Noah Weiss: evaluation

Transcript context

…Slack is a big-ish company within now let's say a big company. But it feels like you still are launching really interesting stuff, you launch huddles, clips, there's this AI stuff coming, sounds like. I'm curious what you have done at Slack to enable these sorts of zero to one bets and what you've seen is important to allow for innovation along those lines. I think maybe we're all a little self-delusional, because I think everyone who works at Slack likes to think that we're still at a small startup. I think keeping that spirit alive, honestly culturally has been a big part of it. I think going back to the principles early on, one of the ones that we did talk about, literally one of the actual wording is take bigger boulder bets. The idea there is that it's really easy to fall into the trap of just constant incrementalism. The concept, it's like a feature team and you have like a KPI and you feel like your whole life is measured by that similar KPI going up 1% a quarter and then you lose sight of what's beyond the horizon. We have this mental metaphor that we talk a lot about getting to the next hill. The idea is that if you're in a mountain range and you're maybe in the little valley, you can see what's right in front of you. But you have no idea how tall the mountains are behind. I think teams can often get lost crawling up that hill, not realizing that there's a huge, incredibly beautiful range behind it. Take bigger boulder bets. Get to the next hill to see what the horizon wants around you. That's how we think about it strategically. Then I think structurally the way we've approached it is that we've over time freighted new teams from scratch that incubated in a new area before the area mature. We did that with a lot of these native audiovisual products like huddles and clips really in the pandemic because our customers were demanding it from us. They were like, "We love living in Slack all day. But we feel disconnected from our teammates when we can't be in the same physical place. What can you do to help us?" That's where that came from. I think in the AI space now, it's a similar thing, which is what we're trying to hear from customers. What do you wish Slack could do if it had these new superpowers? Let's incubate a couple teams, a prototype there and then figure out what can get to real product market fit. I think when we have those teams, I think it's important to just give them space to run, to give them ... get a gel free card for maybe the normal process of, "Okay. Our planning quarterly reviews" and make it feel something that is the pace of learning is what matters. How fast are you prototyping, how fast are you learning from users and then getting to do that publicly and pilot and then get something to launch that's amazing, blows people away. That's the formula that we've seen. This episode is brought to you by Vanta, helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate your growth. Thousands of fast-growing companies like Gusto, Com, Quora, and Modern Treasury trust Vanta to help build, scale, manage, and demonstrate their security and compliance programs and get ready for audits in weeks, not months. By offering the most in-demand security and privacy frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27,001, GDPR, HIPAA, and many more, Vanta helps companies obtain the reports they need to accelerate growth, build efficient compliance processes, mitigate risks to their businesses, and build trust with external stakeholders. Over 5,000 fast-growing companies use Vanta to automate up to 90% of the work involved with SOC 2 and these other frameworks. For a limited time, Lenny's podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/lenny, that's V-A-N-T-A .com/lenny to learn more and to claim your discounts. Get started today. One of the things I love learning about from product teams is their unique rituals and traditions. I'm curious what's maybe the most interesting or unique or fun or funny ritual or tradition on the product team of things you all maybe do regularly?…

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