Merci Grace
Co-Founder & CEO, Panobi. On 2 shows, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveoperatorinvestor@merci ↗LinkedIn ↗mercigrace.co ↗
Merci Grace is best known for establishing and leading the growth practice at Slack as its first Head of Growth. She also founded the nonprofit community Women in Product, worked as an investment Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, and founded the SaaS platform Panobi.
2shows
1appearances
20statements
2resolved
1supported
0contradicted
50%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Merci Grace said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Grace: Software purchasing decisions are driven by emotion, not logic
“People don't make purchasing decisions because they have really, you know, logicked it out in their mind, even though we'd like to pretend that that's the case. Virtually all decisions that we make are really emotional in nature”
Grace: Big-tech PMs often fail at early-stage startups
“I have seen just hard fails from people who kind of like have that Silicon Valley passport that you're looking for. Oh, three years at Google, and then four years at Facebook. Fantastic. Not for your 20% startup. That person, especially people from Facebook th…”
Grace: Candidates spending 10 hours on take-homes show valuable commitment
“If someone is really motivated to be at your company, it's okay if they spend 10 hours on it, because that's actually a great signal that this is someone who really gives a and is really gonna, you know, is a craftsperson who really cares and is gonna put a lo…”
Grace: Sales teams cannot replace user researchers for product feedback
“My sales guys are bringing back information to HQ. You, but they're not really listening. They're selling. And they're listening for the name of the competitor, for the problem that matches the use case, because they have that great line about this feature, wh…”
Grace: Product teams should ignore competitor moves and features
“Definitely ignoring everything else that's happening is the best thing to do. Competition can be very distracting and it's easy to look at someone else and sort of assume that, like, they're more successful than you are, or that the flow that you went through …”
Grace: Nail SMB and end users before expanding to enterprise
“If you are selling to both enterprise and SMB, then I think just like anything else, nail the hell out of SMB first before you try to scale up into enterprise, because that is actually where the truism of, you know, like, oh, just follow the end user and don't…”
Grace: Video games act as continuous onboarding experiences until they end
“Games are basically onboarding experiences forever until the game is over, because you're always learning something new.”
Grace: Qualitative user research leverages evolved human sensitivity to behavioral cues
“The human body is an incredible information processing machine for the data of other people. We have evolved for a very long time to Understand what, like, a little shift in tone means, or a little flush of color, or, like, a small twitch of your eye, and so u…”
Grace: A Slack-like tool will emerge for blue-collar workers
“I think that something like Slack is going to emerge for pink and blue collar workers.”
Grace: A product's core loop relies on two or three features
“Cause what you're looking for is what is this core loop that people are going to come in and do over and over and over again. And it's probably just two or three features. You're going to need more to sell into enterprises and things like that. But ultimately …”
Grace: Limit product onboarding flows to three core concepts
“Isolating the few things that people really need to know about your product is really important, so oftentimes the onboarding flows that I've seen fail are ones where people are like, let me show you everything, and they're like, oh, and this thing, and then y…”
Grace: Users only notice screen changes within a coffee-cup-sized area
“If you have someone in, like, this lower part of the UI, And you've given them a hint about, oh, this is how you open this menu down here. They will not see something that happens outside of roughly like a coffee cup sized area around it, and that's often the …”
Grace: Designers must hone button text and headlines before visual designs
“People, you know, people don't read, but people read actually button text, and then headlines, so read that out loud to yourself, show it to everyone that you know, make sure that it's very, very crisp, and then the rest of the visual design will follow that, …”
Grace: Flowdock and HipChat had more features than early Slack
“Look at FlowDoc and look at HipChat and, like, there aren't any features that are different. And in fact, both of those products had more features and they had things like replies that we would consistently hear from people.”
Grace: Slack pushed mobile desktop parity too far
“Slack, as you probably have noticed, or maybe not has really gone for parody on the mobile app to an extreme. It's like one of the things that I disagreed with. I felt it should be more of an alert inbox and not something that was like fully fleshed out.”
Grace: Features in live competitor products are not proof they work
“Because again, you do not know what works for them. And just because something's in the product doesn't mean that it's working.”
Grace: Slack's growth team used RPG character sheets to test onboarding
“I created a product process out of this with my team as well, where when we were probably 30 people on the growth team, one of the really difficult things about always working on onboarding is that you need to constantly put yourself in the mind of someone who…”
Grace: Product teams must ensure visual subtlety does not become invisibility
“That's like the interesting sort of tension between product and design is like, you know, subtlety is beautiful, but the point at which subtlety becomes invisibility is like something to keep your eye out for.”
Grace: Slack added onboarding segmentation to feed data to enterprise sales
“The other thing that we did was we added in some segmentation and onboarding in order to give our sales team better and better data because then they would often go into sort of the C-suite of this larger company and be able to say, oh, hey, you know, we'd lik…”
The other half of the tape: Merci Grace's own voice is left out of every number here. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Statements about Merci Grace, by other people (1)
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Merci's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Panobi | 0 | 0 | 100% 1/1 | full record on 20VC → |
 SAASTRLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Panobi | 1 | 20 | 0% 0/1 | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |