The 10 traits of great PMs, AI, and Slack's approach to product

Noah is discussing core responsibilities of product managers, building on his point that impeccable execution is a baseline requirement for PMs.

I think impact solves all PM issues, which is if a team is consistently building things people love and changing the director of the business, everything else is just an input.

Your job as to facilitate the pace and quality of decision making. That is very different than you are the person who makes all the decisions... how do you actually get the team to be able to make high quality decisions quickly without you arbitrarily playing tiebreaker all the time.

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.

"That whole term of art" refers to "product-led growth," which Weiss mentioned didn't exist as a concept when Slack started.

I think it was more that whole term of art became a thing as maybe many other freemium SaaS products took off... I think the core of it really was building a product that customers loved enough that they would put their own social capital on the line to get their coworkers on board.

We stopped spending so many cycles on design explorations of static mocks or walkthroughs and said, 'How quickly can we get into prototyping the path in real software, even if it's messy and you throw it away,' at least for something like Slack. You got to live and touch and smell the software.

I think when to involve the founder CEO in a project is really important. I think you want to get the founder CEO really involved early on, especially if it's a big new project, to make sure that there's strategic buy-in... then I think at the very end you want them to really be bought in.

The fundamental challenge I think for new users or new teams using your product once you get past the kind of tech early adopters is do they comprehend what this thing is for? Do they understand how it works? Then desirability is why should they care?

Noah found that teams with 5+ people actively using Slack most of the workweek were 400% more likely to upgrade to paid plans within six months.

What we found was that if you could get five people using Slack, the majority of the work week to just communicate at all, that would be a successful team there were going to be 400% more likely to upgrade over the next six months.

I think the biggest probably lesson learned, frankly, is that we were really close with the Instagram folks early on... I think in hindsight we were a little bit mistaken to believe that the atomic unit would be a person talking about a place that they're at... versus a person sharing a moment or an experience that they're having in the world.

Noah is discussing the core responsibilities of product managers, building on the saying "growth solves all problems."

I think impact solves all PM issues, which is if a team is consistently building things people love and changing the director of the business, everything else is just an input.

What we started doing with these complaint-storms... we'd actually start off with other products first in adjacent spaces and we'd say, 'Okay. As a group we're going to go through the customer journey from the moment you land on the website through getting your first account going... We're going to do it on one screen. Someone's going to project and then people are going to fill in every issue, everything that's confusing, every pain point.'

I think as much as possible is getting to the point where you have alignment on the principles for what it means to build a great product of that company. Not just about if the intuition and tasting gut, but how do you distill that to principles that become the language of the company so that everybody else can start thinking through a similar frame.

I think there's something actually where you learn more from the things that don't fully work out or don't quite achieve what you wanted to achieve. You actually have a feedback loop where you get a lot of negative signal about like, 'Okay. That didn't work. That didn't work. What can I actually learn, take away from that?'

I think for most teams, our roadmap for any feature team at Slack is that it's a portfolio and it's meant to be a portfolio that's diversified a couple different ways. One is you want to diversify things that are meant to be new capabilities versus making the thing you've already built a little bit better every day.