Evidence receipt / recommendation
Published · transcript-backedStewart Butterfield: recommendation
20 Nov 2025 Lenny's Podcast Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield
“Rather than merging and say like, "Hey, you guys are a bunch of idiots wasting your time on this thing that doesn't matter.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Stewart Butterfield
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- recommendation
- Recorded
- 20 Nov 2025
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…Okay. Okay. [inaudible 01:07:37] it a try. And just to close the loop on that, the solution is the leader recognizing this is happening and stopping it. Telling people why are we spending time on this thing that is not going to get us anywhere? Yeah. And what you just said probably isn't the best way because that sounds like you're chiding them, and they're dumb. When it's actually your responsibility to make sure that there's sufficient clarity around what the priorities are, and explicitly saying no to things upfront and stuff like that. Rather than merging and say like, "Hey, you guys are a bunch of idiots wasting your time on this thing that doesn't matter. " Whose fault is it? It's the manager's fault. It's the VP of whatever's fault. It's the CX, whatever, it's the C... Ultimately, it's the leader of the organization that has the responsibility to make sure that there is sufficient known-valuable work to do. And that's actually harder than it might appear. Okay. Before we run out of time, I want to touch on two other topics. One is, when people think of Stewart Butterfield, I think a lot of people think of, We Don't Sell Saddles Here. Your legendary Medium post that is just, I don't know, it's become a historic piece of literature in the annals of product building and in startups. I haven't heard people ask you much about this recently. So let me just ask a couple of questions. What was the reason you put that out? What was the backstory on writing that memo? Why was it necessary? Why was it necessary?…
Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.