In Depth
Lessons from Slack on decision making, product-led growth, and taking big swings — Noah Desai Weiss
Episode guests
Podcast summary created with Snipd AI
Quick takeaways
- Breaking down daunting challenges into smaller milestones allows teams to gain visibility and adjust their course along the way, compounding their successes over time.
- While data has its place in decision-making, intuition, product sensibility, and understanding the market are crucial for making bigger, riskier decisions.
- Developing product taste and intuition through hands-on experience and exposure to great products, alongside working with experienced professionals, is essential for honing those skills.
Deep dives
Getting to the Next Hill and Decomposing Bets
To make daunting challenges less scary, the podcast discusses the importance of breaking them down into smaller milestones. By focusing on getting to the next hill, teams can gradually gain more visibility and adjust their course along the way. Decomposing a long-term bet into smaller, incrementally provable steps allows teams to take more vigorous swings and compound their successes over time.
Balancing Data-Driven and Intuition-Based Decisions
The podcast explores the common misconception that every decision must be solely data-driven. It emphasizes the importance of intuition, product sensibility, and understanding the market when making bigger, riskier decisions. While data can play a role in solving easy problems and making incremental changes, it may not be sufficient for the more complex decisions that require strategic thinking, market understanding, and a sense of where the industry is heading.
Developing Product Taste and Intuition
The podcast highlights the importance of developing product taste and intuition through hands-on experience and exposure to great products. It suggests working with people who have strong product sensibility and being part of the process of creating great products repeatedly in diverse problem spaces. While these skills can be taught over time, they require repetition, getting hands dirty, and working alongside experienced product professionals.
Building Trust, Alignment, and Team Vibe
The podcast emphasizes the significance of trust, alignment, and team dynamic in driving effective decision-making and productivity. It mentions the importance of inclusion, enthusiasm, and cooperation among team members. By fostering an environment of trust and openness, teams can engage in healthy conflicts, make bolder decisions, and maintain a positive team vibe. Regular communication, shared context, and repetitive reinforcement of goals and strategies help strengthen alignment within the team.
Balancing localized teams and taking transformative swings
Finding the balance between having localized teams focused on specific features and KPIs, and taking big swings that can be transformative for the business is crucial for success. Encouraging teams to take bigger, bolder bets and diversifying the portfolio of projects can help mitigate the risks associated with these swings.
Lessons learned in growing an enterprise-grade organization
Slack initially had a product-led approach and undervalued the role of sales and customer success. However, as the company scaled, they realized the importance of building an enterprise-grade organization. They began to focus on addressing the needs of larger enterprises, including security, administration, and compliance. However, they also had to balance this with maintaining product momentum and innovation. The key was to find the right timing, align the organization on goals and strategy, and ensure a strong alignment between the product founder CEO and the product teams.
Noah Desai Weiss is the Chief Product Officer of Slack, and has an accomplished track record inside and outside of the company. He started Slack’s Search, Learning, and Intelligence division, led the Self-Service (SMB) Business, and led the Expansion and Virtual HQ product areas (responsible for Huddles, Clips, and more). Before joining Slack, Noah was the SVP of Product Management at Foursquare (raised over $390m), and was a Product Manager at Google.
In today's episode, we discuss:
- When to use intuition vs data to drive decisions
- The most underrated traits in a remote work environment
- How Slack runs product reviews
- The importance of a team’s “vibe”
- Managing pace vs accuracy in decision-making
- Balancing "big swings" with incremental improvements
- Advice on product-led vs sales-led growth
Curious to learn more about Slack? You can try Slack Pro and get 50% off using this link.
Referenced:
Creative Selection - Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs: https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Selection-Inside-Apples-Process/dp/1250194466
Salesforce acquires Slack: https://slack.com/blog/news/salesforce-completes-acquisition-of-slack
Thinking in Bets - Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts: https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Bets-Making-Smarter-Decisions-ebook/dp/B074DG9LQF
Where to find Noah Weiss:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/noah_weiss
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahw/
Where to find Brett Berson:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/brettberson
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/
Timestamps:
[2:46] Not all decisions should be data-driven
[3:46] When to use data vs intuition to drive decisions
[9:15] Taste and judgment are learnable
[11:47] How Slack scales intuition across their product org
[14:58] Challenges of intuition-led product building
[16:43] Matching people to data vs intuition-driven work
[19:19] underrated qualities for remote workers
[21:34] What's special about Slack's approach to product?
[23:33] Which products should focus on end-users versus executives
[26:38] What Slack learns from Salesforce
[31:44] Pricing lessons from Salesforce and Marc Andreessen
[34:10] How Slack runs product reviews
[37:02] What creates good vibes in a product team
[40:17] Managing pace vs accuracy in decision-making
[46:29] Rituals for good decision-making
[50:20] Balancing "big swings" with incremental improvements
[55:30] Slack's biggest philosophy change
[60:05] Slack's humility and why it matters
[61:43] Advice for thinking about product-led vs sales-led growth
[01:08:14] How to build product with a product-focussed founder
[01:12:46] People who made an outsized impact on Noah's career
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