SaaStr 411: Slack Chief Product Officer Tamar Yehoshua on Effective Product Design, Customer Development Processes and Evolving Management Philosophies

Tamar Yehoshua is the Chief Product Officer @ Slack, the company providing a place where people get work done, together. Prior to their direct listing in June 2019, Slack raised over $1.3Bn from the likes of Accel, Thrive, Softbank, Kleiner, IVP, T Rowe, GV, and a16z to name a few. As for Tamar, previously, Tamar was a Vice President at Google, holding product and engineering leadership roles on Google’s most important products, including Search, Identity, and Privacy. Prior to that, she was the Vice President of Advertising Technologies at Amazon’s A9. If that was not enough Tamar is also on the board of 2 public companies in the form of Yext and ServiceNow.

 In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

• How Tamar made her way from Google and Amazon into the world of bottoms up SaaS with one of the leading companies of our generation, Slack?
• What were Tamar’s biggest takeaways from her time with Amazon and Google? How did Jeff Bezos’ approach to “the customer” impact Tamar’s operating mindset? How does Tamar analyse customer responses to product changes? How important a role does the press play in customer’s responses? 
• How does Tamar think about effective product design today? How does Tamar structure the customer development process? What questions does she ask? What is she looking for? Where do many people go wrong with customer discovery? What channels can teams put in place to have this real-time dialogue with their customers?        
• How would Tamar describe her management philosophy today? What have been some of Tamar’s biggest lessons on giving effective feedback? How should it be structured? When should it be given? To what extent does Tamar agree with “radical candour”? Where do many go wrong in giving their feedback?

Tamar’s 60 Second SaaStr:

1. The most challenging element of Tamar’s role with Slack?
2. What would Tamar most like to change about the SaaS industry?
3. What moment in Tamar’s life has served as an inflection point and changed the way she thinks? 

Read the full transcript on our blog: https://www.saastr.com/saastr-podcast-411-with-slack-chief-product-officer-tamar-yehoshua/

 

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Jason Lemkin

Harry Stebbings

SaaStr