Slack

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“I'll tell you the best way to ramp that up is by making sure that those AEs are only talking to companies where there's already a lot of traction without ever needing a person to help them”

“They approach marketing in an iterative prototype driven way, the way that we've always approached products.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“I think we got to, I want to say, 80 or ninety million dollars in ARR before we hired a head of sales.”

“We have a team that's focused on more of the self-service business, this new user, new team journey, product-led growth. That team I would say, 95% of what they launch as an experiment. It's incredibly data-driven.”

“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…”

“77 of the Fortune 100 use Slack, and probably a hundred of them are Salesforce customers.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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 …”

“I don't know what the latest set is, but I know when we went public, we had a sat, I think it was 85% of our enterprise deals by the time we went Public at our IPO had started off as paid customers through self-service, meaning that they literally got to the p…”

“We're working on an entirely new kind of user interface and visual design navigation for Slack.”

“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…”

“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…”

“That went from, you know, zero to like 20,000 People in the Slack community, I think it is today.”

“A lot of these things go out of style and like a doc, I'm not starting a Slack community. There are way too many of them. They get noisy. It's hard to scale. There's still value and I'm sure some people can still make it successful, but for me, I just don't th…”

“We first started the Slack community trying to go after VPs of HR and we were like, let's make it a VIP community. And it fell flat, like no conversation, nothing happened. But once we sort of broadened it up to sort of more all HR people, what we found is peo…”

“And when you look at ChatGPT, I think partly why it's been successful is that it's such a standalone product that's not integrated into anything else. And I think if it actually was integrated into your Slack or into your email or into your work, I think peopl…”

“If someone wants me to help them write SQL, or like, I don't know, debug something in Excel, like I'll go do something I do support for other people's products in Slack, because I just think it shows like a positive association with how much we care about thei…”

“You will be surprised at the difference in the conversation when you respond in one second versus one minute versus 10 minutes. Because when someone asks a question and you respond in 1:02, it immediately turns into a conversation. And It is very likely that y…”

“This is the first company where I actually know everything after we do an earnings call and our windows open and our CFO goes on the roadshow. I understand what they're saying and not just me. He sends out a slack to the entire company of the sentiment, the ov…”

“Talking things through live when people do have the shared like context, they just disagree is incredibly valuable and it's almost impossible to kind of like get to the end of these things on like a chat on Slack or something. You really do have to like talk i…”

“We didn't have the dynamic that Dropbox and Slack had where you have 30% of a company using it, especially when you go outside of the big tech companies. And so, A lot of times it would be like five percent of employee base”

“And so Dropbox and Slack, if you ask me what's the company value, well, the company value was securitizing, in a way, the bottoms-up problem that we created for them, which is all this rogue usage.”

“Eventually the way that we got a ton of customers was actually by cutting off all of the different ways that we supported customers. So we basically pushed all of our customers into the same channel. So anyone that would sign up to Clay, we would say, join our…”

“We have maybe 4600 people today in the Slack channel, and that's pretty active.”

“And here's a controversial one. There's times we spent a year. I'm like, you don't need to be here anymore. You have learned everything that you're going to learn here at Slack. It's time to go somewhere else. And I wouldn't say it like that, but there's truly…”

“I encourage teams to Post an experiment in Slack and get everyone to vote on which one they think is going to be the winner and let the founder and the head of products and the head of growth be very public about their bets. And then they're going to be wrong …”

“We don't do daily one-on-ones. We don't have sort of like extensive write-ups for the work that we're doing for the sake of showing that it's a lot of work. The way that we approach product building is we have a channel on Slack called Daily Updates where ever…”

“I heard Stuart Butterfield from Slack say it at a conference that, you know, if the money is available on good terms, you just take it. And the money was available and on good terms. So I took it and it allowed us to invest.”

“We have, I don't know, 500 different Slack channels with all the engineers from companies we work with. And the response rate of those Slack channels, you measure that daily and like we obsess over that.”

“The demo can be kind of broken up into everything that comes before showing the workflow builder and then everything that comes after, because before you show the workflow builder, people are bored and everything you show them, they think they've seen before. …”

“The reality is that most people don't care about the product only being 80% as good. For most people that doesn't matter. They're not willing to pay a lot more for that incremental, incremental piece.”

“Our attrition is extremely low, but the leaning into the async culture has helped because everything's written, everything's recorded, everything's captured in Slack or Notion, or one of our sales meetings is ingested into our warehouses, and this kind of solv…”