Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I would think teams that work on very user facing products do it at least once a quarter. I think other teams that work on maybe less user facing might do it maybe twice a year. But quarterly is a pretty healthy cadence. Wow. I didn't know about that. That connects to ... Slack has always been a very delightful product. I remember early on the animations were so awesome, the little twirly, I don't know, pounds hashtag thing. It feels like Slack has always invested in delight. How do you operationalize that? Is it these customer Love Sprints? Is there something else that's just like we need to allocate some percentage, just make things really fun even though it's not going to move any metric? I would say it's a little bit good DNA of the company, honestly, which is that for co-founders trying to build a massive online role playing game for many years that was called Glitch and their background was all in building delightful, playful experiences. Glitch didn't work out. But, yeah, there's a whole long backstory. But the short version is a tool they had built internally that they then wound up spitting out a company from which became Slack. I think that DNA we're trying to build a consumer grade experience that just happens to be for work is really ingrained in the company. It's also a big part of how we hire. I would say 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. They bring that focus in the spirit and then I would say the last bit beyond kind of the principles and the complaints-storms and the customer love is that we have this amazing team that we call the CET team, the Customer Experience Team. They're in some ways the team that is doing our scale at Foursquare is most often in touch with our customers. From the very early days people used to do CE shifts if you worked in products so that you can actually figure out what's frustrating, what's confusing. We have a really great pipeline for getting the insights from the CE team of what are the obstacles, the pain points, the most frequent complaints into the hands of the product teams to be able to prioritize, to figure out, yeah, not all these are going to move a given metric. They might not achieve something for the business. But collectively, I think the way that Slack thinks about competition is we obsess it about customers. We build something they'll love enough to tell their coworkers and the rest takes care of itself.…

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