Noah Weiss: belief

Transcript context

…I'm imagining some PMs might be hearing this and wonder, "Okay. Great. Now the founders and the execs have all these things that they want us to fix. I have goals to hit. I got a roadmap. How do you think about prioritizing things that come up in these sorts of sessions for the team and how do they mix and match versus all the other stuff that you want to do? Or is it just like they don't actually have a huge roadmap and this is a way to inform the roadmap? No. I mean, more broadly, I think the way that we think about, or us to think about our roadmap for any feature team at Slack is that it's a portfolio and it's meant to be a portfolio that's diversified a couple different ways. I think one is you want to diversify things that are meant to be new capabilities versus making the thing you've already built a little bit better every day. Similar to parenting. Are there things that are meant to be risky that you aren't sure are going to work but might have a lot of upside versus things that are known bets. Then I think often you're balancing are you doing things that are meant to have impact that you're already very confident in versus things that are meant to learn about a new possibility space. I think for most teams, this stuff usually wind up tactically filling up that bucket of, "Let's make the existing product a little bit better every day for users." At Slack we have this thing we call customer Love Sprints, which is an interesting way team to figure out how to get this on their roadmap is it's hard to allocate that work throughout the quarter. What we'll wind up doing often is have a team do a two-week customer love sprint, almost like a hackathon, but with that burndown list of what we think is the lowest effort, highest impact changes that we can make to generate more love from our customers and whatever that feature areas. Then people just sprint for two weeks, design product engineering, and then you have a bunch of things that you celebrate. At the end, the goal is to ship all of them. This isn't hacks that you throw away. That's how we end up prioritizing it off in that work is actually making it this really fun total change of pace throughout the quarter to not do big feature work that may take months, but to do all these small delightful things that customers are going to love at the end. That's the other way that we figure out how to balance it in. I love that. How often do you do these sorts of customer Love Sprints?…

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