Noah Weiss: evaluation

Transcript context

…Is there anything else on Slack that you think would be interesting to share in terms of what makes it a successful product team, product business before I move on to another topic? The other thing I think is maybe a little bit interesting in terms of how we develop product and it's really different and it's changed over time, which is that obviously the easiest person to build for is yourself and the next easiest is people who look almost exactly like you or have similar preferences and sophistication. I think in the early days of Slack, that's basically what we did. I mean it was really just trying to build for small technologically savvy teams in terms of you could build a pretty big business making a great product for them. Over the years, obviously, that's changed. One of the things I think that we've done, which has worked really well, one obviously is we've figured out how to do experimentation in a SaaS product, which is not always obvious because the metrics are much longer term than you land at a checkout page and then you hit Checkout. But I think the other thing is we figured out how to scale up getting real customers using Slack in the wilds for new functionality. We have this really robust program that we call our pilot program where we have, I don't know, probably thousands of different customers that have all signed different agreements now where we can actually roll out to progressively larger user bases, because Slack is a multiplayer product. You often have to roll out real net new functionality to a whole company or whole team because otherwise you can't use huddles by yourself, for example. Then we have a really great program for actually getting feedback from those customers both through Slack connect itself through surveys and this winds up being a lifeblood of feature teams where you can, by the time you actually launch a big net new feature for Slack, have done so much customer feedback from people actually using in the wild to get work done and so much more confidence in what you're building from the metrics and the surveys that we do that you know can't guarantee it's going to be a hit. But you can be really confident not because it just worked well internally, which is no longer that predictive, but because it worked well for a thousand different companies, in 50 different countries, in 20 different industries. I think not early on SaaS companies don't need to figure that out, but I think as you grow and as you have a more diverse customer base as you said all these SaaS founders who said, "Hey, you got to keep reestablishing product market fit." I think that is a programmatic way of being able to do that with your product development process. That's pretty interesting. Any tips for how to choose who to include in this group if someone wants to build something like this for themselves?…

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