Noah Desai Weiss
Chief Product Officer, Slack. On 4 shows, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executiveoperator@noah_weiss ↗LinkedIn ↗
Noah Desai Weiss is the Chief Product Officer at Slack, where he oversees product strategy and development. He previously served as Senior Vice President of Product and Analytics at Foursquare and worked as a product manager at Google.
4shows
1appearances
31statements
12resolved
9supported
1contradicted
75%fully supported
Everything Noah Desai Weiss said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Weiss: Data solves easy product problems, but big swings require intuition
“What we used to actually say early on was, you know, data can help solve easy problems, but doesn't actually solve the hard problems. And hard problems are ones where you can't actually just experiment your way, you know, down incremental paths. You actually h…”
Weiss: Product taste is not innate and can be 100% learned
“My honest kind of feeling is that almost everything can be taught. That teaching may be more informal. It may be more observational. You know, product design, product intuition, I think is really about seeing what great looks like and being part of the process…”
Weiss: Next-gen product-led SaaS companies will reach $10B within a decade
“And then I think kind of the next generation of companies like notion air table and so on, you know, these companies are all early on in their life cycle. I think give it another decade. And I think, you know, the companies that are a billion or two billion mi…”
Weiss: Product managers acting like "mini-CEOs" alienate their teams
“I will tell you that people who take the approach of being a mini CEO for a team are the ones who their teams wind up saying, why do we have to have a product manager on our team? Can't we do it without them? Because, you know, you can wind up accidentally bei…”
Weiss: PLG companies expanding to enterprise shouldn't start with outbound BDRs
“Starting off with building out a huge BDR team to do inside sales for cold leads feels like If you already had a product-led growth motion, not the right place to begin. Because I think, without a doubt, the best leads aren't ones that you cold emailed or that…”
Weiss: Product founder CEOs should follow a U-shaped involvement model
“If you think about like a major product initiative, not an experiment, but something more significant, that's like this big kind of bet. And you think about the X axis is kind of the time that goes on from the project starting to maybe launch. And the Y axis i…”
Weiss: Google was notorious for demoralizing eleventh-hour launch cancellations
“Or the absolute worst thing, and this happened at Google all the time, they were notorious for this, is like launch, Readiness review something or other. And you did all this work. You maybe worked for years as a team. And it's like, finally, you have one of t…”
Weiss: Early products lack the scale for A/B testing and require intuition
“And definitely for most early products, you don't even have the scale to actually be able to say, we ran a test, we're gonna run the test for a year before you get statistical significance. You have to use intuition, judgment, strategy a lot more.”
Weiss: Slack leans 75% on data for small features, 75% on taste for big bets
“Here's what I would say is, of smaller feature work, I would say it's probably 75% data-driven, where we'll actually run an experiment or run a release with a holdback. For larger, bolder, new features that are net-new capabilities, I would say it's maybe the …”
Weiss: Consistently neutral A/B test results signal a local optimum
“And this is, I think, often a good sign that you need to stop relying on experimentation and step back, which is that every experiment wasn't really positive or wasn't really negative. It was really just neutral. And it became increasingly hard to figure out W…”
Weiss: Product taste is learned by working with experts, not from classes
“It's something I think you learn much better by actually working side by side with folks who have really strong product taste and sensibility. And not by reading a lot, or taking some classes, or I don't know what it might be, because it's something that is in…”
Weiss: Slack scales founder product intuition via principles and 3-year strategy
“So the first is really just about making sure that we have everyone really aligned and energized around our mission, our vision, and our kind of what we call our three-year strategy internally. So that's kind of what people are aligned at a high level. But the…”
Weiss: Slack avoids endless debates by quickly prototyping functional software
“Prototype the path, which gets into how we at least approach a lot of what we do by not getting stuck in long product debates or endless design reviews, but actually figuring out what's the fastest path to being able to actually touch the software with your ow…”
Weiss: Product Teams Should Hire PMs with Distinct Spikes, Not Generalists
“No one person we hire looks like a perfect sphere. Right? So what we look for actually is people who have clear spikes on one or two of those axes, and also is well-rounded, but what are their superpowers? It's one of the things we talk about when we bring som…”
Weiss: Scaling Orgs Slow Down Due to Consensus Decision Bottlenecks
“Most of the reasons why you're moving slower is because decisions start grinding to a halt. You have a consensus based kind of model. Everyone gets a voice. You don't have a framework for how you actually get to resolution.”
Weiss: Bottom-up product strategy fails when executive buyers do not use software
“And so I think that's probably if I was going to delineate is figuring out this approach works best when we actually have an alignment between the end users and the people who at least can make the initial purchase decision and definitely works the worst if yo…”
Weiss: Salesforce is pound-for-pound the world's best enterprise sales machine
“In some ways, to your point, that kind of premise, if you will, of the acquisition was, if you can take the company that pound for pound is probably the absolute best at enterprise sales and marketing in the world, as in Salesforce, and you can take the compan…”
Weiss: Salesforce is effectively the Berkshire Hathaway of SaaS
“Salesforce itself is almost like the Berkshire Hathaway of SaaS, if you will. Like, they are a conglomerate that has many different product lines. So they definitely have a single voice as a corporation or an umbrella brand, but all their products kind of live…”
Weiss: Slack historically underpriced its product by prioritizing value creation
“I think Slack maybe, I think historically probably has underpriced the product versus the value we've created for customers. Part of that I think is one of our maxims from the very early days is we focus on value creation, not value extraction.”
Weiss: Company strategy presentations are forgotten within a month without repetition
“If you can keep an organization aligned and focused, it's like a superpower for velocity, but alignment isn't static. You don't get to do it once. I mean, this is even if you, like, present a three-year company strategy. If you don't talk about it over the nex…”
Weiss estimates Slack's product portfolio allocation is roughly 60-35-5
“Across the board, I would say we probably look, my hunch that I haven't actually, like, actually done the math on it, is we probably look a little bit more, like, 60, 35, five, if you will. Not quite as many fully speculative things, but maybe focus a little b…”
Weiss: Multi-year product bets must be decomposed into sequential public milestones
“For any one of our large product areas, a lot of what we talk about when we're making big new investments is you have this grand vision. Okay. We're probably not going to spend the next five years building this out and then ship it and see do customers like it…”
Weiss: Slack reached $80M-$90M ARR before hiring a sales head
“I think we got to,
I want to say, 80 or ninety million dollars in ARR before we hired a head of sales.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Noah's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 IN DEPTHLEDGER | Chief Product Officer, Slack | 1 | 31 | 67% 2/3 | full record on In Depth → |
 20VCLEDGER | Chief Product Officer, Slack | 0 | 0 | 75% 3/4 | full record on 20VC → |
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Chief Product Officer, Slack | 0 | 0 | 0% 0/1 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
 MADLEDGER | Chief Product Officer, Slack | 0 | 0 | 100% 4/4 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |