critical way for things you might want to try in your own product. Once you get to that, then it becomes easier to actually do with your own software. But it is a little painful, obviously. Same with watching usability tests.”
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
“Something that started, I want to say back in 2019, maybe early 2020. And the idea a little bit was how do we help as a team look at the software that we build with Fresh Eyes? Because we've been set at Slack for a long time. And Slack, many more than almost any other company, maybe like Figma is probably similar as listening to the podcast just earlier today, where if you work on Figma, you work on Slack, you also live in Slack and you live in Figma all day. So you can become more of a power user than anyone else on Earth. And what we were realizing, especially for people trying to build Slack for the next million customers, the people who have never used Slack before, it was becoming increasingly hard to kind of have empathy for what their usage of Slack would look like. How would they look at it in a more critical way? How would they care less than we cared? And so what we started doing with these complaint storms. And the idea was really simple, which is we get a team together.”
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
“Know more of the shape of what the technology is capable of. We'll just have AI capabilities as part of their roadmaps, just like every product team is responsible for their own mobile roadmap. They don't outsource it to someone else. But I think today when things are moving so quickly, you actually want a little bit of a more kind of ad hoc, flexible approach to move quickly. And that's what we're doing.”
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
“Me, the unfair answer is a hybrid of the two, which is to say we have a kind of central machine learning and search team, where there's a lot of people who have expertise in this field to build infrastructure that everybody can use. And what we've done is because space is evolving so quickly, like literally every month, like the capabilities are evolving, the risks and trade-offs are evolving a ton. What we want to do is actually kind of spin up a couple different teams that are focused on prototyping using that common infrastructure, but in specific directions that are all a little bit different. So we've got a common ML, let's say search team, and now we have a bunch of teams that are kind of working in parallel in different kind of customer problems that we're trying to solve using that shared infrastructure. So I think this isn't the steady state. I think over time what it'll probably look like is that all the existing product areas as soon as we kind of”
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
“Right, yeah. I think I love that our version of that has always been that you open up Slack and suddenly instead of having to read through dozens of channels or find all these mentions that magically Slack could just tell you in the order that you would care about kind of a summary of all the interesting things that have happened and then let you dig in if you want to, like your very own kind of like personal chief of staff who knew everything that you cared about and read everything that you could read. I don't think that's going to quite be possible anytime soon, but I think like Spotify heading towards that North Star, you wind up developing, I hope a lot of really compelling projects, for instance, along the way.”
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
“I can safely say we have a lot of prototypes internally where we are playing this. And I think it's actually funny as an aside. And one of the original Slack. The idea is we didn't even know what the state of AI would be by the time hopefully companies had their collective knowledge in Slack. And now we're finally at the period where the magic AI stuff seems finally pretty amazing, pretty magical. So yeah, we're doing a lot of prototyping internally and also trying to work with the ecosystem around as well because there's so many companies doing amazing work in this space so that if you work at a company where you have so much knowledge and you're kind of Slack channel repository that you can suddenly get amazing leaps in productivity to help you better do your job because Sen knowledge is in Slack, but it's sometimes hard to reach. And I think these technologies can make that possible.”
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
“And I think that's going to be something that people are going to have to work on a lot, which is to figure out how to be not so faultless, to acknowledge when you're not sure, because otherwise it undermines the trust people have in the system, using a lot of transparency about where the data comes from so people can actually build credibility in the tools is really important. And then I think making sure that as you're designing the products that you have virtuous cycles that are naturally part of the product experience where you can get training data as a byproduct of people naturally using the software and then can make the model that you're building behind the scenes smarter, more accurate, more predictive. So a class example of that would be Netflix back in the day of their rating system. They actually had a feedback loop from their customers to then make the system better at predicting. I think people are still trying to figure out what does that look like in this world of LLMs.”
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
“Have natural language generation where suddenly a computer can talk back to you in a way that feels extremely human. And then the creative applications of that are pretty massive and exciting. So that's kind of, I guess, the lineage there. I think from over the years back at Google, at Foursquare, we did a lot of personalization and recommendations at Slack. We have search and ML, the tone and fuse to have the product. I think a couple things come out as kind of, I guess, the principles that we've kind of used over the years. Back then, I think one of the big ones was that the promise of the UI has to match the quality of that underlying data, which is to say, and I think this is actually one of the failings of the various LMs right now, is they all appear supremely confident, even when they're completely hallucinating.”
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
“I mean, it's almost 15 years ago now that I was working at Google in Search later became called the Knowledge Graph. So this idea of building kind of a canonical repository of information, people, places, things in the world, and relationships between them. And back then, it was a lot of the same idea as obviously the techniques I've got a lot more mature. So we used natural language processing to extract all this information from the web and try to build this kind of database of facts. The idea then was, could you take queries? People have like, what are the tallest fountains in Europe? Or what are the most popular beaches in Southern California and be able to actually give answers, not just Templu links? I think the thing that really changed and super exciting in the last six, 12 months with LLMs and chat GPT and everything else is the idea that now you can take not just knowledge about the world, but actually”
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
“Often be okay, you'll often have optimization experimentation circles like, oh, every click, remove it. But I actually think in a lot of software when it's not transactional, helping people understand what they're doing, giving them confidence, helping them have trust in the steps. We've seen that that can actually be a better experience. So that's another example of don't make it stressful. Help people chill out when they're using the software. That's the idea behind that 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
“There's a famous user design book called Don't Make Me Think, which we sold the title of for our next principle. And that's really just about as people building the software, you know how it works so well. You care about all the nuances and intricacies. And you really want your users to love it as much as you do. But often actually that kind of owner's delusion that someone else will care as much about the software that you built as you do prevents you from actually making something that's simple, comprehensible, understandable. And so one of the core tenets because Slack is pretty complex under the surface is how do we actually make people not have to think? How do we not reinvent the wheel if there's existing design patterns to use? How do we actually wind up designing for people who come from many different backgrounds and we kind of cater to their needs in ways that don't make them have to customize it too much? There's a saying we also have which is more clicks can”
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
“Right. So maybe we borrowed that or someone was inspired by it, but be a great host, sound and aspirational. I love 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
“I mean, Slack, I think, is where we kind of enshrine them much more because we scaled it org so much more that we needed principles. And I think for us, they were really about unpacking just the mission, which for Slack is making people's working lives simpler, more pleasant, more productive. That's the mission of the company. The question is, how does software help do that? That's what the principles are there to answer. For us, we've got five core principles. They've largely stayed the same, some of the language has changed over the last couple years, but at least for the last four or five years, we've had these. So the first is be a great post, which is all about kind of that level of craft, the reluctance of saving people's steps. If you're, let's say, in a host in an Airbnb, it's like putting clean towels on the bed. So no one has to wonder, are these for me? That type of foresight.”
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
“Doesn't just feel like the team says we want to ship. And the founder says, no, it's not ready. Ideally, as a group, you're saying we want to get it to a bar that's going to light our users. And here's the gap from where we are today to what we want to ship. I think that mentality winds up being a lot more constructive, but that's not always easy to do.”
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
“Yeah, I mean, I think that does happen. The UShip And I think what's important there is that hopefully you're refining in code and you're not still at static design mocks because using the software is so different than looking at what the software will visually appear. And so I think what we would wind up doing with Stuart at Slack, for example, is like we would get the entire development team, engineers, design, product, user research, and steward together in a room. And we kind of almost do like a bug bash together. And the idea was like, we're doing all together. We're trying to make the best product possible, making great software really messy. And we're all trying to kind of clean up the mess together. You know, sometimes you might find things like, okay, this entry point really isn't working. Maybe we have to move this entry point. That's maybe a bigger change. But I think often what you'd find is just all those bits of polish and refinement and doing the little delightful things that might otherwise be missing to kind of raise that craft bar and doing a real collective way.”
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
“And then I think at the very end, you want them to really be bought in. That did you build something that's up to the quality of our company? Is this something that's going to like customers, like literally taste the soup? What's missing in it? And I think at most companies that have a maniacally kind of customer focused founder, if you don't do that last step, it's going to be much more painful after you launch because they weren't part of that co-creation of the team. And so I think that kind of formula winds up working pretty well if you throw into that kind of alignment principles and vision.”
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
“And I think it's actually great to say, okay, the overall vision for the company is it the responsibility of any one team to have everyone buy into that vision, but then to have space for teams to be able to actually do creative work, do explorations, because you know that it's aligned with that high level vision. So if you can get that alignment and you can get those principles as the common language of what great software looks like, I think you can have a really good working relationship. And then the other bit I would just say is I think when to involve the founder CEO in a project is really important. And the short version, I think that works the best is almost like a U curve where the x-axis is time and the y-axis is level of involvement. I think you want to get the founders, you know, really evolved early on, especially if it's a big new project to make sure that there's strategic buy-in, whether you agree on the principles for how you're going to approach it, on the goals and the anti-goals, getting that to them the team can run and explore.”
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
“So that everybody else can start thinking through a similar frame or a similar lens when you're designing a product. Because otherwise it can feel a little bit kind of Goldilocks every time a team builds something, they take it to the CO's like, no, not quite right again. No, not exactly that. And then you don't have the language to actually have a more constructive review. And then doing that at the little strategy as well. I think the product found or CEO is always going to be the holder of the vision for the company. I'm sure at Airbnb. I imagine Brian was very much like that as 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
“Kind of say to folks in general, if you're joining a company and the CEO does the role that is your functional area of expertise, it's probably the area where you'll learn the most because they're hopefully world-class edit, but also when you'll be the most frustrated at times because you're going to feel like you have less agency. And so you should just know that going to it. If you go to a company that's run by a former marketer and you're in marketing, they'll probably want to have a lot of save influence over that. And I think just going into knowing that is good. You know, looking back, I would say probably two main things stand out of what's really worked with both Dennis and Stuart, not just for me, but I think for the teams that kind of work with them as well. The first is, I think as much as possible, I think maybe we'll talk about this a little bit later as well is kind of getting to the point where you have alignment on the principles for what it means to build a great product at that company. Not just about if the intuition and tasting gut, but how do you distill that into principles that become the language of the 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
“Yeah, and I think the feedback signal you get from are people willing to pay for the product that you're building is so much faster than can I build a large scale consumer business and one day hope to have enough reach to then slap ads onto it. That's a much more of a kind of try to hit a home run and hope it works out. But you don't really know if you're doing it along the way. So yeah, I think B2B is easier to have a more incremental, successfully business than pure consumer.”
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
“And getting tips when you go to a place and all the push notifications. But I think there, again, it was kind of hard to stay ahead. I think specifically of Google because they had a billion plus Google Maps users distributed on Android and iOS. And even though they might only take a couple of years, eventually they would wind up replicating a lot of the functionality. And then I think it was hard to regain that momentum. So much of this stuff is luck and timing and just coincidences of history. I think there was a path. I think in the end we kind of lost our social sales and then Google was able to catch up on the utility side. And now the company's built a really valuable kind of B2B API company, which offers a story. I mean, Slack is in some ways a pivot, obviously, from a consumer company to a B2B company. But yeah, that's my mini post-mortem. What could have been?”
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
“It's tricky. I mean, I'm not going to do like 30 minute post mortem because I'd probably bore everyone, but I thought about this, we've all thought about this a lot kind of on the early team there. I think the biggest probably lesson learned, frankly, is that we were really close with Instagram folks early on. They were like big developers on our platform. They used the Force group API before they were bought by Facebook. And I think in hindsight, we were a little bit mistaken to believe that the idea that the atomic unit would be a person talking about a place that they're at. And you have to have a physical place to tie it to versus a person sharing a moment or an experience that they're having in the world. And sometimes that might have a place connected to it. I think that one change in framer and what you would say like the customer actually wanted to do, that probably was the thing that took us away on the social side. I think on the more kind of local discovery side, it's actually what people want to be using the product much more for over time, getting kind of personalized.”
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
“Thank you for being a I have more lessons learned and more scar tissue from the crazy up and down of, I don't know what it was, 2010 to 2015 roughly. And I think there's something actually where you learn more from the things that don't fully work out or don't quite achieve what you want it to achieve. And you actually have a feedback loop where you get a lot of negative signal about like, okay, that didn't work. That didn't work. What can I actually learn take away from that? It's still great. I still love using Foursquare. I think we got caught in the Death Star Instagram's ascent back in 2012, 2013. But I hope a product like that exists forever in the future. And I'm glad you got to build a company and landed Airbnb through it to Grid Story.”
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
“This is from a good friend is like you got to fully get into it as a parent. There's nothing that replaces actually you got to change the diapers. You got to do the feeds. When they're up, even though they can't talk, you got to talk to them. You got to like listen to what they're saying and just be fully kind of present in the moment. I kind of realized for myself and then like basically a full digital detox, you saw how long it took for me to reply to your emails. I was like, put all the devices away, just kind of be fully with our daughter Willow and our family. And I feel like it was so much more rewarding. I felt really connected with her now after just a couple months. So it's a crazy time. You're going to love it. It's going to drive you mad at times as well. And that's all okay.”
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
“Here are the three my wife and I wound up coming up with like three maxims that we want to be using throughout the first two months to keep ourselves grounded. So first one, I would say a little bit better every day, no matter how many books you read and how much Emily Oster you consume. There's nothing like actually doing it. And it's a physical thing being a new parent. And so getting a little bit better every day, giving yourself permission to be like, that didn't go great and that's okay. That's number one. Number two, don't overextrapolate from the early days. The fourth trimester is a real thing. These babies come out. They are not fully baked. They can't even support their own heads. So if you try to trap it, you think the next 18 years are going to be like the first 18 days, it's going to be sobering. So like keep that perspective, it gets, they develop so much every week with part of the fun. And then the third thing, which I got advice from you.”
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
“So, first off, I mean, obviously, congratulations. You're about to go on. Roller coaster of emotion, sleep, and everything else. You know, I literally went back to work two days ago. So I think my advice about being a new parent is better than my advice about being a PM right now.”
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
“We have this mental metaphor that we talk a lot about getting to the next hill, the actual wording is take bigger, boulder bets. I think teams can often get lost crawling up that hill, not realizing that there's a huge, incredibly beautiful range behind it. Over time created kind of new teams from scratch that YouTube made in a new area before the area is mature. So we did that with a lot of these kind of native audiovisual products like huddles and clips early in the pandemic because our customers were demanding it from us. And I think in the AI space, we're trying to hear from customers, what do you wish Slack could do if it had these new superpowers? And let's incubate a couple teams, a prototype, give them space to run and pilot and then get something to launch that's amazing as people away. That's kind of the formula that we've seen.”
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