Jul 23, 2023 · 1h 25m · lennys-podcast
The 10 traits of great PMs, AI, and Slack’s approach to product | Noah Weiss (Slack, Google)
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Noah Weiss, Chief Product Officer at Slack, joins Lenny Rachitsky to discuss the core traits of elite product managers, strategies for shipping AI products, internal rituals for cultivating customer delight, and navigating product-led growth.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Lenny holds 26.8% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Lenny as informed peer 4.3 Guest teaching 6.1 Guest disagreement 0.3 Lenny pushing back 0.6
speaking balance: gold is Lenny, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 1:05:35 Noah dismantles the 'PM as mini-CEO' metaphor
Noah emphatically criticizes the conventional Silicon Valley trope of PMs being mini-CEOs, labeling it the single most dangerous piece of advice that leads to dictatorial behavior.
Hardest push from Lenny ▶ 15:08 Lenny challenges the idealized U-curve founder involvement modelLenny challenges Noah's U-curve framework by asking what happens when the final late-stage check-in triggers founder rejection of the team's entire output.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 49:05 Noah explains the 'successful teams' leading metric at SlackNoah details how Slack identified a non-obvious leading metric—getting five people communicating during a single work week—which boosted downstream paid conversion likelihood by 400 percent.
Lenny holds their own ▶ 1:10:38 Lenny enriches the writing discussion with tactical frameworks and literatureLenny demonstrates deep craft knowledge by contributing specific editorial lessons from his newsletter alongside three targeted book recommendations on concise writing.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Lenny as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Lenny pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paternity Leave Reflections and Parenting Advice | 3 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Lenny establishes a warm, collegial rapport by bringing up his upcoming paternity leave. Noah offers tactical, experiential parenting rules of thumb, which Lenny enthusiastically jots down on a sticky note. | |
| Foursquare Reflections and Consumer vs. B2B Pivots | 5 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Lenny shares that he built his startup LocalMind on Foursquare's API before selling to Airbnb, giving him direct domain context. Noah explains why consumer social shifted toward moment-sharing rather than place-based check-ins and why B2B data monetization provided a sustainable pivot. | |
| Collaborating Effectively with Product-Minded Founders | 4 | 7 | 1 | 3 | Noah outlines his U-curve model for founder involvement, emphasizing early strategic alignment and late-stage polish. Lenny pushes back by asking about scenarios where the final review reveals a severe mismatch between the founder's expectations and the shipped product. | |
| Slack’s Product Principles: Hospitality and Simplicity | 4 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Noah outlines Slack's product principles such as 'be a great host' and 'don't make me think.' Lenny interjects with domain validation, pointing out that 'be a host' was also one of Airbnb's core foundational values. | |
| AI in Product Development and Slack's AI Vision | 4 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Noah discusses AI lessons from his early Google Search and Knowledge Graph days, highlighting UI promises versus underlying data quality. Lenny connects this to Spotify's 'magic play button' dilemma described by Gustav Söderström. | |
| Structuring Teams for AI Innovation | 4 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Noah explains Slack's hybrid organizational model for AI, pairing central ML infrastructure with dedicated application prototyping teams. Lenny validates this by citing similar patterns he has observed across multiple tech company interviews. | |
| Customer Love Sprints and Operationalizing Delight | 4 | 7 | 0 | 1 | Noah breaks down complaint storms and quarterly 'customer love sprints' focused on rapid polish burndowns. Lenny notes the similarity to Stripe's friction logging and inquires how to balance delightful craft work with hard metric goals. | |
| Competitive Strategy: Teams, Discord, and HipChat | 4 | 7 | 1 | 1 | Noah contrasts Slack's customer-obsessed strategy with competitors like HipChat, Discord, and Microsoft Teams. He explains how Teams evolved primarily into a bundled video conferencing tool while Slack remained the daily workflow hub. | |
| Fostering Zero-to-One Innovation Within Large Organizations | 3 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Noah details the metaphor of 'getting to the next hill' to avoid incrementalism, giving zero-to-one teams a get-out-of-jail-free card from standard quarterly planning cycles. Lenny facilitates by exploring the genesis of features like Huddles. | |
| Sponsor: Vanta | 2 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Following the mid-roll ad read for Vanta, Noah describes product rituals such as reviewing mean user tweets and running real-time collaborative Slack threads during live usability testing sessions. | |
| Turning Around Slack’s Self-Service Business Plateau | 6 | 8 | 0 | 0 | Noah explains how Slack diagnosed its 2018-2019 self-serve plateau by resetting its roadmap, introducing freemium trials, and establishing the 'successful teams' metric (5 DAUs across a week). Lenny synthesizes this with insights from other B2B SaaS founder interviews regarding recurring S-curves. | |
| Product-Led Growth Realities and Enterprise Expansion | 5 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Noah outlines how organic bottom-up adoption inside large enterprise accounts created the pipeline for enterprise sales. When Noah remarks that certain software categories like compliance may not rely on word of mouth, Lenny gently counters by noting that great security tools like Sentry or Vanta generate strong organic startup advocacy. | |
| Structuring Multi-Customer Pilot Programs | 4 | 6 | 0 | 0 | Noah breaks down how Slack structures multi-customer pilot programs across hundreds of companies to validate multiplayer workflows before general availability. Lenny parallels this with Stripe's methodology of building intimately with pilot users. | |
| Deconstructing the 10 Traits of Great Product Managers | 8 | 6 | 1 | 1 | Lenny and Noah review the 10 traits of great PMs. Lenny demonstrates substantial domain authority, citing recommendations and frameworks from Brian Chesky, Paul Graham, Shreyas Doshi, and Paige Costello, while adding three specific book recommendations to Noah's writing section. | |
| Lightning Round and Slack Pro Tips | 4 | 5 | 0 | 0 | In the lightning round, Noah shares book recommendations, baby tech gear, and Slack productivity tips like quick switchers and sidebar sections. Lenny shares personal parenting tips and closes out the episode. |
Statements from this episode (25)
Weiss: Foursquare lost social to Instagram by anchoring to places, not moments
“In hindsight, we were a little bit mistaken to believe that the idea that the atomic unit would be a person talking about a place that they're at, and you have to have a physical place to tie it to, versus a person sharing a moment or an experience that they'r…”
Weiss: B2B provides much faster feedback than ad-supported consumer startups
“I think the feedback that you get from are people willing to pay for the product that you're building is so much faster than can I build a large scale consumer business and one day hope to have enough reach to then slap ads onto it. That's a much more of a kin…”
Weiss: Joining a CEO with your functional background maximizes learning and frustration
“If you're joining a company and the CEO does the role that is your functional area of expertise, it's probably the area where you'll learn the most because they're hopefully world-class at it, but also when will you, you'll be the most frustrated at times beca…”
Weiss: Founder-CEO product involvement works best as a U-curve
“I think when to involve the founder CEO in a project is really important. And the short version, I think that works the best is almost like a U curve where the X axis is time and the Y axis is level of involvement. I think you want to get the founders, you kno…”
Weiss: Software creators' 'owner's delusion' prevents building simple products
“Often, actually, that kind of owner's delusion that someone else will care as much about the software that you built as you do prevents you from actually making something that's simple, comprehensible, understandable”
Weiss: Adding user clicks can often improve non-transactional software UX
“There's a saying we also have, which is more clicks can often be okay. You know, you often have in, you know, optimization, you know, experimentation circles, like, oh, every click, remove it. But I actually think in a lot of software when it's not transaction…”
Weiss: AI UI must match data quality rather than projecting false confidence
“The promise of the UI has to match the quality of that underlying data. Which is to say, and I think that's actually one of the failings of the various LMs right now is they all appear supremely confident, even when they're completely hallucinating.”
Weiss: Slack is testing internal prototypes of conversational AI bots
“I can safely say we have a lot of prototypes internally where we are playing with this.”
Weiss: Fully automated AI 'chief of staff' for Slack won't arrive soon
“I don't think that's gonna quite be possible anytime soon, but I think like Spotify heading towards that north star, you end up developing, I hope a lot of really compelling projects for instance along the way.”
Weiss: Slack organizes AI development using central infrastructure and prototyping pods
“We have a kind of central machine learning and search team, but there's a lot of people have expertise in this field to build infrastructure that everybody can use. And what we've done is Because the space is evolving so quickly, like literally every month, li…”
Weiss: Living in your own software blinds teams to beginner user friction
“If you work on Figma or you work on Slack, you also live in Slack and you live in Figma all day. So you can become more of a power user than anyone else on earth. And what we were realizing, especially for people trying to build Slack for the next million cust…”
Weiss: Critiquing competitor products helps unstuck teams unlock new ideas
“Whenever a team, I think either gets stuck or feels like they reached like a dead end in a direction is Doing complaint stores about the product area that they're in or using adjacent products just to get inspiration. And then I think it kind of unlocks a lot …”
Weiss: Most PMs, designers, and engineers joining Slack lacked enterprise software backgrounds
“Certainly the majority of PMs, designers, and engineers who joined Slack had never worked at an enterprise software company before. It's not like most people had worked at Oracle or SAP. It's most people had worked at consumer companies or game companies, and …”
Weiss: Microsoft built Teams defensively to protect Office against Slack
“I think, you know, the origin of Teams really was a defensive move for them to protect Office, because Office is an incredible, very profitable kind of monopoly in the productivity space. And so I think when they built Teams, it was more of a kind of covering …”
Weiss: Teams evolved into a video conferencing tool competing with Zoom
“I think as Teams has evolved over time, it's become much more of a video conferencing product that competes with like Zoom and Google Meet, the people who use Teams use it completely different than Slack where you live and breathe and channels and work and kin…”
Weiss: Slack develops zero-to-one features by establishing scratch incubation teams
“Structurally the way that we've approached it is that we've over time created kind of new teams from scratch that incubate in a new area before the areas mature. So we did that with a lot of these kind of native audiovisual products like huddles and clips earl…”
Weiss: Incubating product teams must be exempt from quarterly reviews
“And I think when we have those teams, I think it's important to just give them space to run, to give them kind of a gel free card for maybe the normal process of, you know, okay, our planning quarterly reviews and make it feel something that is like the pace o…”
Weiss: Slack doubled paid customer growth after a 2018 self-serve pivot
“We wound up kind of doubling the rate of our new paid customer growth in the year and a couple of years after that and kind of reaccelerating the self service business.”
Weiss: Five Active Users Made Slack Teams 400% More Likely to Upgrade
“What we found was that if you could get five people using Slack the majority of the work week to just communicate at all, that would be a successful team. They're going to be 400% more likely to upgrade over the next six months.”
Weiss: Product-Market Fit Is a Stack of S-Curves Across Audiences
“Product market fit is almost like you keep stacking these S curves where you get product market fit in a small group, and then you suddenly reach like exponential growth because you can crack that whole group, that type of audience. But then you start declinin…”
Weiss: Slack's Original Pitch Deck Targeted Companies of 5 to 50 People
“When the original pitch deck came to the investors, they said, Slack is for companies of five to 50 people. At the time, the biggest company imagined using Slack was 50 people, because I don't know how this is going to work beyond that. You know, it'll become …”
Weiss: Slack's Early Enterprise Sales Called Domains Sorted by User Count
“And then by the time we then scaled our enterprise sales team, I mean, truly the exercise initially was just take customer domain, sort by number of active users and call them in the order of that, which is, you know, Hey, by the way, you have a couple thousan…”
Weiss: Calling PMs 'mini-CEOs' is the most dangerous product management advice
“We should find out who wrote that expression early on of, like, PMs should be mini CEOs. I think that's the most dangerous piece of advice ever in the history of product management, because I think that is how you wind up having PMs who try to act like dictato…”
Weiss: Writing is the only scalable way to influence large product orgs
“I said, write well, like I actually think, especially as you get to more senior positions, writing is the only scalable way of having influence on a larger and larger product org.”
Noah Weiss: Prototyping real software beats static design mocks
“By far the biggest thing, which is more of a cultural shift is that we stopped spending so many cycles on design explorations of like static mocks or walkthroughs and said, how quickly can we get into prototyping the path in real software? Even if it's messy a…”