An Interview with Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield

hey welcome everyone to another session of experience week this is super exciting because we're talking about product experience today I'm Ryan Smith co-founder and CEO of Qualtrics and I have the pleasure of sitting down with Stewart Butterfield founder and CEO of slack how are you Stewart I'm well thank you first before we get started Stewart talk let's talk about where slack came from how you came up with the idea this isn't your first rodeo you created a well-known product called Flickr mm-hmm very few entrepreneurs can do it once let alone twice so if you just take us through the origin of you know Flickr and then and then slack and and why we're here all right well so the bad news is that they're close to impossible to replicate both are kind of pivots from failed massively multiplayer games so it's kind of thing I think if you start off with the intent to build a failed massively multiplayer game you may not end up with a product like this but there's something common to both of those failed games Flickr and slock and that comes from an experience I had 25 years ago so it's 1992 it's my first year college one of the things we had to do is go down to the basement computer lab in the Claire hue building at the University of Utah RIA and get our accounts on the school's UNIX machine so I got that and there's a couple years before the web or maybe a year and a half before the web really took off so the things on the internet were using a talk IRC email and it could use email to talk to two friends who had gone off to different colleges but using that kind of just blew my mind this directory of news group topics kind of like a bulletin board and this was like 90% of the traffic on the internet in the days before the web in fact rock music G dead or the Grateful Dead discussion group was like the Netflix of its time was like 40% of Internet traffic and the thing that was so exciting to me was the use of computing technology to facilitate human interaction which was kind of really brand-new that you could transcend geography that you could could you know transcend the the way in which you grew up and find these people who could be in different time zones on different continents but shared the same interests as you so may not seem connected but over the next couple years when the webs came to prominence I taught myself HTML I got a job as a web designer in the first days of blogging I was really avid you know maybe from 99 through 2002 or something like that and all this early online community the kind of birth of social software you know now we're at the point where everyone has these fancy phones in their pocket you can communicate with anyone on the surface of the planet literally at the speed of light and what are we gonna do with that technology so we as a again as a species kind of stumbling our way trying different things experimenting I think we're still in the really early stages so when I say we wanted to try and make a game I think what people think is that you or like a guy with the sword fighting a dragon or something like that this was much more taking those early virtual communities and putting them into the context to play really collaborative a lot of social interaction one world that was shared and the point of the game was gonna have to evolve the world there's a book by the theologian James course called finite and infinite games and the first line of the book at them paraphrasing a little bit but there are two kinds of games one is played for the purpose of winning those are finite games and then infinite game is which are played for the purpose of continuing the play so that was really our inspiration turns out a little bit hard to explain a little bit lofty not super commercially viable so especially in 2002 which is when we started the first company sure you know you remember this time he had the dot-com crash we had WorldCom and Enron the big accounting scandals 9/11 it was just like a disaster moment kind of black economy the Nasdaq had fallen eighty percent from its peak and no one wanted to fund anything on the Internet at all but especially not something whimsical like a game and we looked for something that week get to market quicker because the game was really complex and ambitious but that would take advantage of the technology we'd already developed that turned out to be Flickr and it's kind of a whole story there which we can gloss over got bought by Yahoo in 2005 myself and the whole team went to go work there and then 2009 beginning of the year I was out and three of those original Flickr team members still yeah all decided to leave and to start a new company to build a web-based massively multiplayer game this time we couldn't fail technology had advanced servers were really cheap compared to 2002 way more people online we were all better what we did there's all this great open-source software the network had spread you know from a couple people having dial-up at home dan more or less Vic witness broadband and failed again but we spent three and a half years on it and we had a really discipline across disciplinary team we had created people artists animators writers musicians and the one hand and then we had more traditional software development team back-end programming technical operations we had customer support business operations and we used one of those technologies that I first discovered back in 1992 IRC or Internet Relay Chat as the foundation for how we communicated at the company and IRC has this one fundamental concept called a channel and you send messages to the channel rather than to individuals or to groups of individuals as you do an email or most messaging systems and that's look it's a fundamental shift because the channel can exist before you arrive and it consists after you leave you can look into other channels across the system when you join the organization you know whether it's the next day or six months later or five years later all of that stuff is archived and not in all these different channels and we slowly over the course years built feature after feature solve the really irritating problems took advantage of the obvious opportunities and so fast forward now to 2012 and to the year it was apparent that the game wasn't gonna work like it just wasn't gonna be viable again it was never gonna be the kind of business they were just the 17 million bucks in venture capital investment we had raised but we all realized we would never work without a system like this one again and so thought that it might be something that the rest of the world would want and I still remember going to andreessen horowitz one of our investors and telling them this is what we're going to do and saying you know we think that there's a big market for this we think over the next 10 years that kind of at the fullness of time this could be a hundred million dollars in revenue and this could be a billion-dollar company and I'm sure they remember this different labor like whatever and we blew past that a couple years after launching so the demand has been much bigger than we would have thought and I think we've sort of accidentally discovered something that is theirs for which there's a lot of latent demand yeah it's really cool it's a fascinating story and I think it's one that a lot of people can can relate to just from how something great comes out of a pivot mm-hmm but I also think it takes a lot of a lot of guts and kind of willpower to be able to do that if you think about where slack is today what's what's most exciting from you know just for our audience to see the size and you know how do you Eddy yes so there are over six million daily active users nine million on a weekly basis little more than half 55% of those are outside of the US there is 50,000 paid teams around the world you have millions of people paying for it but when we say daily active users mean like you know people are logging in there every day because it's the kind of app that you you can't just check in on you know once in a while if you're not using it every day you're not really using it and when we think about the future obviously there's just more like there are hundreds of millions of people around the world who fall into the kind of sweet spot of knowledge work and they could be you know speaking English or some other language they could work in IT or legal or recruiting or finance or attack marketing and we barely scratch the surface there you know we're like over a couple percent of the way in and then the second thing it's not tends to replace the usage of email for internal communication it definitely doesn't that's not an email killer it doesn't get rid of email across organizational boundaries but when people hear that I think what comes to mind is you type some text into a box you hit the button and against sent over the internet and someone else can look at it but that's not all we use email for like email is this system of record it starts to do list it's the fundamental kind of security passport you can use to reset your password ever else it's the way you get receipts for all your transactions you take a ride and I left for you by Simon Amazon that's where your seat shows up it's friends and family it's invitations to events its unwelcome pitches from salespeople it's welcome pitches from salespeople it's newsletters you subscribe to marketing messages spam but inside a company really specifically it's the way all decisions get made it's like a way the job offer gets approved the budget is debated on setting direction for the company all the formal announcements you know we just hired a new executive or we bought a company or we're shutting down this division or whatever and all of that stuff move just lock including all of the credit column workflows you know which can be things as mundane as approving expense reports or putting in a ticket to IT for support because your laptops messed up all the way up to approving the contract for your biggest customer ever yeah I think look we've definitely seen that Aquatics where you know it's it's prevalent throughout all our organizations especially in engineering is we is we is we shift a little bit and talk about product itself mm-hmm you've had a lot of iterations I think the virality or the viral component of slack's been super impressive to a lot of people when you when you think about creative and product and you think about hiring how do you how do you actually think about those together I just came in on the on the wall I saw empathy and creative how does that all play out I've heard you talk about it before there's some same from Charles Eames architect and designer that the role of designer is that of a good host that way of thinking that the other people using your product are your guests is putting a very different mindset then you're like this creative genius in what you're doing is super important and the world just doesn't understand you and people should appreciate this because we've really just a 180 degree different attitude when we evaluate our own stuff versus when we use other people's software or experience other people's products it's not this thing where when you go to a restaurant website if you're anything like me you want the phone number the address the opening times or the menu and nothing else matters and yet no one makes restaurant websites that prioritize that stuff it's like this stupid music starts playing and there's like a slow Ken Burns pan over some pasta or whatever and you have to wait for that it to be done no one wants that experience for themselves and yet they feel like other people are gonna want it and that's a kind of the most exaggerated example I can find but we really tried to put ourselves in the position of our customers and you tried to hurt and techniques for that one that I'm not sure if it's truly effective or not but I've tried a lot with people is just try to imagine someone's heard about slack a couple times maybe they saw tweet about it I saw an ad that we put up and then someone recommended again it's the end of their day it's 9:00 p.m. they just put the kids to bed they're watching TV they lay back they go to the App Store and they install our app and we're just like not even in the top 1000 most important things in their lives you know like they have all these other concerns ambitions issues and we don't want to create an experience that is anything less than the most respectful it could be of their time imagine if you were designing this for yourself you don't care about the company at all just purely selfishly how would this work you know how would you be on board into the app how would the administrative features work how would you invite people how would you install applications into slack from our app directory it's a tough one for you know for whatever reason a lot of people have been trained up on techniques for like value extraction from customers as opposed to value creation for customers and you know our business and we want to make money but I really admire under cadet Leeson survivorship bias here but companies like Amazon where you're like we had 20-plus year focus um they're now twenty something years old they started making money a couple years ago and up to that point it was just creation of value and they're still relentlessly focused on how fast can the delivery happen how fast can the pages load how fast can an accurate can the search results be and those fundamentals are really critical and it's harder and harder to ensure that our focus remains on those as we get bigger and as we get more customers you get more demand some customers and more feature requests more input of just of all kinds and we almost as a point of religion try to keep ourselves as open to feedback as possible so expose as much of the company to like surface area of customers as we can so I don't know like I have no one magic trick there except for again focus you know that experience and imagining that this person using the software's is our guest they are more important than us we're trying to be of service to them and if we can truly create value there'll be plenty of opportunities for us to capture some of that down the road so most most people probably watching this are either with a really small company where it's really easy to be involved in all the details we've actually had this conversation before I remember a couple years ago you and I were talking about being involved in all the details on the product side but you just mentioned Amazon where as you get bigger and the challenges that we've gone through that you've gone through of scaling how do you make sure that you don't have product drift right or something that something that ends up different than you thought I don't think many people set out and say hey we want to build a product with a horrible experience but here we are surrounded by products that have a horrible experience so what's a couple tips that you have for creating that and maintaining that focus I think it's really remembering how much deliberate effort it takes and that can like literally be putting things on the wall so you saw some of these in there's a wall here but you know it's checklist techniques it's like here's the mantra where you repeat at the beginning of the meetings weekly or whatever it is to keep that foreground because when new people started slack I tell them the story I'm in Vancouver we have an office there I meet with our creative director for product design revenue one and one we're in this neighborhood in Vancouver where the sidewalks are really narrow and there's a lot of vendors have sandwich boards out on the sidewalk so you kind of got to go like this when you're walking down and it starts to rain and we don't have umbrellas but and most other people do maybe three-quarters or something like that and when people are walking towards us we noticed that very few of them move their umbrellas out of the way seems like the pokey thing was right like I level when we're walking down the street and we'd even have a joke we're talking about it and we're trying to predict like the next person would they move it out of the way or not and they didn't so one explanation and this is not the correct explanation because you should not attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance so one explanation is like if you don't have any avenues to exercise power in their life and so they're just like I'm gonna make you get out the way of my umbrella that's probably not you but what explanations remain so like one is they just don't notice they're walking down the street and despite the fact that they would inevitably live in a city like Vancouver have had this experience since allergy for where they didn't have the umbrella and someone else did they just don't see it or they see it and they're like I can't I don't know what I could do about this it's too bad but that's happening and that that person has to get out of the way of my umbrella but I'm you know I don't have any theories about what I could do to make that situation better when it's really look there's two options one is this you know like a hundredth of a calorie worth of effort in one little tiny muscle in your wrist and the other one is this but those two things will get the umbrella out of the way and I don't like thinking about the world this way because it's a little bit of a pessimistic view but most people didn't move their umbrellas other way so most people just don't see the problems or if they see the problems they don't see a solution to the problems and it's not like there's one class of humans who are geniuses and we'll see it every time and there's a bunch of morons and we want to make sure we only hire the geniuses we all have that tendency we all have that continuum we all have a focus on ourselves and our own priorities and our own needs when you mentioned something earlier around and it seems like there's a repetitiveness that has to go on to educate everyone around you know what we're focused on and kind of the the principles of great product great design you mentioned being a host mm-hmm right what what makes a good host in your mind if you're if you're hosting the product and you you actually view it as you're a steward over that experience what what makes that I mean I think it's it's pretty simple it eludes me not getting the result is simple but the the orientation is pretty simple which is thoughtfulness anticipating needs you one of my favorite examples of literally being a hostess if you have someone come in to stay at your house and some guests then you have a guestroom take the towels that you want them to use and put them on the bed yeah nicely folded so when they come in they're like oh I should use those towels rather than right into the bathroom and we like there's a whole bunch of towels in here I'm not sure which ones I'm supposed to use and it might sound like a stupid example but again it's incredibly little effort and it anticipates that need and anyone who has ever been to a good restaurant and not necessarily like a fancy expensive restaurant but just one where it is well Ron it can be a little family joint there's this thoughtfulness that goes into greeting you at the door how you get to the table you know there's a very big difference between the abrupt please wait to be seated and then kind of like a mean host or hostess and the kind of welcoming and a huge amount of thoughtfulness that goes into the presentation on the menu like there's a lot of places that use light gray text on white paper that's tiny and then it's dark in the restaurant and you see people to pull out their phones don't him you see someone pulled their phone in a restaurant like there was a failure of thoughtfulness on the part of the restaurateur but also the noise levels how responsive the the servers are like there's a screen experience where you never feel like you're being pestered and yet anytime you want something there right there lucky now if you're what your waters empty they're there refilling it when you're ready to have the plates taken away they're taken away when you're ready for the bill the bill just magically shows up no those require like you know a $500 tasting menu at a three-star Michelin restaurant so it's a lot of the same things for us so we will produce it and and you know I'm absolutely myself had in the guilty of this I spent decades as a designer for a living of this looks cool when I like step back and look at it but boy that tax is actually super hard to read you know like there's like important explanatory tax that's right underneath it or there's an example recently just from slack so when you create a channel the channel name and this is changing soon but for now anyway it has to be lowercase letters we had a field in the iOS app that capitalized the first letter of your word so we would you would type a lowercase letter we would capitalize it you could finish typing the thing you would hit enter and then we tell you uh-uh no uppercase letter is allowed and that's like it's just such an incredible example of not something that anyone would have prioritized and the creation of this dialog boxing like we've got a requirement we're going to work on this future it's that kind of oversight so a lot of it is just running through the experience yourself and really again putting that effort in to put yourself in the position of someone who doesn't know this stuff doesn't care about it doesn't have the same set of priorities you do they don't work for slack that I'm not interested in whether we're successful or not other than you know they're a customer they would like us to continue to exist what do they want what what experience are they looking for and that's 9 p.m. and they just put the kids down right yeah exactly you know and when they think about that we're thinking about the future work and we got all kinds of amazing visions and we're in this hundred year transformation and we're starting to really understand how to make use of all this technology to work better and come to mean it's a messy process now and meanwhile for them it's like I'm mad at this person because they've got a promotion I didn't and I'm like annoyed with my spouse because they said they were gonna go pick up stuff from the store and they didn't do it just like you know all the things that were going on in their life like I said we're not even in the top thousand of their concern you think about hiring a host mm-hmm right a product host or what what are the what do you look for and I mean in talked earlier about how and no one's ride all over the time it's a tough one you know there's a couple of things that for me are showstoppers and one of them would be the kind of person who is rude to the receptionist or rude to the server in the restaurant rude to the you do garden away in I think is just not gonna have the the ability to put other people first you know that's just kind of like it's three strikes in one action for me hygiene issues right there some people are just strangely dismissive you know they unless someone's important to them and and it's gonna be valuable for them for some reason they're just jerks so we know there's an obvious one the rest of them are a lot more subtle one positive worker is curiosity and an open mind it's an indicator for me of a couple qualities that are positive so the approach eveness I think is one of them intelligence is another but the curiosity is important in its own right like it's just it's a stance towards the world which is like I like to learn I'm you know I have theories I'm excited to test them out and I want to understand how things work and if you have that orientation I think you can much more likely to be successful suppose you think about here you are you've got a great host you've got a great product you're in a bigger company or a little company and you're you're doing well you're actually able to drive change mm-hmm are you leading and this is the question we always get into around the product are you leading ahead of what the customer wants are you responsive to what they want are you creating something that they've never seen before mmm-hmm what's your what's your take on this because I think you know you've got this great vision around communication and I think everyone's starting to see it but I don't think everyone saw yourself what Anderson Horowitz was saying yeah we didn't we definitely I mean like we really thought that as the biggest we could ever get is like how big we got about 18 months ago and that was definitely wrong and now the sights are set much higher I'm gonna take that there are no I'm like literally hundreds of millions of people who will be using slack or something like it within the next decade and for now at least we're number one not knock on this little wooden here thing I'm trying to say this in a way that doesn't appear like it's contradictory so let's see if it's if it's a contradiction but by the way this question is contradiction it's very hard it's like how far do you lead your customers right I mean it's it's definitely it's a column response kind of thing and it's some it requires pain deep attention I think of it a little bit more like performer on stage like a magician or a musician or whatever feeding off the audience reacting to them like having an understanding of their cues but not when someone holds up their lighter and says Freebird instantly stopping the song that you're playing and starting to play Freebird maybe you don't play Freebird all night you know and you're responsible for for their entertainment and you don't just do exactly what they want you did you you're trying to create for their benefit but if you don't pay the attention to them at all you know look if you're trying to do stand-up comedy and you just have no sense of the room you're gonna bomb for sure I think we tend to look for the intent behind what customers are asking rather than the specific implementation because usually the the implementation that they're requesting the feature that they're request here are the change in the product is really driven by what they see today and it's it's reacting to that rather than kind of what the higher goal is and what the higher goal is for any executive any manager is gonna be we want to increase the linemen we want to break down silos we wanna make sure everyone's coordinated on the same page pushing in the same direction and what's interesting is the non-executive non manager the workers inside the organization actually want exactly the same thing when do you think about office space the movie or the TV show the office or like Dilbert or anything any of those tropes of office life and the disenfranchisement that people feel are alienation it's really I don't feel like I understand the context for these decisions nothing makes any sense and not in the loop I don't understand these other groups are doing and they all seem to be working on the same project but it's redundant and that overlap in the kind of like the Venn diagram of what the end users let's say inside the organization wonder what the leaders want is exactly the sweet spot that that slot tries to drive towards it's interesting the way you explain it around you know if you're an artist and you're on stage and how your your jobs really to give them a show mhmmm right and that's they're obviously they're yeah right so I'm the reason I said it was like contradictory is because I'm just saying that you're trying to you know be the host and not you're not the rock star but if I can come up with a better or if you can come up with a better analogy there I'd love to hear it but there is you know the the key point there is paying attention to them and having a read for it and understanding their reactions and be able to you know if you are a good magician it's all about misdirection and where people are paying attention so you don't have a really good sense of what people are thinking about then you're gonna fail I think it's the same thing in software like you really have the last question is if we think about creative right you are designer I think one of the challenges you know I run creative teams we every organization does it differently how do you think about where creative plays in the role of product and engineering I think there's Eliquis so many different ways I can answer this but the one that because the last word you said was engineering that you know that got me thinking was the interplay between product and engineering because you can in poorly function organizations you can be like here's what we want to do and then the response can be that's impossible or that's too expensive or it's too hard or it won't work because of of whatever and even if that's the first response the in a well-functioning product development organization both sides get creative in that okay so that that's too expensive that's going to take too long or that's too complicated or that's not gonna work or it's impossible what about if we did it this way well yeah I guess if we did it this way then we could do this and there's this kind of negotiation and you know and you can think about it in one sense like two parties who are in opposition negotiating to some kind of consensus is in the middle or in the best case that's kind of like Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards or something like that luck there's no actual interplay and we're pushing in this direction we're pushing in this direction and we it's multiplicative like we actually accentuate each other's strengths and drive to whatever the best solution is so that's definitely the idea don't not realize everyday but that's the game well it's typically after that you know the third fourth fifth six in duration that you actually come upon something great and I think if that doesn't exist then you're always going with the first or the second you don't ever actually do anything yeah it's like the turn over what it was but the first version of yesterday that song as the scrambled eggs his legs are broccoli or something like because you try to think of what the lyrics would be that that's good that that version didn't get out yeah yeah well look it's a true pleasure I think we're all watching the growth and we're excited to see this whole vision play out I think it's exciting time so thanks for thanks for all your help yeah great to talk to you all right

Channel: Qualtrics

Views: 121,732

Keywords: Qualtrics, An Interview with Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, Slack, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield, Slack CEO, Stewart Butterfield, Experience Week, ExperienceWeek, Experience, Week, CEO Stewart Butterfield, Butterfield

Id: IS_wpAlkP48

Length: 28min 25sec (1705 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 25 2017