The 10 traits of great PMs, AI, and Slack’s approach to product | Noah Weiss (Slack, Google)

we have this mental metaphor that we talk a lot about getting to the next Hill the actual wording is take bigger Bolder bets I think teams can often get lost crawling up that hill not realizing that there's a huge incredibly beautiful range behind it where you've over time created kind of new teams from scratch that YouTube Aid in a new area before the areas mature so we did that with a lot of these kind of native audio visual products like huddles and clips really the pandemic because our customers are 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 and have these new superpowers and let's see if you made a couple teams prototype give them space to run and pilot and then get something to watch that's amazing those people away that's kind of the formula that we've seen welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-win experiences building and growing today's most successful products today my guest is Noah Weiss Noah is Chief product officer at slack where he spent the last seven years prior to that he was head of product at Foursquare which is near and dear to my heart as you'll hear at the top of this episode prior to that he was a PM at Google and at Fox Creek software and in our conversation we covered the 10 traits of great product managers how to work effectively with strongly opinionated and product minded Founders what Noah has learned about working effectively with AI in your product over his last 15 years at Google and Foursquare in Mount slack we talk about a process called complaint storms that help slack build better product plus what he's learned from Slack's self-service business plateauing back in 2019 and how they turned it around and what they took away from that experience also how he thinks about competition with Microsoft teams and with Discord also a bunch of new dad advice which I found very helpful this was such a great in-depth conversation about all things product and Leadership and I'm really excited for you to hear this episode with that I bring you Noah Weiss after a short word from our sponsors this episode is brought to you by sidebar are you looking to land your next big career move or start your own thing one of the most effective ways to create a big leap in your career and something that worked really well for me a few years ago is to create a personal board of directors a trusted peer group where you can discuss challenges you're having get career advice and just kind of gut check how you're thinking about your work your career and your life this has been a big trajectory changer for me but it's hard to build this trusted group with sidebar senior leaders are matched with highly vetted private supportive peer groups to lean on for unbiased opinions diverse perspectives and raw feedback everyone has their own zone of Genius so together we're better prepared to navigate 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and save over 4 hours a week that's over a month of save time per year with superhuman you can split your inbox into streams or VIPs team members and emails from your favorite products to reduce contact switching and make sure you never miss an important email you can set reminders if you don't hear back so that you can follow up and never drop the ball on an email thread you can also work faster than ever before with powerful AI features like writing editing summarizing and even translating join the ranks of the most productive teams and Unleash the Power of superhuman try one month free at superhuman.com Lenny that's superhuman dot com slash Lenny Noah welcome to the podcast thank you for having me I'm excited to finally get to join and be a long time listener I feel the same way in Reverse I've been really excited that you're finally on the podcast and I don't know if you know this but this is actually going to be the last podcast I'm recording before I go on Pat leave uh this is this is going to play while I'm on break and coincidentally you're actually just returning from Pat leave is what I just learned yeah and so let me ask you a question what advice do you have for someone about to enter the beginning of baby life from someone that is exiting that and going back to work so first off I mean obviously congratulations you're about to go on a roller coaster of emotion sleep and everything else you know I literally went back to work two days ago so I think my maybe advice about being a new parents is better than my advice whether being in PM right now 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 you know depending on how much Emilia 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 right and that's okay that's number one number two don't over extrapolate from the early days like they are you know the fourth trimester is a real thing these babies come out they are not fully big they can't even support their own heads so if you try to extrapolate and think the next 18 years they're gonna be like the first 18 days it can be sobering so like keep that perspective it gets they develop so much every week with part of assignment and then the third thing which I got advice from this from a good friend is like you gotta fully get into it as a parent like 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 gotta talk to them you gotta like listen to what they're saying and just be fully kind of present near the moment I kind of realized for myself and then like basically a full visual detox you said 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 feel really connected with her now after just a couple months so it's a crazy time you're gonna love it it's gonna drive you mad at times as well and that's all okay all right we're going to be pivoting this podcast into a parenting podcast this is awesome advice I wrote everything you just said on this little Post-it as you're talking so I'm going to put that up in my in our nursery and see see ya see how it all goes one thing that's tough about my career path in this weird life is I don't get a nice uh Pat leave you know pay Pat leave from a big company so I've actually been working on stacking guest post and podcasts ahead of my leave so that I can actually as exactly as you said just get fully into it you have six awesome yeah I have awesome guest posts coming all these podcasters backlogged so I'm hoping it all works out that's the smart way to do it yeah on a totally different topic you're ahead of product at Foursquare and I don't know if you know this I actually built the startup on foursquares API it's a company called local mind and for folks that don't know about it the way it worked is basically let you talk to someone checked in on Foursquare anywhere in the world if you're thinking about going there so you could be like hey is this bar fun right now what's happening there before you actually show up and we ended up selling the company's Airbnb ended up not being a big problem for enough people and that's how I ended up at Airbnb but it was it was like quite magical and API was amazing and so I guess just say I just want to say thank you for building an awesome product in awesome API thank you for being a developer on top of the ecosystem I mean it's interesting with Foursquare will populism for later I feel like I have more Lessons Learned and more scar tissue from the you know crazy up and down of I don't know what it was 2010 to 2015 roughly and I I think there's something actually where you learn more from the things that don't solely work out or don't quite achieve what you wanted 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 to take away from that so it's so great I still love using Foursquare I think you know we got caught in the Death Star of Instagrams Ascent you know back in 2012 2013 but uh you know I have a product like that exists forever in the future and I'm glad you got to build a tempting landed Airbnb through it uh it's a great story looking back at Foursquare do you think there was a path to building a massive consumer app type business or is it just never going to work out and I know they went in direction of B2B data sort of business so I guess was there was there a path or was it just like no that was never going to work out it's true I mean I'm not gonna do like a 30 minute post-mortem because that'll probably bore everyone but I thought of that this we've all thought about this a lot kind of on the early team there I think you know the biggest probably lesson learned frankly is that you know we were really close to the Instagram folks early on they were like big developers on our platform they used the FourSquare API before they're about 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 type to versus a person sharing a moment or an experience that they're having in the world and sometimes I might have a place connected to it I think that one change in frame or what you would say like a customer actually wanted to do that probably was the thing that took us away on the social side I think I'm the more kind of local discoveries I it's actually what people want to be using their product much more for over time getting kind of personalized recommendations and getting tips when you go to a place and all the push notifications but I think they're again it was kind of hard to stay ahead I think specifically with Google because they had you know billion plus Google Maps users distributed on Android and iOS and even though they might only you know take a couple years eventually they would wind up replicating a lot of the functionality and then I think that was hard to regain that momentum so you know 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 it could obviously from a consumer company to a B2B company but yeah that's my mini post-mortem um what could it did with Foursquare it's interesting how many consumer companies pivot to B2B because it turns out that's where the money ends up being yeah and I think the feedback something that 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 a easier to have an incremental successfully business than pure consumer okay so speaking of Foursquare Dennis Crowley was the CEO and founder a very strong product minded founder I know you've worked with a number of very strong product minded Founders including Stuart Butterfield Dennis obviously we just talked about maybe others I'm curious what you've learned as a product leader working with very opinionated Founders and I think this is interesting not just as like a product leader working with very product minded CEOs but also as a first piano at a startup you're often put in this tough spot of just like the founders just telling you what to do and you have to go build it versus having a lot of say in agency so I'm curious what you learned about working and being successful in that position which is often really hard so come and 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 at it but also when will you you'll be the most frustrated at times because you're going to feel like you have less agency and so you just know that going into it if you go to a company's run by a former marketer and you're in marketing they'll probably want to have a lot of same influence over that and I think just going to knowing that is good you know looking back I would say probably two main things stand out of what what's really worked with both Dennis and Stewart 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 that not just about if intuition and tasting gut but how do you distill that into principles that they come the language of the company so that everybody else can start thinking through a similar frame or a similar lens when you're designing product because otherwise it could feel a little bit kind of Goldilocks every time a team builds at something they take it to the CEO and see I was like no I'm not quite right again no not not exactly that and you don't have the language to actually have a more constructive review and then doing that as a little strategy as well I think the product founder 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 absolutely and I think it's actually great to say okay the overall vision for the company is it the responsibility of any one team 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 create 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's level of involvement I think you want to get the founders yo it really evolves early on especially if it's a big new project to make sure that they're strategic by it but you agree on the principles of aggregate approaching we have the goals and the anti-goals getting that so then the team can run and explore 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 broader 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 uh and so I think that kind of formula winds up working pretty well if you throw in that kind of alignment on principles and envision that u-shape sounds nice in theory but I often imagine you get to that final step and this founder is like what the hell is this this is not at all what I was hoping it'd be is there an example of that that comes to mind where you maybe went through that and then it's just like no that did not work out the way we expected and if not no problem yeah I mean I think that does happen the iship is maybe the end of the year is kind of like the level of Engagement and often that last level of Engagement that's where there's actually the most rapid refinement that you're doing and I think what's important there is that hopefully you're refining in code and you're not so like static design mocks because using the software is so different than looking at what the software will do 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 Stuart together in a room and we kind of Almost Do like a bug bash together and the idea was like we'll do it all together we're trying to make the best product possible making great software is 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 so it 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 in the light our users and here's the Gap from where we are today to what we want to share I think that mentality winds would be a lot more constructive but that's not always easy to do you talked about creating these principles which is an awesome approach of just like creating guard rails for the team so they kind of think the way the founder and the head of product think what are some examples of principles you have and had early on maybe at Foursquare or slack I mean slack I think is where we kind of enshrined them much more because we scaled it more so much uh more that we needed principles and I think for us they were really about unpacking just the mission which for stock 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 so for us we've got five core principles they've 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 host which is all about kind of that level of craft the relation so the saving people's steps if you're let's say a hosting an Airbnb it's like putting clean towels on the bed so no one has to wonder are these for me like that type of foresight that's actually evaluator being B exactly itself it's actually be a be a host at Airbnb is one of the four core values right so maybe we borrowed that or someone's inspired by it but be a great host sounded aspirational I love that yeah yeah it's a little bigger there's a famous uh 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 you know users to love it as much as you do but often actually that kind of owners 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 tenants because slack is pretty complexion of the surfaces 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 you know 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 often be okay you know you'll often have in you know optimization you know 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 like that's another example of don't make it stressful help people chill out when they're using this offer that's the idea of being on that one shifting a little bit I know you guys have been working on a bunch of AI stuff at slack and I believe you've been working on AI related stuff for for many years I think I Google you worked on a lot of AIS related products I feel like a lot of people are just getting into this and trying to figure out how do we integrate Ai and ML and llms into our product and how do we not just waste our time chasing things so I want to ask you just in your time working with AI over the many years you've been doing it and share a little bit about what you've been doing there what are some things you've learned about how to be actually effective and build valuable products and not just kind of fall for the shiny object issue and trap I mean it's almost 15 years ago now that I was working at Google in search on what later became called the knowledge graph so this idea of building kind of a canonical repository of kind of information about people places things in the world and relationships between them and back then it was a lot of the same ideas positive techniques I've got a lot more mature so we used natural language processing to extract all this information through 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 mountains in Europe or one of the most popular beaches in Southern California and be able to actually give answers not just 10 Blue Links I think the thing that's really changing 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 have natural language generation where suddenly the you know computer came to talk back to you in a way that feels extremely humid and then the creative you know 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 forestry we did a lot of personalization and recommendations at slack we have you know search and ml that's going to use 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 at Google 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 there's actually one of the failings of the various LMS right now is they all appear supremely confident even when they're completely hallucinating and I think that's gonna be something that people are gonna 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 and the tool 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 project 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 yeah the classic example that would be Netflix back I mean they have their reading system they actually had a feedback loop from their customers that make the system better at predicting and I think people are still trying to figure out what does that look like in this world of llms something I hope that you're all building at slack is a way to ask about questions based on all the conversations in the slack I've been looking for that product for a while now I can safely say we have a lot of prototypes internally where we are playing on this and I think it's actually funny as a side in one of the original Slack product Vision decks back in 2014 there are kind of cool strategy there's four parts and then part number four which was a joke at the time was then do magic AI stuff on top and maybe I was reading if you know what the state of AI would be by the time hopefully companies have their Collective knowledge and slack and now we're finally at the period where the magic AI stuff seems finally pretty amazing pretty magical uh 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 the space so that if you work at a company where you have so much knowledge in your kind of slack Channel repository that you can suddenly get amazing leaps in productivity to help you better do your job because that knowledge is in slack but it's sometimes hard to reach and I think these Technologies can make that possible this reminds me of something Gustav the CPO and CTO and co-president of Spotify share that they always have a deck and a vision of just like a play button within Spotify you just play and all magic happens and it's the best music and thing exactly what you want to hear and just how that isn't actually possible and it's still not possible and so exactly to your point you have to like really think about how does it act like how close is it to the reality and if it's not actually there like he's like he was saying how like we'll pick two songs that are correct out of ten just because we don't really know exactly what you want to hear right now and it's just there's no point trying to design that right now because it's not actually going to be delivering on the promise 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 like 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 thing that you could read I don't think that's gonna quite be possible anytime soon but I think like Spotify heading towards that North Star you wind up developing I I hope a lot of really compelling projects for instance along the way yeah man the more you think about it the more the more amazing opportunities exist in slack it's it's like all text it's amazing okay there's a lot of cool stuff coming I imagine yes I can't wait yes on that on that topic how do you think about creating teams within slack and AI specifically are you like recommending each team think about how AI can make their stuff better or are you dedicating here's the AI team and they're going to work on stuff and you guys just keep shipping with your shipping and keep moving your metrics meet on Fair answer is a hybrid of the two which is to say we have a kind of central machine learning and search team which a lot of people have expertise in this field to build infrastructure that everybody can use and what we've done is uh because the space is evolving so quickly like literally every month like the capabilities are of all the the risks the train ups are evolving a ton what we want to do to 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 Church 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 trade infrastructure so I 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 know more of the shape of what the technology is capable of we'll just have you know AI capabilities as part of their roadmaps just like every product team is responsible for their mobile roadmap they don't have 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 search to move quickly and that's what we're doing that's kind of what I've been hearing from everyone I've been asking this question the search ranking team is always seems to be the center of all this and then it's a few experiments here and there so that's an interesting pattern I've been noticing good to know I heard that you have a process internally called complaint storms and I'd love to understand what that is if something started I want to say back in 20 in the 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 through that slot for a long time and slack maybe more than almost any other company maybe like figma is probably similar I was listening to the podcast just earlier today where if you work on figma or you work on slack you also live in the 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're realizing especially for people trying to build slot for the next million customers the people who have never used stock 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 are they care less than we care and so what we started doing with these complaint storms an idea was really simple which is we get a team together often Stewart or myself would also join and we'd actually start off with other products first like an adjacent spaces and we'd say okay at the group we're going to go through like the customer Journey from the moment you land on the website through let's say it's a you know workplace product getting your first account going getting the first couple users on board getting to the point of value we're going to do it on one screen and someone's going to project and then people are going to fill in every issue everything that's confusing every pain Point not buzz but ways in which if you care about and software you can work on it what would actually confuse you what would stop you in your tracks and from that you want to generating a bunch of amazing Mission by looking at someone else's product in a really critical way for things you might want to try on your own product once you get to that then it becomes the introduction to you with your own software but it is a little painful obviously same with watching usability test to like look at your own you know baby in a way that is okay I'm trying to Define all the words 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 like a dead end in a direction is doing complaints storms about the product area that they're in or using adjacent products just to get inspiration uh and then I think it kind of unlocks a lot more kind of creative views of the problem space it's similar to a process that I learned stripe has called friction logging but I love I love the Nuance here of starting with someone else's product because I could totally see how that makes you feel better looking your product in real like it's not like we suck it's okay everyone's has so much opportunity exactly yeah I've heard that from Strike too I think it gets a similar place and I think it's the doing it I think the byproduct is that you also get like 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 have these things that are kind of hard to actually feel collectively on the same page about and how to calibrate it's another good way to do it I'm imagining some PMS might be hearing this and wonder okay great now the founders and the execs have all these things that they want us to fix I have like goals to hit I got a road map how do you think about prioritizing things that come up in these sorts of sessions for the team and how do they mix and match versus all the other stuff they want to do or is it just like they don't actually have a huge roadmap and this is the way to form the road map no I mean I think more broadly I think the way that we think about it or I like us to think about our roadmap for any feature team at slack is that it's a portfolio and it's meant to be a portfolio that's Diversified a couple different ways right I think one is you want to diversify things that are meant to be new capabilities versus making the thing you've already built a little bit better every day similar to Parenting uh are there things that are meant to be risky that you aren't sure are going to work but might have a lot of upside there's things that are kind of known bets and then I think often you're kind of balancing are you doing things that are meant to have impact that you're already very confident in versus things that are meant to learn about a new possibility space and so I think for most teams this stuff usually wind up tactically filling up that bucket of let's make the existing product a little bit better every day for users and at slack we we have this thing called customer love Sprints which is an interesting way it seem to figure out how to get this on the road map is it's hard to allocate that works 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 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 sell there 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 want to prioritizing it off and that kind of work is actually kind of making it this really fun total change of pace throughout the quarter uh 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 I love that and how often do you do these sorts of customer love Sprints I would say teams that work with very user-facing products do it at least once a quarter so I think other teams I work on maybe less user-faced you might do it maybe you know twice a year but quarterly is a pretty healthy kids wow I didn't know about that and that kind of connects to slack has always been a very delightful product I remember early on the animations were so awesome the uh little twirly I don't know pounds hashtag thing and it feels like slack is always invested in Delight how do you operationalize that how do you is it these customer left Sprints is there something else that's just like we need to allocate some percentage just like make things really fun even though it's not going to move any metric I would say it's a little bit the DNA of the company honestly which is that 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 like building delightful playful experiences glitch didn't work out but you know there's a whole long backstory but the short version is a tool they had built internally that they then wound up spitting out a company from which became slack I think that DNA uh we're trying to build a consumer grade experience that just happens to be for work is really random 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 have worked at Oracle or sap it's most people have worked at consumer companies or game companies and so they bring that Focus to the spirit and then I went to the last bit beyond kind of the principles or 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 scaled support but is most often in touch with our customers and from the very early days you know people used to do CE shifts if you worked on 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 what are the obstacles the pain points the 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 Collective I think the way that thinks about competition is we obsess about customers we build something they'll love enough to tell their co-workers and the rest kind of take care of it takes care of itself speaking of competition something I wanted to ask you a bit about so early on slack was competing against this product called hipchat and that was actually what I used at our startup and we loved hip chat it was so hilarious just these memes everywhere and their Billboards are amazing but then slack ate their lunch later on I'm just kind of thinking out loud Discord feels like that was the big threat and now Microsoft teams obviously I'm curious just how you think about competition and even just what you've learned about working in a space where there's a lot of competition and thinking about that long term and even short-term 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 the maxim that we have in surrounding which is we're customer obsessed but competitor aware uh so I think it's a little bit different I think some companies are like Uber for example I think was Notorious like competitor of SAS and yeah they tried to delay customers when they could I think Hip chat I don't think slacks sought out to like kill hip chat at Foursquare reused I think it was called campfire back in the day for the 37 singles people so it was a whole generation of those products and I think slot came along and I think they had a couple of Innovations one was they had a great mobile experience that seeked across every client search actually worked and then they brought a lot of the best parts of like consumer messaging uh into the workplace like the Emoji and reactions and all those bits and I think it turns out that you know if you're a 10x better in 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 hip chat campfire which is Black World discord's interesting I mean we keep it aware of Discord but it is so much more focused on the kind of consumer originally it was gaming now 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 I've 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's 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 you know the origin of teams really was a defensive move for them to protect office because offices is an incredible very profitable kind of Monopoly in 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 his team has evolved over time it's become much more of a video conferencing product that competes with like zoom and Google meet uh the people who use teams use it completely different than slack where you live and breathe in channels and work in kind of workflows all day long and I think what we've seen there too is that like a lot of our customers they happily use both most Fortune 500 companies have either off subscription or a little 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 you know 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 you know staying aware of our competitors but really obsessed on what are the new ways that we can Delight our users as the years go by so slack is kind of a big-ish company within now or let's say a big company but it feels like you still are launching really interesting stuff you launch huddles uh Clips there's this AI stuff coming sounds like I'm curious what you have done at slack to enable these sorts of zero to one bets and what you've seen is important to allow for sort of for Innovation along those lines 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 didn't talk about literally one of the actual wording is take bigger Bolder bets and the idea there is that it's really easy to fall into the Trap of just constant incrementalism you know the concept it's a feature team and you have like a kpi and you feel like your whole life is measured by that similar kpi going up one percent 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 ranging or 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 uh incredibly beautiful range behind it so take bigger Bolder beds get to the next Hill to see what the Horizon is like around you that's kind of how we think about it strategically and then it can structurally the way we've approached it is that we've over time created kind of new teams from scratch that YouTube made in a new area before the areas mature so we did that with a lot of these kind of native audio visual products like huddles and clips early in the pandemic because our customers were demanding it from us they were like we love living this cycle day but we feel disconnected from our teammates when we camp 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 and have these new superpowers and let's incubate a couple teams 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 space to run to give them kind of a get a jail free card for maybe the normal process of you know okay our planning quarterly reviews and make it feel something that is like the pace of learning is what matters like how fast are 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 that's kind of the formula that we've seen this episode is brought to you by vanta helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate your growth thousands of fast-growing companies like Gusto com Cora and modern treasury trust vanza to help build scale manage and demonstrate their security and compliance programs and get ready for audits in weeks not months by offering the most in-demand security and privacy Frameworks such as sock 2 ISO 27001 gdpr HIPAA and many more vanta helps companies obtain the reports they need to accelerate growth build a fishing compliance processes mitigate risks to their businesses and build trust with external stakeholders over 5 000 best scoring companies use van to automate up to 90 of the work involved with stock 2 and these other Frameworks for a limited time Lenny's podcast listeners get one thousand dollars off vanta go to vanta.com Lenny that's v-a-n-t-a.com Lenny to learn more and to claim your discounts get started today one of the things I love learning about from product teams is their unique rituals and traditions and I'm curious what's maybe the most interesting or unique or fun or funny ritual or tradition on the product team things you'll maybe do regularly one of the things that we do which is kind of always a little bit funny I mean it's more of a like a emotional thing rather than a practical thing is that at all hands we'll often wind up taking like specific tweets that people had about their product and you know Twitter people say the craziest thing sometimes uh and sometimes they're like really heartwarming like customer love but often it's just the the meanest most frustrating complaints that people have and it's honestly meant for us to just have a pulse on like where are 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 user that's your user base gets more and more diverse and larger I think it 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 that's one big way and the other that reminded me of which is actually probably better maybe delete that last one because it's kind of boring no it's great we're not deleting nothing fine uh you know user but so I'm a big believer in you want to be data you know informed but you don't want to be so data driven that you actually don't have a pulse I want 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 it's actually like attend user research sessions and so what we wound up doing especially in the pandemic when we first want to remove is you know navington 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 like so people 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 PMS into years designers and the user researcher all in one slack thread like live responding reacting to usability session and then suddenly that thread becomes actually the best kind of source of truth from the research report that gets rid of but I think most importantly it gets the team almost at the complaint storms but actually watching someone else do it like 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 and it's humbling it's filled with humor and also it's I think really constructive for the teams to do it that way I was gonna ask where they actually share these thoughts that's an in slack makes a lot of sense yeah I mean in terms of your report at some point but literally just link back to the original thread and then you have like you know 100 people's reactions as the you know reporters coming ongoing if only there was a I tool to summarize all of your thoughts we've got a prototype for that hopefully it'll work well enough that actually the useful for customers too you tweeted once about how I think maybe around the time you joined slack around 2019 that the self-service business of slack basically plateaued and it wasn't clear why I'm curious just what that period was like and how did you kind of get to the bottom of what was going on and turn things around 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 of slack where I would say maybe 2014 to 2017 where it was almost all self-service and it was just growing on gamebusters and then we started spinning out the sales team and an Enterprise team which are focusing mostly on that and I think we kind of you know we saw the team that was working on self-serve but it was primarily the company's Focus was all driving Enterprise deals kind of getting to that next level of maturity and then in 2019 I think we started to see that when we look beneath the surface the you know fundamentals of the self-service business weren't looking as healthy as they used to be I think kind of the biggest thing is we kind of dug into it was a little bit to what we were talking about earlier with the motivation and complaint storms is it was getting harder to understand what the next generation is like customers really wanted from the product and whether you're thinking about this is crossing mechanism or moving from like kind of early adopters to the needs of kind of 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 uh sophistication and so we get a lot of these are research we've looked at all these cohort curves which you can imagine suddenly they're like oh they're they're not as healthy as they used to be like what's going on and I think you know 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 years we said okay let's kind of throw the whole roadmap away and instead let's come up with a bunch of hypotheses about what could be new levers 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 which of these levers are real and which of these are just totally Off the Mark and you know we kind of have 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 wound up happening we wound up kind of doubling the rate of our new paid customer growth in the year and a couple years after that and kind of re-accelerating 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 the sake of learning and I think there's a good muscle to build but it was definitely not easy to do at the time well the story begs the question what are the levers that worked whatever you can share one of the big things that we want to focusing on is what we talk about as in is 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 co-workers 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 on that and that new user experience it sounds maybe a little ludicrous but slacker 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 have to pay for the pay tier and that one of being one of I think the ripest beings is figuring out how to give people a taste of the full premium slack experience so that they would never want to go back in doing that in a variety of different points in the customer Journey and those are the other biggest thing to call the one out is we really need to figure out a new North Star metric for motivating the teams across Slack at that point in time we basically had paid customers and then we had created to use which is like the very very beginning the very very end of the journey and we did a lot of quantitative research and data science and one coming up but there's a new metric we called successful teams which is a little bit you know I feel a lot of companies have this like Facebook's I'm not looking number seven or whatever it was where what we found was that if you could get five people using slack the majority of their work week to just communicate at all that would be a successful team there are 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 it motivating not just the two notes to focus on self-service but all these other future teams across the company to drive more new successful teams knowing that if we can move that which is much earlier in the funnel but not a complimentary then it would actually drive upgrades and pay customers and thus Revenue long term and that was a huge kind of turning point for how we rallied product teams around so we would actually drive that self-service business man this feels like its own podcast just analyze the things you learned down this journey and there's so many takeaways here one is just the importance of an activation metric that is predictive of retention so it sounds like you landed on five people in a company like Dau basically for a week something like that that's awesome and then the other interesting takeaway here is I'm actually doing a bunch of interviews with founders of the most successful B2B companies and interestingly they all not all maybe half or like I still don't think we have product Market fit like they're at like a billion dollars valuation growing like crazy and like I feel like I have product Market fit with the current users but I dumped with the people I want and that's what you're describing right is like the new you stopped having product Market fit with people that you wanted next I think that's exactly right I think of like product Market fit is almost like you keep stacking these S 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 because you start hitting the ceiling up 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 Nexus curve which is like how do we get technology Savvy teams that aren't developers or how do we get people who are you know in large Enterprises who are outside the US and these each kind of be they used to become new curves that you have to build product Market fit for and I think it's just all in a huge exercise in like being self-critical being humble not 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 they their previous audience didn't need it all if you think about the pie chart of what you have to change to make it work how much of it was like messaging positioning onboarding optimization versus like product features let's say maybe 60 40 in the sense of the early journey I mean not just obviously positioning messaging but like the entire trades of like unboxing slack if you will with your team uh you know we called it the day one Journey but extended 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 the fundamental parts of the product were missing that would make it comprehensible to the next audience then you're gonna have problems so like it sounds Maybe impossible to remember but slack used to not have wussy wig message composition you used to have to use a markdown and so making matte wysiwig was a huge boost making mobile work offline so it worked no matter where you were in the world was another big one all the things about configuring your sidebar notification so that as you scale it you should just lack it and become overwhelming those are some of the kind of foundational product Investments that we wanted making so that that next generation of slack customers could get value and not be overwhelmed or daunted by it maybe one last question along these lines people look at slack as kind of the maybe the first major product-led growth success story and they always look at a slack of like oh we just want to grow like slack let's see what they did for people that are studying Slack's journey and success what do you think slack did right early on that maybe people don't recognize or don't appreciate enough that Founders today should be thinking about more so versus just like let's just make a premium product and right I may think maybe the most telling thing is when slack started it's really when I joined so I don't think a word or acronym product like growth existed so it wasn't like we were really good at taking this Playbook and applying it I think it was more that whole term of Art became a thing as maybe many other kind of freemium SAS products kind of took off I 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 co-workers 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 if you wanted to for just your team and I think when people think about this product like 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 five to fifty people at the time the biggest company imagine using cyclists 50 people because I don't know how this is going to work beyond that you know it'll become pandemonium obviously that was initial I think real real strong product Market fit but the other bit which then was what powered the Enterprise business was teams of 5 to 50 people who worked at larger companies and I think what wound up happening was that you would have two those independently at a company like IBM or Disney or apple one or whatever it might be or comcast discovering slack using it for themselves because they thought it would just meet their working lives simpler more pleasant more productive and maybe not even know that anyos at the company was using slack and then by the time we didn't scale their 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 I should use this Locking Company like do you want to think about a broader deployment or controls or analysis and so I think that that was it that's consumer grade experience that customers love enough to get their co-workers on and pay for themselves and then at Enterprise companies like having a bunch of different flowers sproutings that eventually you could roll up it enterprise-wide kind of deal and then it was all the tactics but I think that that was where it started the way you described at the beginning of make a product that people want to share with their colleagues reminds me of a I was just listening to an interview with Seth Godin who's this you know marketing Legend he I think he has a new books he's on every podcast and he had this really great quote that the products that winner ones that you want to tell your friends about and it's a really simple concept and basically it's like it's word of mouth is how you have to win but but I think that's so true like every successful company I talk to ends up being like we just want to build something people want to share with their friends even if it's growing in some other ways yo okay feels like that's always at the root of it is you just like want to tell your friends about it because you love it and slack I think is a great example of that I think it's true and I mean obviously there are categories of Enterprise offer that isn't true for like insecurity or but even that I think yeah like I think they if it's an awesome security product you're like hey you got to check out this like Century or whatever or sneak yeah like uh I'm good friends as advantis you know Christina I think yeah a lot of stories where whoever would have thought 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 got you an event today it's amazing so yeah maybe that is true I think especially in this day and age where all the marketing acquisition channels have been so saturated people are optimize them so much I think it's really hard to like scale a 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 gonna just play the cat game in hopes that the numbers work out I remember uh slack rolling out at Airbnb and all the designers getting so excited about it creating their channels and everyone's just like what the hell are they doing what is this thing and then it it did exactly what you're describing just spread everyone's just like whoa this is cool and they're all telling each other how useful it is to them and spread like crazy I love that is there anything else on slack that you think would be interesting to share in terms of what makes it a successful product team product business before I move on to another topic the only thing I think is maybe a little bit interesting in terms of how we develop product and it's really different in a change 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 you know have similar preferences and sophistication and I think in the early years 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 is work really well one obviously as we figure out how to do experimentation in a SAS product which is not always obvious because the metrics are much longer term than you know you land at a checkup 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 wild for new functionality and so we have this really robust program that we call kind of our pilot program where we have probably thousands of different customers have all signed different agreements now where we can actually roll out to progressively larger user bases because slack is a multiplayer product you you often have to roll out real net new functionality to a whole company or whole team because otherwise you know you can't use huddles by yourself for example and then we have a really great program for actually getting feedback from those customers but through stock connect itself through surveys and this will end up being kind of the lifeblood of feature teams where you can buy 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 servers 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 predictive but because it worked well for a thousand different companies 50 different countries in 20 different Industries uh and so I think you know early on I mean SAS 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 know you said all these SAS Founders who said hey you gotta like keep re-establishing a product Market fit I think that is like a programmatic way of being able to do that with your product development process that's pretty interesting any tips for how to choose who to include in this group if someone wants to build something like this for themselves 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 uh 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 a this like Champion Network that we built with 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 decide actually we're going to kill that feature before we ever ship it to everybody so diversity and you know intolerance this reminds me of something else the CTO stripe shared of how they build new product which is they pick a couple customers that need a problem solved and they just build it before them essentially and with them and in B2B generally it's a lot easier to build something people really want because they are very motivated for you to solve their problem and they're going to put in the time and there's like you don't need thousands of people involved you just need a couple yeah I definitely think there's one of the 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 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 all right I'm gonna shift to a totally different topic which could also be its own whole podcast but let's just see how it goes see you at this I'd say famous blog post on product management called the 10 traits of great product managers and I want to just try to go through this list briefly and just see how it goes I don't want to you know this could be an hour of conversation but let's just kind of run through it because I think it'd be useful for people to hear and I think these are all 100 true even though you wrote this number of years ago at this point and just let's just see what comes up and and then have a few follow-up questions on this list these traits are kind of came after I wrote this other thing which is like the item it's the product management which are all the things that people think product management is and when they switch to the job and they're disappointed by and then I was like let me actually write the 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 contribute things that you should interview for but I think it's the actual job of chronograph what is it about what does success look like and I don't think they're really in a particular order in hindsight but um live in the future and work backwards I think it's very much kind of the idea as a PM this is one thing you'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 then bring ideas back bring inspiration back to the team I'm gonna just gonna throw comments at as you're going through and just add to them so I love that this is like exactly Amazon's like approach of like work backwards working backwards process at Airbnb this is actually like the main thing Brian want pushed everyone to do is just think about the idealized product of like a magical world where all this is totally solid and then work backwards from that and then Paul Graham talks about this too right just like live in the future and build it I I definitely riffed off at least the Paul Graham thing because I remember reading an essay of he thinks you know everyone thinks that you get sort of ideas by like I don't know sitting with their co-founder Elaine Dolores Park looking up at the sky and like Conjuring up the next unicorn or something uh definitely not how that works you have to actually 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 I also saw a great tweet by trios the other day about how if you're working at a company with good leaders they're never going to be sad that your vision is too big and too ambitious if there's you know some reality to it that often they want that just like let's go let's think bigger let's how do we how do we change the way we think about the future of all this stuff yeah I mean that was when I was at Google the thing I took away most from any review and Lariat survey was they would ask like how could we get like 100x the scale or how could this work for this would seemed like an outlandish use case that would like push the team to think much further into the future yeah I think definitely the founders always want that's what Brian Jessica always said too just like how do we 10x this what would it take the 10x this idea yeah so awesome okay okay uh the second one which is maybe obvious but thinking about how to actually amplify by your team so how do you facilitate ideas how do you create interview how do you create momentum a people I think can be a little bit unsatisfying if you're usual where you create things yourself opposed to you're the one who's amplifying what the work that's being put by everyone else is so you have to kind of get into that we're a facilitator mindset what I think about here is a lot of teams like don't want PM's on their team or don't like PMS or don't think PMS are valuable what I find is that just means your camera's not good because if you have a good PM they're just gonna help you do the best work of your life they're going to help you clarify things prioritize well unblock you all that stuff totally who I wish you to find out who wrote that um expression early on of like PM should be mini CEOs I think that's the most dangerous piece of advice ever in the history of product management because I think that is how you wind up having PMS who try to act like dictators instead of kind of leaders and facilitators because you're acting like that yeah your team can completely reject you say I never want another PM again yeah like so many upms are just like I'm finally gonna have the power finally like if they move from engineering or some other role and then they get there like oh what the hell yeah convince everyone of all these things I want to do that actually um slightly different direction of the order of this post but yeah the fifth one that we're in 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 tie breaker all the time and it's like 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 pm21 I would say okay now it's my turn to get to make the decisions it's definitely not what the job is about what that makes me think about is I taught a course on product management at one point that I paused for now I've just like like the core job of a PM is to figure out what's next for every single person on the team and you're this there's this meme or GIF of a a dog on a train and he's just laying the tracks as the team is moving forward ahead of them just one step at a time and to do that this is such an important part of that is just help people make decisions and unblock them totally yeah 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 of nasal'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 you know there's that same like worth solves all problems I think impact solves all like PM issues which is if the team is consistently building things people love and changing the direction of the business everything else is just an input and so I think that focus and understanding as a 2.0 laying the tracks of like what direction do you need to go as a team to actually drive that impact that's probably the simple thing that PM can most control I love that I always recommend exactly that if like if your career is not going as well as you'd hoped or you're not getting promoted it's usually you're not delivering impact whatever that means to the company like it may be moving moving a metric maybe in building great product that the founders really love Yeah main pack can mean a lot of different things but it's so true on the execution executing impeccably bucket the way I think about that is as a great PM you need to kind of have this Aura of I've got this anytime someone puts something on your plate it's not going to fall off you're not going to forget about it you're not going to let a ball drop that if the more you can create this order of like I got this the more responsibility people are going to give you the more impact you'll end up having the more people want to work with you and all that yeah Ben Horowitz was a board member back at Foursquare and I I still remember you used to have this saying it's very you to like of you know good leaders need to say what they're going to do and then do what they said and 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 that last point is so important like you may not be able to do all the things on your plate but just telling people hey I'm not going to get to this thing let's re-prioritize is such a small thing you could do and really creates that or if you got this they're not going to forget about this thing asked you to do yeah you're kind of the you're 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 net but we'll you know speed bumps and whatever else so I'll combine two or three of these that are kind of related or just more skills I said write well like I actually think especially if you 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 is he he's not maybe the most like literary like critical acclaimed author but he's a prolific author who poses things that people love and tell their friends about and here's a great short book on like the practice of writing high quality high volume uh production before you move on I'll throw out a couple more books that I found useful in my writing one is actually called on writing well so that's kind of funny that they're so similarly titled which basically every chapter is just another way to cut more from your writing like more and more Parts you should cut and interestingly I do have a lot of guest posts in my newsletter and I find 90 of the time if I just cut the first paragraph of what they first took a crack and jumped straight into the thing immediately gets better and this book talks a lot about that another book that is amazing for writing better is nobody wants to read your by the guy that wrote The Art of the war of art forget his name but that book is awesome and it's just like nobody wants to read what you're writing here's how to maybe make it something people want to read and then recently I read one called several short sentences or something like that it's all about just writing short sentences and that helps a lot so there we go three three more recommendations okay I got I gotta read the last two I haven't read those but they sound perfect so okay maybe I'll throw a little more let's say we talked about this earlier but I actually read this 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 future team you're part of a big company I'm not making this up you're on the AdWords team at Google and you're responsible for the you know bid input selector or something and it 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 I'll do anything for learning being willing to take those Boulder bats uh 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 it's a product but I think a really important one I was just interviewing a product leader at Asana Paige Costello and we were talking about how she's often the youngest person in the room and often manages people that are much older than her more experienced than her and asked her just how do you how do you do that at E60 in that sort of environment and what she's found is just being the person that has the answers and the insights in meetings people obviously run run to her like hey what do you think of this because she just knows what people are going to need and so I think that's exactly what you're talking about here is just be the person that knows the most about the problem the customers the space yeah yeah and then I'll come by the last two just because I know on time but the combination of I wrote data fluency which is not to say that ever PM needs to be a statistician I mean it's great I mean you've had a lot of great posts about like 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 beds and that data can be quantitative that data can be survey basic can be from doing a hundred meetings with customers yourself those are all types of data or inputs to me so being really fluent and then combining that with great product taste I know it's like a controversial statement now which is there is taste for product but I I do think in all the love of the Frameworks and the 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 uh and I actually think you know there's a lot there's a focus it's called like creative selection I forget the exact name of it about uh some of the early like iPhone development games at Apple and working with two jobs there and I've never worked for Apple but I actually think it's the best book I've read about the just iterative 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 that too is a combination is a pretty powerful combo let me ask you just a couple questions about this list before we get to a very exciting lightning round and I can let you go okay of these 10 attributes say your new product manager if you have to pick two or three that you think are most important to get right and focus on in your early career which would you say they would be 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 news for impact even if the impact is more local because that's how you actually will demonstrate momentum and build credibility and then I actually think early on getting really fluent on the data and the research side so that you can have insights that you can read back to your team those are to me like the most slammed up ways of of becoming someone to searchable credibility as a product manager in any organization awesome that's what I always tell on upms to just get really good at execution because that creates that aura of this person's just killing it they're just shipping on time people know it's happening they're hitting dates things like that yeah the last question is just say you're a senior moreover senior product leader say I don't know director are there three other attributes you think are ones they should focus on most or maybe yeah I mean I think this is where the piece of all of decision making starts to smell out more because you're still unresponsible sometimes for like teams of teams and you're helping to you know facilitate high quality decisions often ones that have a lot of uncertainty or risk or ambiguity so how do you keep the organization unblocked not just a team moving well I think the living in the future and working backwards I think the more senior you get you know it's always going to be the product founder who is responsible for the ultimate Vision but you become more responsible for the meeting the longer term strategy to realize that vision and so becoming just someone who can dedicate more of their 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 uh and the last one and we talked about this earlier about 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 to develop products at a company well with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round I've got six questions for you are you ready let's do it what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people these are may not be the most unique but I will say them which is in Arizona like leading Christians in whether you're working a large company and you're suffering it or you're working a startup and you're trying to out flank yeah and incumbent I still do think that an inner very solution follow-on are the best books on product strategy to read if you're moving into 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 beaten path there's a book called leadership in turbulent Times by Doris 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 in their presidency and I just think it's actually the best book about like leadership style and how do you evolve and how do you deal with crises which again is maybe 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 what is a favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed 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 the Shakespearean level drama of it all it's just incredible and just part-wrenching that you wind up kind of losing most of the characters that you you can't take yourself out of it the one that's maybe less common uh and I watched right when we started paternity leave is the bearer I don't know if you heard about it the uh restaurant yeah yeah I'm a sucker for like incredible cinematography and just like what they do and they say 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 Expedition or whatever but uh it is a really moving like emotionally like jarring piece of TV also quite stressful to watch I would not relaxed to it to go to sleep but awesome okay favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates you know 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 to you it might say unfair are you in secret I usually mean like not something that you probably read on like I mean what did you learn how did you learn it and how does it work and how do you apply it you also just get amazing interesting like bits of inspiration from asking that what is a favorite product you've recently discovered that you love this will also serve for repetitions for issue based on our email Thread about parenting points because none of the products I've learned or loved recently I've been like software but they're all maybe software enabled so Dynamic which is like a kind of weird name but it's just like AI enabled camera for basically you know watching your baby as they sleep it's like incredible it gives you like sleep analytics and like really helps you be a less neurotic parent I would highly recommend it uh this new which is basically like this amazing device that can help to your kid when all they need is like a little bit of like that you know soothing while they sleep so that you can sleep a little bit more you can tell the theme Here is sleep and the last one is there's just something called up a baby that has this whole like elaborate stroller system with interchangeable parts and honestly it's just like an incredibly well designed piece of like Hardware that that works in and out of the car so yeah I I think I really appreciated really well designed like hard products that are not necessarily Hardware from Apple and that has they were paid new parents is about I have all three also a huge shout out to the Nana team who sent me a nanet and all the stuff around the nanet uh so thank you I'm not gonna name the specific PM who sent it to me because I don't remember his name off the top of my head but thank you Nana yeah it turned out there's a whole world the baby Tech which I had no idea I mean makes sense of existed but you never know about so your parents and now I'm obsessed one tip that we for nanet so my wife and I have been playing with different names for our kid and we have been changing his name in the nanet so that anytime we go into the room it sends us a push hey there's activity in the room with the name so that we could kind of feel the different names I I really love that yeah my wife and I did something to remember where we we had like three or four final name contenders and we didn't use the Nana for but we literally just picked a week and said on Monday we're gonna like refer to the Future Baby by that name for the entire week and like give some you know personification to it and that helped us yeah get down from four to one so yeah what a wide ranging set of pieces of advice we got on this podcast two more questions what is something relatively minor you've changed in how you develop product at slack that has had a lot of impact on your ability to execute by far the biggest thing was in more of a 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 gotta kind of live and touch and smell the software you can't just look at it and that's been a huge unlock for avoiding spending months on design debates and just getting to well how does this Opera feel that's what matters speaking of slack final question what is your favorite slack Pro tip that people may not be aware of I'm 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 you'll fall in love with slack so the first is obviously you have a sidebar it can be unruly but you can customize the sidebar into sections in each of those sections you can have settings like show unread only or short by recency or short by alphabetical whatever it might be and you can collapse the section so you don't see it all at once so I think having a well-managered sidebar which doesn't actually take that long it's like this amazing thing because then all this inbound is structured in an order and a grouping that fits how you want to view your working life so customize inside bar and the second thing is just use the quick switcher for everything just hit applique and just start typing uh and it feels like they're playing a video game just hopping around sharing those people files search pretty much all the actions you can take are done as well I think most SAS products now have borrowed that pattern so yeah you can use another software but it works particularly well in Slack no I know the last thing you needed was to record a podcast your first week back to work I so appreciate you making the time it feels like we're two ships passing in the night from Pat leave and to new pet leaf and so two final questions where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and learn more and how can listeners be useful to you 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 awesome Noah thank you so much for being here thank you so much for having me bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode

Channel: Lenny's Podcast

Views: 9,502

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Id: XrRlVOWe5GE

Length: 85min 34sec (5134 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 23 2023