Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…We've got a prototype for that. Hopefully it'll work well enough that actually be useful for customers, too. You tweeted once about how ... I think maybe around the time you joined Slack around 2019 that the self-service business of Slack basically plateaued and it wasn't clear why. I'm curious just what that period was like and how did you get to the bottom of what was going on and turn things around. Yeah. It was actually a couple years after I joined, but it was a point where I was focused on the self-service business because we had this period with Slack where I would say maybe 2014 to 2017 where it was almost all self-service and it was just growing like gangbusters. Then we started spinning up the sales team and an enterprise team. We started focusing mostly on that. I think we saw the team that was working on, but it was primarily the company's focus was all driving enterprise deals, getting to that next level of maturity. Then in 2019, I think we started to see that when we looked beneath the surface, the fundamentals of the self-service business weren't looking as healthy as they used to be. I think the biggest thing as we dug into it was a little bit to what we were talking about earlier with the motivation and complaints terms is it was getting harder to understand what the next generation of Slack customers really wanted from the product. Whether you're thinking about this as crossing the chasm or moving from kind of early adopters to the needs, the more majority or later adopters, I think we're at that point where not every technologically sophisticated company on earth was using Slack, but most were, and we were getting into a market that customers just had different needs. They had different levels of sophistication. We did a lot of user research. We looked at all these cohort curves, which you can imagine suddenly they're like, "Huh, they're not as healthy as they used to be like. What's going on?" I think we got a bunch of insights from it. But I think really what we want to change about how we were operating was instead of to continue to try to optimize the things that had worked over the last couple years, we said, "Okay. Let's throw the whole roadmap away and instead let's come up with a bunch of hypotheses about what could be new levers that could actually help based on the insights that we now have about the next set of customers." "We're going to try to quickly learn which of these levers are real and which of these are just totally off the mark." We had to say for the next six months, we're probably not going to drive any impact at all. It's only going to be about learning. But at the end of that, hopefully we wind up finding a couple different levers that had years of room run and that's what wound up happening. We wound up doubling the rate of our new pay customer growth in the year and a couple years after that and accelerating the self-service business. I think it really came from stepping back, being humble, not feeling like we deserve to have every company on earth sign up and then figuring out how to optimize for learning. In the long term you could get the impact. But knowing that for the next couple quarters we're going to sacrifice impact for the sake of learning. I think that was a good muscle to build, but it was definitely not easy to do at the time.…

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