Stewart Butterfield: belief

Transcript context

…Let's go down that rabbit hole a little bit more around delight and craft. Slack was famous for being one of the early, let's say consumerized B2B SaaS products. Slack leaned into delight and experience and craft and a great experience. And you just as a product leader, I'd say are known as very taste forward, very craft oriented leader, which is pretty rare and I think continues to be rare. So there's a few things I want to talk about here. One is taste. I heard at a talk, you gave a talk on taste and you have a really unique perspective on just what taste is, what product taste looks like. Can you share that? There is a lot of you going back to the utility curves again, people who are obsessed with this one little thing and keep on adding more and more detailed improvements beyond the point where it makes much of a difference. But I guess a couple of things about taste. So one is can you learn to develop it? I think so because the word literally comes from experiencing food and putting stuff in your mouth. And can people become better chefs with training? Yes, absolutely. Undoubtedly, some people have a natural advantage and are born with this ability to make discernments that are difficult for other people to make and stuff like that. But you can definitely practice and you can definitely get better. The second thing I'd say is you can create a real advantage for yourself, for your product, for your company by leaning into it because most people don't have good taste and don't invest. You're probably familiar with, again, Jeff Bezos line, your margin is my opportunity and pretty obvious what he meant by that. I would tell the story at Slack over and over again. It actually made it part of the new hire welcome. I'm in Vancouver at our Vancouver office and I'm going for a walk with Brandon Velestuk who's our, at the time creative director for product development, I think that was his title. And we're in the Yaletown neighborhood in Vancouver so there's really narrow sidewalks because it used to be a warehouse district and now it's fancy restaurants and nail salons and boutiques and stuff. And as it does in Vancouver, it starts to rain. We don't have umbrellas. We're walking back to the office and most people have umbrellas and we're on these narrow sidewalks with people coming towards us with umbrellas. We noticed how few people would move their umbrella out of the way. And of course, the other person, their umbrella, the pokey bits are exactly at eye level for people walking towards them. We would get forced off the sidewalk or having to duck down or whatever. It became a game like we were guessing is this person going to tilt their umbrella out of the way so we can pass or not? And something like one-third of the people would do it. And we had this conversation about it where it's like, okay, I can think of three reasons why people wouldn't do it. One is they have very few avenues in their life to exercise power and this is one of them. And they're just, want to get out there and dominate people and cause suffering. Shouldn't ascribe to malice that which can be ascribed to ignorance so that probably is the explanation for a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of people. But the other two explanations aren't that great either. One is that they see it's happening, they see they're pushing other people off the sidewalk or poking them in the eye or whatever, and they're just like, "Fuck, that's too bad. I wish there was something I could do about that, but I can't think of anything." And the last reason is they just don't notice it all. e eye or whatever, and they're just like, "Fuck, that's too bad. I wish there was something I could do about that, but I can't think of anything." And the last reason is they just don't notice it all. They're just oblivious to their impact on other people. And they're so in their head, and I can't really think of any other explanations for it besides that. And so we would say it's not like tilting your umbrella is our opportunity. That's not a great rephrase of your margin is my opportunity, but your failure to really be consider it exercise this courtesy and really be empathic about other people's experience is an advantage that you can create a critical advantage. I think that there's many reasons why Slack was successful at the moment. It was successful and we think we had a bunch of really wonderful tailwinds and all of that stuff, but it wouldn't have grown the way it did without those little conveniences which caused people to form an emotional connection because a lot of our growth came from startup A uses Slack, and then someone leaves startup A for startup B, and startup B doesn't use Slack yet. And they would be like, "Oh my God, you guys, you really, this is so good. We got to try it." And the spread was driven by that and people really genuinely advocating for it.…

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