Stewart Butterfield: preference

Transcript context

…So just to mirror back what I'm hearing, there's this, if you visualize this curve at the bottom, it's like I don't even know what this is. And then up the curve is like, okay, I sort of get it. And then at the top is, okay, I can't live without this now that I understand what this is for, it feels like it's a really a different way of thinking about getting to the aha moment for someone where they see, okay, saved items, I get it, I need to use this constantly. It feels like this works both for a specific feature and also just for Slack, getting people to even understand here's what Slack can do for you. And then now I can't live without Slack. And essentially this is a lens you use to figure out where to spend product resources because if you don't get up that curve to I get it and I can't live without it, nothing else matters. Is that the framework? Yeah, and I think then you layer on another concept like the, Bezos used the term divine discontent. The line actually moves because once people are familiar with a piece of software or the way a feature is implemented or something like that, their standards go up, and so there's this competition. And again, this axis can be, utility is the best general term for it, but it could be quality, convenience, speed, it could be any number of things, but as you improve your search capability or as you improve your login experience or your forget password experience or your checkout experience or whatever everyone else is as well. And so there's this continued investment and when forget about thinking about a new feature, you're looking at how the product works overall and usually things get implemented once, and then if they're lucky, they get improved upon periodically. Most things get improved upon very infrequently and some things get improved upon never. I want to give an example at the absolute extreme because I actually don't know how long this has been, but I try not to criticize other people's software so much because I'm very familiar with the trade-offs and prioritization and how hard it can be and blah, blah, blah, blah. But okay, so most people have the Gmail Calendar app on their phone. I travel a fair bit. I'm mostly in the Eastern Time Zone, sometimes in Mountain Time, sometimes in Pacific, sometimes in English time, and sometimes in Japan, Central Europe. There's maybe 10 time zones, 12 time zones that I would ever choose. When you hit the option to set the time zone on an event in Google Calendar, on the iOS app, it presents all the time zones in the world in alphabetical order. And I mean, there's probably worse orderings, but there's no value in that. And even when you start searching, it still presents them in alphabetical order by country with that turn. So if I'm in California and I'm trying to set the appointment for next week when I'm back in New York and I type in E-A-S-T and I get a bunch of garbage, okay, Eastern, and then the first one is Eastern Australia, New South Wales, and then Eastern Australia, Queensland, and then Eastern Australia, Daylight Savings and Eastern Australia standard time. And then you're like, "Well, fuck, I can't remember which one is Daylight Savings and which one is standard time?" I could keep going like this for a while. This is an app that's used by at least hundreds of millions of people, presumably every single Google employee. It's bananas how bad it is. There's so many, there's all these clever things you could do. Like you know me, I'm on the West Coast, first option should be the East Coast and vice versa. But it definitely shouldn't be that every time zone is presented with equal value. I don't a couple hundred time zones. I grew up in Canada. Newfoundland has its own time zone, which is offset by half an hour. The population of Newfoundland has about half a million people. al value. I don't a couple hundred time zones. I grew up in Canada. Newfoundland has its own time zone, which is offset by half an hour. The population of Newfoundland has about half a million people. Not that many people go to visit Newfoundland, maybe a million people in all of history so like a million and a half out of 8 billion people. And there's Newfoundland, the same with China time, which is like 25% of the world's population in this. Anyway, that was a little bit longer than I intended to go on this example, but it's crazy because no one's going to switch to Gmail or to G Suite, Google Calendar from Outlook Exchange because the time zone picker is good, so maybe in some sense it doesn't matter, but at the same time there's a real value in delighting customers and there's an emotional connection that they form or don't form. And in some cases that could be really positive like they would recommend it. And when they switch companies or decide to start their own company, they're going to choose to use this product or advocate for it because of that emotional connection and vice versa. They'll also be like, "I hate this thing that drives me bananas. I really think we should stop using it," or advocate for the alternative. And I think people just don't appreciate or come back to those things often enough. And then there's this category of really essential parts of the app again like account creation, sign up, forgot password, things like that, that for most organizations very infrequently get a lot of love and iteration and improvement despite the fact that the quality bar has gone up across the board and continually goes up.…

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