Noah Weiss: belief

Transcript context

…We have this mental metaphor that we talk a lot about, getting to the next hill. The actual wording is "Take bigger boulder bets. " I think teams can often get lost crawling up that hill, not realizing that there's a huge, incredibly beautiful range behind it where we've over time freighted new teams from scratch that incubated in a new area before the areas 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. I think in the AI space, 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 or prototype, give them space to run and pilot and then get something to launch that's amazing. Blows people away. That's the formula that we've seen. Welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard one experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Noah Weiss. Noah is chief product officer at Slack where he spent the last seven years. Prior to that he was head of product at Foursquare, which is near and dear to my heart as you'll hear at the top of this episode. Prior to that, he was a PM at Google and at Fog Creek Software. In our conversation we cover the 10 traits of great product managers, how to work effectively with strongly opinionated and product-minded founders, what Noah has learned about working effectively with AI in your product over his last 15 years at Google and Foursquare and now Slack. We talk about a process called Complaint Storms that helps Slack build better product. Plus, what he is learned from Slack's self-service business plateauing back in 2019 and how they turned it around and what they took away from that experience. Also, how he thinks about competition with Microsoft Teams and with Discord. Also, a bunch of new data advice, which I found very helpful. This was such a great in-depth conversation about all things product and leadership, and I'm really excited for you to hear this episode. With that, I bring you Noah Weiss after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Sidebar. Are you looking to land your next big career move or start your own thing? One of the most effective ways to create a big leap in your career and something that worked really well for me a few years ago is to create a personal board of directors, a trusted peer group where you can discuss challenges you're having, get career advice, and just gut check how you're thinking about your work, your career, and your life. This has been a big trajectory changer for me, but it's hard to build this trusted group. With Sidebar, senior leaders are matched with highly vetted, private supportive peer groups to lean on for unbiased opinions, diverse perspectives and raw feedback. Everyone has their own zone of genius. Together, we're better prepared to navigate professional pitfalls leading to more responsibility, faster promotions, and bigger impact. Guided by world-class programming and facilitation, Sidebar enables you to get focused tactical feedback at every step of your journey. If you're a listener of this podcast, you're likely already driven and committed to growth. A Sidebar personal board of directors is the missing piece to catalyze that journey. Why spend a decade finding your people when you can meet them at sidebar today? Jump the growing wait list of thousands of leaders from top tech companies by visiting sidebar.com/lenny to learn more. That's sidebar.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Superhuman. How much time do you spend in email each day? How about your team? You may not realize this, but your email tools are wasting your time.…

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