Stewart Butterfield: belief

Transcript context

…I love just even the way you summarize this, just a really good reframing of, instead of obsessing with reducing friction and reducing steps, instead think, how do I reduce the amount of thinking the user has to do? I've never heard of it described as, you have to think about the ATP and glucose being used to actually think, and your goal is to reduce that versus let's just reduce friction, reduce clicks. Yeah. I think in my more cynical examples, I would say to people, " Stop what you're doing for a second, close-" Stop what you're doing for a second. Close your eyes, take a couple of deep breaths, and then pretend that you're an actual human being. And open their eyes again, and then look at this thing and see, can you figure out what it's supposed to do or say. Or what action you're supposed to take or what the impact will be if you take that action. There's a whole nother related cycle. But before I get into it, I know that I am verbose. I want to wrap up your last example of people being unsatisfied. So here's the quote that I was trying to find. This is 2014, so like that was the year that Slack actually launched officially in February. And this is now near the end of the year. I was interviewed by MIT Technology Review and asked if we were working to improve Slack. I said, "Oh God, yeah. I try to instill this into the rest of the team, but certainly I feel like what we have right now is just a giant piece of shit. It's just terrible and we should be humiliated that we offer this to the public. Not everyone finds that motivational though." So I came into the office the next day and people had printed out on like 40 pieces of 8.5 by 11 paper that quote, and pasted it up on the wall. But to me that was like, you should be embarrassed by it. It should be a perpetual desire to improve. You should probably be like, "Oh, this is great," and you could be proud of individual pieces of work. But in the aggregate, if you can't see almost limitless opportunities to improve, then you shouldn't be designing the product, or you shouldn't be in charge of the company, or you shouldn't almost nothing. Again, you could reduce it down to a tiny feature is anywhere close to perfect. And if A, that's acknowledged freely inside the organization. And B, people think about continually improving as the goal. And that could be like Six Sigma Toyota, Kaizen, that kind of side of thing. Or it could be that story that... I can't remember his name right now. The guy who started Bridgewater tells about Michael Jordan- Ray Dalio.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.