Oct 9, 2018 · 38m · saastr
Insider's Guide To Building Great Product w/Merci Grace, Slack's First Head of Product
Merci Grace · 26m spoken Alan Yen · 4m spoken Fred Hsu · 49s spoken Bernard Sled · 33s spoken Tim Murray · 23s spoken
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this SaaStr fireside chat, former Slack Head of Product Merci Grace outlines actionable frameworks for scaling product management, optimizing user onboarding, and building bottom-up growth through game design principles and deep user empathy.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. How this is scored →
Jason as informed peer 1.1 Guest teaching 5.2 Guest disagreement 2.0 Jason pushing back 0.2
speaking balance: gold is Jason, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 30:02 Dismissing competitor analysis completely
Merci bluntly rejects the audience member's premise of tracking rivals, arguing that monitoring competitors like Microsoft Teams and HipChat is an active distraction.
Hardest push from Jason ▶ 12:55 Probing PM take-home assessment guidelinesAlan challenges Merci to clarify the specifics of her interviewing framework, asking whether problem-solving tasks should be completed live on the fly or as take-home tests.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 11:15 Debunking the value of big-tech PM hiresMerci breaks down why hiring PMs with Facebook and Google pedigree often backfires at early-stage startups due to an over-reliance on statistical testing infrastructure.
Jason holds their own ▶ 4:38 Elaborating on user persona role-playAlan builds directly on Merci's discussion of user empathy by citing her specific exercise of adopting external user identities during rigorous product reviews.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Jason as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Jason pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Applying Game Design and Empathy to Product Thinking | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Alan prompts Merci to explain how her game design background influenced her product leadership. Merci details playtesting, emotional resonance, and Stuart Butterfield's exercise of looking at prototypes as a normal human being. | |
| Revamping Slack's Onboarding Flow via Customer Discovery | 2 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Alan inquires about the state of Slack's onboarding when Merci joined as employee 50. Merci recounts diagnosing invisible UI indicators through customer support tickets and running a GV design sprint to simplify the flow. | |
| Hiring Product Managers and Evaluating Startup Readiness | 3 | 6 | 3 | 1 | Merci argues against hiring PMs with prestigious big-tech backgrounds because they are accustomed to massive sample sizes and infrastructure unavailable at early-stage startups. Alan drills into the mechanics of take-home evaluation tests. | |
| Harnessing Qualitative User Research Versus Sales Feedback | 2 | 6 | 3 | 0 | Merci defends qualitative user research over sales feedback, explaining that sales representatives listen to close deals rather than surface foundational product issues. | |
| Exploring Market Opportunities and Angel Investing Focus | 2 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Alan asks about market gaps and the founding of the Women in Product community. Merci discusses opportunities in workflow tools for shift workers and creating spaces for female tech leaders. | |
| Q&A: Prioritizing Features with Constrained Engineering Resources | 0 | 5 | 1 | 0 | During audience Q&A, a founder asks about feature prioritization under engineering constraints. Merci emphasizes isolating and validating the core loop before worrying about secondary enterprise features. | |
| Q&A: Fostering Collaboration Between Product and Enterprise Sales | 0 | 5 | 2 | 0 | Merci answers audience questions on enterprise sales collaboration and UI copy. She warns founders against clever custom iconography and urges them to test sharp button copy and headline language first. | |
| Q&A: Managing Competition and Product Distractions | 0 | 7 | 4 | 0 | When asked how to track competitors like Microsoft Teams, Merci dismisses competitive tracking entirely, explaining that products like HipChat had more features but still lost because Slack focused on holistic user experience. | |
| Q&A: Prioritizing Enterprise Buyers Versus End Users | 0 | 6 | 2 | 0 | Merci addresses balancing enterprise buyer demands with end-user needs, advising founders to secure high SMB end-user adoption first before attempting enterprise compliance checklists. | |
| Q&A: Mobile Feature Parity and Video Game Onboarding Inspiration | 0 | 5 | 3 | 0 | Merci shares her internal disagreement with Slack's push for complete mobile feature parity, and recommends looking at video games like Monument Valley and Nintendo for onboarding inspiration rather than copying competitor SaaS apps. | |
| Q&A: Determining When to Depart an Early-Stage Startup | 0 | 3 | 1 | 0 | An audience member asks how to know when to leave a startup. Merci gives a candid, brief answer about moving on when bored or when culture turns toxic. |
Statements from this episode (21)
Yen: Grace scaled Slack from 500,000 to over 5 million DAUs
“And so while at Slack, she ran their growth team as director of product and took the company from 500,000 daily active users to over five million.”
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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…”
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: 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: Products are full experiences including sales, support, and copywriting
“Products are a whole experience that include Sales. They definitely include your support team. They include the language on your website, and that's how real people experience them.”
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: 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: 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.”