In early 2019, our Slack self-serve business growth had flat-lined. There were no “obvious” culprits.

Years of experimentation had optimized every step of onboarding. We needed fresh eyes. But we were too close. We were creatively stuck.

So we came up with the “Complaint-storm” The idea was simple: how can we get our team to look at the end-to-end experience with fresh eyes? The “curse of knowledge” is real. It’s reflexive to filter out ideas because “we tried that 3 years ago”. And doing a deep critique of years of your own work is almost too painful.

“Hybrid” SaaS has taken off. Companies like Atlassian, Shopify, and Zoom have built SMB-focused product lines without sales people.

At Slack, we’ve scaled our “self-service” biz to hundreds of thousands of customers and hundreds of millions in ARR.

🧵 8 hard-earned lessons: Take a consumer-grade approach to building SaaS software.

Make the service so delightful and pleasant, people love using it enough to buy with a credit card.

No talking to a sales person required.

What are the common traits of PMs with the steepest career trajectories? You can’t study product management in college, so how do people who learn the fastest approach the job?

A thread with the seven traits of fast-growing PMs... 1. Fast-growing PMs relentlessly focus on customer impact.

They routinely rebalance their team’s portfolio of investments. They optimize for the pace of delivering value to end users.

Today, we launched new virtual HQ capabilities in @SlackHQ to help companies operate digital-first.

This is the origin story (with early wireframes included!): We talked to hundreds of customers to learn their top needs for working-from-anywhere.

We built tools to help teams:
🎲 Recreate the serendipity and creativity of the office
🔌 Feel connected while physically apart – fewer meetings required
🧘‍♀️ Foster flexibility and inclusivity

1yr ago, Tom Hanks got Covid. The US went into lockdown. The unplanned remote work experiment started.

Overnight, millions of people turned to Slack as their office.

Now @SlackHQ we’re building a Virtual HQ to #ReinventWork for the hybrid remote future.

Here’s what’s next: No one grew up dreaming of spending 9-5 on endless video meetings.

You’re not crazy feeling exhausted. Stanford Researchers recently published a 4-part study why: news.stanford.edu/2021/02/23/fou…

Yet people feel less connected and aligned than ever. What can Slack build to help?

After a decade+ working in NYC tech across Google, Foursquare, and Slack, some thoughts on the impact of Amazon+Google committing to space for hiring ~35k people — around 4.5x their footprint today.

Punchline: perhaps counterintuitively, this will be great for local startups. 1/ To grow in NYC at this scale, AMZN/GOOG will have to hire, train, and develop huge numbers of recent graduates. They'll provide some of the best, pragmatic “graduate schools” for a much more diverse group than exists in tech today.

Blitzscaling from @reidhoffman is great (amzn.to/2R3PKpp). Thread w/ excerpts on 7 topics that resonated:

- When to Blitzscale
- Slowness risks
- Distribution matters
- Virality + network effects
- Walking and chewing gum
- Needing a new strategy
- Learning machines 1/ When to Blitzscale a market: massive size, growing fast, and extreme competition

1/ It’s nearly impossible to define what makes a PM great. They have diverse backgrounds, murky responsibilities, and wildly varied expectations across companies. That said, here’s an inherently incomplete list of 10 areas great PMs excel at: 2/ Great PMs live in the future and work backwards. They immerse themselves in research, feedback, data, discussions, and the market. They craft thoughtful, inspiring narratives for where the product should go — and the best path to get there.

1/ Why is it so hard to incubate entirely new capabilities within mature products? It’s a feature-level Innovator’s Dilemma at play. A few strategy lessons distilled from product histories at Instagram, Twitter, and Foursquare: 2/ Scaled Product Challenge #1: How can we make high upside, riskier bets while keeping stable a core product with hundreds of millions of users?

1/ “Chief Question Officer” is the unofficial role of many great product, design, and eng leaders. The best questions foster rigor, encourage focus, and teach instincts. Some favorites when reviewing product proposals / plans / specs: 2/ “What is our fastest path to learning?” The biggest determinant to long-term product velocity is the pace of learning.

1/ Product Management isn’t a major one can study, few folks graduate into, and most people learn by apprenticeship. There are number of dangerous myths about what the PM role is. Here is a thread with five… 2/ “PMs are mini CEOs”: This is admittedly a catchy tagline. CEOs have direct management responsibilities, decision making authority, business-level objective ownership, and often founder-level credibility for the original vision.

Writing is the best forcing function for clear, structured thinking.

https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/987028898880733184

Common reasons I hear folks say they don't want to write a proposal down: "It will slow us down", "Slides are more persuasive", "We've already discussed all the details", "I'm a better verbal communicator", and dozens more.