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Weiss: Slack product innovation slowed from 2018-2020 due to enterprise focus

Noah Weiss · Noah Weiss: How to Master Product-Led Growth; Scaling PLG to Enterprise at Google & Slack | E1026 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jun 16, 2023 · at 31:00

Noah Weiss is the Chief Product Officer at Slack. In response to criticism regarding Slack's shipping speed, he acknowledges that enterprise compliance and security priorities temporarily reduced core product velocity.

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“I mean, I think where internet was most true was 2018 to 2020. And I think I would, I think we would fess up to it entirely because back then, you know, this is again, I don't know if we could have done it differently. You're a small company. You can't do everything at once, but that's when we really made this kind of hard rotation on focusing on the enterprise buyer, the enterprise organization. And I think we did prioritize for a while kind of scalability and solving those really complex, you know, fortune, 500 use cases and compliance and security needs. And I think we did take the eye off a little bit, that core pace of product innovation, of pushing the boundary of what's category can be forward.”

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