The Exchanges

Q like when translated into a product roadmap. There are tons of useful tactics that Noah covers in our conversation today that product leaders can try tomorrow. And now my conversation with Noah. So maybe to kick things off, I can, I can sort of throw out some, some different things that popped to mind for me. The first is what common product building advice do you disagree the most with?

A One of the things that we talked a lot about at Slack, which is very in contrast to my early days at Google, is about not being data driven with every decision that you make. 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 have to figure out, here's a big swing I want to take. How do you know that's the right swing? It's intuition. It's data informed. It's product sensibility. It's understanding where the market's heading. Those are the really hard tragedy problems that I don't, I don't think you can just rely on data as a total crutch for, but I think in the field of product, it's become very fashionable to say everything can be empirically answered by data unless you're running everything as an experiment, you're doing it wrong. And I would disagree gently with that.

AI assessment note: “not being data driven with every decision that you make”

Q Are there any examples that popped to mind where you flipped sort of your thinking on that? Meaning you sort of thought the work had to be intuition driven and actually it could be much more data driven or something that seemed quite data driven, but you found the optimal strategy is to lean on judgment.

A Good example of the latter, which is that probably mid-two 1020, we had actually done a ton of, I mean, really great data-driven work to really think about the optimization of that kind of initial new user, new team, sign up and onboarding funnel. But what we had seen is that we kind of reached a plateau. 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 What's going on where we can't make any positive or negative effect, which kind of seems to me that we had reached a, at least a local optima with the overall kind of end-to-end experience. And so what we wound up doing, kind of understanding that we had reached that plateau, is really taking a step back, and we had this project that we called Day One, where we overhauled the entire first day experience from the moment you land on the website or the mobile app through creation, onboarding, inviting your first few teammates, getting to that initial conversation, and Because that was so many different things were changing at once. There wasn't a way to decompose this into 20 different experiments, obviously. And it was one of those things where if you think about it, kind of like this mountain range, we were at the top of on…

AI assessment note: “Good example of the latter, which is that probably mid-two 1020, we had actually done”

Q Maybe kind of taking a slight turn, what do you think are the most underrated qualities in the best people you've worked with just writ large?

A It's a good question. So what I would say, I think, especially in this hybrid or remote world, whatever you want to call it, the ability to actually write really well matters an incredible amount. And by that, I mean, can you write Succinctly, clearly, persuasively. Can you do it quickly? And can you figure out how to influence or align an organization in a way that's much more scalable through writing versus, you know, endless meetings that you otherwise might be in? I think something that I see a lot of folks do too is thinking about how do you really drive the pace and quality of decision making? And most organizations, as they scale, the number one complaint people say is, Why do we move so much slower now? Should we move faster? And 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. And so I think, you know, there's not one size fits all kind of model. It depends on the organization, depends on the scale, but driving that pace of high quality decision making and You know, the last thing I would say is we talk a lot about the vibe of a team at Slack.

AI assessment note: “the ability to actually write really well matters an incredible amount”

Q any sort of product strategy, there's like obvious things to nail down or do. There's a lot of those things, but there's often really big step function type projects That both require a lot of effort and will likely fail, but a subset of those, you know, similar, I think venture investing end up building like the next pillar of the business and any thoughts on like managing for that?

A Yeah, it's one of my favorite things to think about because it's hard in the inclination over time is to have, you know, a localized team where you're really focused on a subset of the feature space and you have one or two KPIs and In a given quarter, you know, you feel like success for you, for the team is, you know, incrementally moving that KPI that you're directly responsible for. That obviously is kind of antithetical to what you just described, which is very important, which is how do you take these huge swings that can be transformative for the business, even though the chance of success might be much lower. It's so much a struggle. I think that we actually created one of our five or six product principles is literally the term take bigger, bolder bets. That is literally one of the product principles. Uh, and I saw something the other day, they're like, well, that's so obvious. Why is that a principle? I'm like, well, you go check out an organization of a thousand people in product development and see if that's so obvious for people to do. There's a lot of laws of gravity, I think, as an organization scales that prohibits you from doing that. So I think things that we do to then encourage that besides just call it a principle, uh, one is when we're doing kind of reviews of teams, roadmaps, To your point, we actually do look a lot at what's the portfolio and how is it div…

AI assessment note: “we actually do look a lot at what's the portfolio and how is it diversified?”

Q What about anything on pricing specifically? Has that sort of evolved in a big way? Or, I mean, I assume it's just such an enormous sort of way in which Salesforce, I'm sure, obsesses

A It's interesting. I remember at an executive offsite, supposed to be like six years ago now, Marc Andreessen came to do a fireside chat. I swear, let's look back to Salesforce in a second. And, you know, this is probably right at when we were first building out at the beginning of our enterprise sales team. Maybe we had like 10 salespeople or 20 salespeople. And we were just, you know, asking the most naive questions, because most of us had never worked in enterprise software before. And I think we'd maybe ask him, how do you think about pricing for the enterprise? And he says, you know, with a very straight face, he thinks, And then he says, think about what you think you should price the product, then double the price. And we're all like, whoa, that would be so much. And then he says, then double it one more time. And he's like, that's probably the place you should start. That's not where we started. 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. And so I think when given the two options, that's kind of always where we bias ignoring literally the sticker price of the software. I think the thing that we've still tried to build initial muscle from, but Salesforce is definitely world-…

AI assessment note: “Salesforce is definitely world-class head is how do you think about decomposing your product suite”

Q So I wanted to wrap up with the question that I normally do, which is when you think about your role as a chief product officer, who are the folks that have had the most outsized impact on you? And what are like the specific ideas or way in which you work or behave that you picked up from them?

A For me, when I think kind of early on, as far as I know, maybe it's not true anymore. No one used to go to school to get a product management degree or to, you know, get a, I don't know, a certification in product management or anything like that. It's something that most people kind of stumble into at some point, and I was the same, and I was pretty fortunate to stumble into it, you know, on an internship in college. But I think throughout my career, and I, I feel like this is something I try to emulate myself, is there were a lot of folks who took bets on giving me a runway that I don't think were at all clear I was going to be able to work with, but were betting on kind of the trajectory of, of how I could grow and how I could stretch, opposed to literally who I was at that point in time. And I think that's probably the single thing that, you know, if you're looking at your own career is finding environments where the organization or the leaders in that organization are willing to make bets on people who obviously aptitude, but also hunger and creativity and willingness to stretch and grow. I think throughout every company I've ever worked at, that's been a super lucky and common part of when I feel like I I've been able to kind of accelerate my own development or accelerate my own career. I think At a company, it can be harder as maybe you get into more senior roles to feel…

AI assessment note: “there were a lot of folks who took bets on giving me a runway”