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- [00:01]
Noah Weiss
LinkedIn news I've always been curious, always looking for patterns in society, how people navigate and find their way. You always need some level of conflict to initiate that dialogue.
- [00:17]
Tomer Cohen
It's never a straight line.
- [00:19]
Noah Weiss
I'm Tomer Coyne, Chief product officer of LinkedIn and this is building one product.
- [00:27]
Market fit is not something you earn once and have forever. It's something that you have to keep renewing as your company matures.
- [00:35]
Tomer Cohen
That's Noel Weiss, the former Chief Product Officer of Slack. He's sharing about a key lesson that informed his approach to continuously innovating as the company grows. We're going to get into that and so much more. So stick around.
- [00:52]
Leah Smart
From LinkedIn News I'm Leah Smart, host of Everyday Better, an award winning podcast dedicated to personal development. Join me every week for captivating stories and research to find more fulfillment in your work and personal life. Listen to Everyday better on the LinkedIn podcast network, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:13]
Tomer Cohen
I learned about Slack similarly to how I learned about many other products. Somebody just invited me to it. The main difference is that all of those other products were consumer products and Slack wasn't. It was a workless collaboration tool, what's often called a B2B product. Slack was one of the pioneers in the consumerization of enterprise solutions, essentially bringing the craft and frictionless experience of consumer products into the enterprise, a product domain basically known for feature rich complexity but not simplicity. In that way, Slack was groundbreaking. That's why I'm excited to share my interview with Noah Weiss, who we sat down and spoke several months ago when he was the Chief Product Officer at Slack. The insights Noah shares remain as relevant today. In this interview, Noah shares lessons about how to maintain continuous pursuit towards rediscovering product market fit. And what does it actually mean to rediscover product market fit? Some of the unique core building principles they employ at Slack, how he leverages his own curiosity as a leader and how he fosters that in his team. And finally, how Slack aspires to win within a very crowded field of collaboration tools. Let's get into it.
- [02:27]
Noah Weiss
You know, I actually didn't know much about product management roles until I arrived to the Valley. But you actually started early with product management roles. Yeah, but you also worked as an engineer and designer across multiple companies from large to startups. So curious what inspired you to pursue a career in product so early?
- [02:45]
Well, first off, I feel like talking to the head of product at LinkedIn. There's probably no one who's more calibrated on what all these journeys look like than you. So I'll share my story, but as you know, it's like everyone has a very different journey. So, I mean, when I was in high school, I was totally fully down the engineering track. I was kind of overloading on computer science. I was doing every, you know, AP class, side projects, side hustles, and frankly, I overloaded on it. And I felt like I wasn't very well rounded coming out of high school. I had kind of gone way too deep down that path. And when I got to college, I was very deliberative. I don't want to just do computer science. I want to learn about other things that I'm just passionate about that I'm curious about. And that's been pretty much a through line my entire career, just following that curiosity and see where it leads you. So I started doing design and economics and psychology and obviously computer science as well. And they all kind of intersect. And I didn't know what would come of it, but I thought, you know, following that path, we'll, we'll see where we wind up. I started doing engineering internships, actually did like a social entrepreneurship investing internship one year. I then went to Google actually as a, what they called a UX designer back then because my advisor and undergrad was an advisor to some of the Google folks. He's like, oh, you'll love it. They really care a lot about human computer interaction design, which is what my focus was. And I show up at Google, I do an internship for 10 weeks. And I will tell you, back in 2006 or whenever that was, Google did not highly value people doing design work. And it was very apparent within a couple weeks that I might be passionate about this job, but this is not a job that is worth doing at Google. And so I kind of actually had a pretty rough summer. I enjoyed the company, but I kind of hated the work and the role. And at the end of the summer, and it was such an amazing thing someone did for me is the head of engineering for the team I was on, which was actually back then the Google Suite team or the Google workplace team now, said, hey, do you want to come just sit with our team, just the engineers, and just help us spec out a bunch of new features in your last two weeks of the summer? I said, sure, I don't really have anything else better to do. And that's what I did. I moved in with the engineering team. I didn't know exactly what the work was. He's like, just help us figure out exactly how we should build this. We know the problems, we know the feature we want to build, we don't know how to build it or how to quickly get something out the door. And so that's what I spent two weeks doing. @ the end I said, is this the name of a job at Google? He's like, yeah, it's called Product managers. I'm like, great, can I do that job full time? And he's like, yeah, let me introduce you to someone who can get you to interview for it. And that's honestly how I stumbled into it.
- [05:27]
Tomer Cohen
That's amazing.
- [05:28]
Noah Weiss
So you were on the APM program, the one that Google pretty much brought into the Valley?
- [05:33]
Yeah, like the one Brett Taylor was in and a lot of those kind of old school folks. So yeah, I started in I guess 2008, loved it for a couple years and then got the startup bug and went on from there.
- [05:44]
For folks who have less context of the associate product management program, in many ways it was designed to actually bring people who care about building products and really trained them on the role because there was no such program to train them outside of companies and it was adopted. We have our own LinkedIn APM program and so do many other companies as well.
- [06:06]
Yeah, that's right. I think Marissa, who was employee number 10 or 11 at Google and the first product manager officially, you know, no one in the early days had been a product manager before. Everyone came from a more technical background and they learned to do what Google thought of as product management. So I thought what if we turn that into a program and let a bunch of other folks who have no experience in product management learn how to do it on the job. And so it was a fresh take and definitely I was a big beneficiary. Getting to immerse myself right out of college in that kind of way.
- [06:36]
Wonderful. I wanted to shift a little bit into what is a little bit of your superpower, a skill that you've built or quality that made you successful in many ways. I've been privileged to work with many amazing product builders and if you ask me what's unique about them, I think I can narrow it down to like oh, this person is. Their attention to detail is unbelievable. They're incredible visionaries. I think in many ways the best people over index on something. What do you think that is for you?
- [07:05]
I mean, I think the through line honestly would be just having an insatiable curiosity and excitement about whatever it is I'm working on. And that's both been something for literally just pulled me in my career, but also when I think about what I've done on the job. You know, back early on, when you're a PM on a feature team, I think being incredibly intellectually curious, seeing how far down deep you can go into understanding the technology, understanding what the world looks like outside of your team, especially if you're a larger organization, following that curiosity and being very genuine about it is a superpower that I think is valuable and folks kind of overlook. You think you leave school and you're done learning. If you always have that more kind of learning mentality and following your nose there, I think it's really important. And I think kind of later in your career, I like to think a lot about, like, what is the quality of questions that you're able to ask, Especially as you move into more senior executive roles, being able to ask the right questions when you only get to ask a few, you're in a product review, you maybe see a team once a month. Channeling that curiosity in a way that can help push the team's thinking, can help facilitate stronger, more informed decision making. I think that's more how it manifests at this point in my career. But really, it's been like that since I was a little kid. My mom jokes when we used to go on road trips, I could ask questions for three straight hours between point A and point B. And it's pretty much the case now. I just don't have hours with every team, unfortunately.
- [08:29]
And do you try to build that for talent? You grow on the team, sounds like it's more natural for you. But is there a process to bring into the team's thinking?
- [08:37]
When we think about it from a career development perspective, I think one thing that we like to do a lot is get people lots of different exposures to different types of problems and different teams in their career at Slack. So, you know, I think some organizations, you wind up having folks who it's been 10 years and they're on the same team and they're the expert of whatever that domain is, I think if you want to build a product organization that has that intellectual curiosity baked into it, where you have people sharing and mixing experiences and lessons learned and scar tissue in every different direction, encouraging a lot more internal mobility is really critical. So that's something that I've always really cared a lot about. And some of my favorite stories of people's careers at Slack are when people kind of go from one domain to a totally different domain and then they flourish because they're bringing a perspective that no One else who normally works in that kind of area has. So I would say that's the main way that we try to encourage it internally.
- [09:34]
It's a wonderful point. You had a remarkable ride being the head of product for Foursquare. And for folks who are less familiar, Foursquare pretty much pioneered the idea of location based discovery via social. And I'm sure you had incredible learnings from this one. So I'm curious which one you brought with you into Slack and how you operate it.
- [09:54]
I mean, I think the single biggest thing I would say is that product market fit is not something you earn once and have forever. It's something that you have to keep renewing as your company matures. And for those who don't know the history of Foursquare, I'll say there was a moment in time when I was actually first starting there, you know, 2010 to 2012, where Foursquare and Twitter and Instagram were all kind of in the same cohort of consumer social networks that are mobile first and taking off in all these different directions. I won't do the rest of the story, but there was many ups and lots of downs along the way. And I think the thing that we had to do that in the end we weren't able to completely pull off was understanding the product market fit you get with one audience, especially an early audience, is not necessarily the thing that's going to fuel you to get to the next level of scale. Now you don't want to ever discard that user base. It's really important to keep those early fans. But often what got you obviously to where you were isn't going to get you where you need to be. And I think there are stories obviously that are counter to that. Like, I don't know, Google had a white homepage with a text box and a search button for 20 years and built a trillion dollar business. So, you know, product market fit, you know, obviously does scale. You don't have to change the model for every company. But I think most products that don't have some, you know, underlying technology that no one else can build do need to think about renewing that. And for Slack, the initial focus was really on small teams building technology that was like the core audience, teams of five to 50 people who are also building software themselves and then expanding to teams in other domains, then eventually to medium enterprises, into the largest enterprises in the world. And each step along the way, I think we had to really rethink how we understood the customer base, rethink how we approach what the product needed to look like while preserving as much of that customer love from the early fans as possible because you want to bring them along on the journey.
- [11:54]
I love that insight product. Market fit is a prerequisite for success, but it's not a guarantee for scaling or sustaining your success. Yeah, and I think some would argue that while the Google homepage stayed the same, the responses did not like I see Google as more of like an answering machine today than an index of some sort, but they really nailed the how do you have access to the Internet? In a way, they're like the gateway to the Internet for so many I heard you also talk about principles, which is something which is dear and near to my heart because as you scale to large organizations, it's a phenomenal way to align people. And you talked about this a common language. Yeah, a common language that helps you work with your CEO and your founders, but a common language that helps you work with your team. What are those for you at Slack.
- [12:48]
I would say a couple years into the journey we started realizing we needed to enshrine the way in which we built product and the way in which we thought about what great software looked like into the culture. And that's where the initial set of product principles came from. They've evolved a little bit over the years, but we've got a separate set of business principles or the pricing and packaging principles, which are also an interesting set of topics but very different than the product side. To me, I think the ones that stand out the most are the most used though when you hear them at first they sound very simple and universal, but there are actually some tension in all of them. The three that we talk about the most is don't make me think. Be a great host and then seek the steepest part of the utility curve, which is the most abstract. I can explain what that one means, but don't make me think when we say that and we often say what does that not mean? Don't make me think it definitely means Slack should be intuitive, it should be effortless, it should be easy to comprehend, it should be easy to grok and to learn. But what it doesn't mean, and this is where folks coming from consumer often initially think is it doesn't mean that you need to reduce every click possible. It doesn't mean that if a job takes seven steps, that three steps is better. We talk a lot about comprehension and understanding and especially in enterprise software, different than consumer building to bring people along on a journey who are living in that software all day long. Who have a high degree of intent, but also who, you know, if you walk them through things, they can actually learn to kind of master and get to a level of proficiency that people typically don't in the consumer world. How do you lean into that? So don't make me think, yes, it's effortless, simple, but it's also about bringing our users along, helping them mature their usage, helping them become experts over the years in which they'll be using Slack.
- [14:39]
I love that. I really love your point around don't make me think is a little bit more sophisticated than people tend to give it credit for.
- [14:46]
I think the classic example of that we always talk about in our design reviews is everyone loves buttons that are just icons. It's simpler, there's less to look at, the interface is less busy. I will tell you, if you ever add a text label to a button, immediately people will think less and they'll probably click on the button more. If it's actually useful, it doesn't look as good. So sometimes you can't do it. But I mean as just a simple example of legibility, comprehension over just the form of things.
- [15:18]
Completely agree.
- [15:19]
The other one, be a great host, which is maybe kind of simpler. We talk about it via story, usually, which is if you ever have gone over to be a guest at someone's house or stayed at an Airbnb, you know that moment where you walk into a bedroom or the bathroom and you see the towels and they're hanging and you're just not sure whether those are the towels meant for you or were those just towels that happened to be there and not actually fresh towels versus the very simple act of fold towels and put them at the very foot of the bed. Those towels never wound up there by accident. As soon as you see that, you know those are fresh towels for you, it was a small little thing that someone did to be a great host so that you know you're coming into something and it's like perfectly set up for you. And so we talk a lot about that in software. We think about Slack. It is a digital manifestation for a lot of folks of their physical working environment. Right. For companies that use Slack, you know, the average person is in it for 10 hours a week. And so we take a lot of responsibility and a lot of obligation with what does it mean to be a great host in that digital environment? What is the places where we can round the corners? I don't mean visually, but like round the rough edges where we can fold the towels. Ways in which we can Be conscientious of the time and attention people are putting into the product. And so that is something that we talk about a lot as well. Part of the mission, one of the words, there's three is pleasant. Making people's working lives pleasant. And the pleasantness is tied into the product development via this principle of being a great host.
- [16:54]
Yeah. And this translates into a lot of things, I assume, right. Like craft and feeling comfortable, feeling you can trust your space. So there's a lot of derivatives that come out of this principle, for sure.
- [17:05]
Okay. The last principle, this idea of a utility curve.
- [17:08]
Tomer Cohen
This is sick. The steepest part of the utility curve.
- [17:11]
Noah Weiss
Yeah. Which is definitely just a weird, slack concept, but has become very important to how we build product. If you imagine on the X axis is the level of investment you've made in an individual feature, and it just goes up over time, the idea is that in the Y axis is the level of behavior change that you see from customers or an end user. Hopefully, the more effort you put in, the more behavior change you see. And so what this principle, seek, the steepest part of the utility curve means is the idea that you need to put enough investment into a feature from a capability, comprehension, being a great host, not making people think, functionality, perspective. Where you reach the part of the curve where that work starts to produce kind of an exponential change in behavior or increase in utility for the customer. This all maybe sounds obvious in some ways because you're like, well, obviously, why would you stop working on a feature before that? But I think if you look at most companies, especially larger companies, what you wind up seeing is that people typically decide to stop working on a feature long before it ever reached that exponential return. And you decide, okay, this isn't actually worth investing in. And then you have a bunch of features that are basically kind of orphaned in the product. And when your users use it, they feel it. And then conversely, you have to know when you reach the other side of the curve, which is to say, all right, there's no more capabilities we can add to this. It is as fast as possible. It has reached its fullest conception of itself. Now's a good time for us to kind of put this thing more in a maintenance mode. So it's knowing how to get to the exponential part and then knowing when you're reaching the point of finishing returns.
- [18:47]
Oh, we can spend an hour on this one. Like, I used to see people kind of getting obsessed with launches. I launched this and I launched that. And I never really understood what's the kind of excitement around the launch if nobody's actually using it, if it's not like a really valuable experience, if it's not really taking off, if you really haven't crafted it yet.
- [19:09]
Tomer Cohen
We're going to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. When we come back, Noye is going to explain how Slack succeeds within the crowded world of collaboration tools.
- [19:17]
Noah Weiss
How we've always viewed Slack is less about trying to win in every category and more about how do we make all the tools that your company's already buying and using that much better because they have this connective fabric of Slack?
- [19:31]
Jessi Hempel
From LinkedIn News I'm Jessi Hempel, host of the hello Monday podcast. In my 20s, I knew what career success looked like in midlife. It's not that simple. Work is changing, we're changing, and there's no guidebook for how to make sense of it. So come figure it out with me on the hello Monday Podcast. I've been a journalist for two decades writing cover stories for Business Week, Fortune, and Wired, and now every Monday I bring you conversations with people who are thinking deeply about work and where it fits into our lives. Like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on growth mindsets.
- [20:13]
Noah Weiss
The learn it all does better than the know it all.
- [20:16]
Jessi Hempel
Or NYU Professor Scott Galloway on choosing a career.
- [20:20]
Noah Weiss
I think the worst advice you can give a kid is follow your passion.
- [20:23]
Jessi Hempel
Or MacArthur genius winner Angela Duckworth on talent versus grit.
- [20:29]
Noah Weiss
Your long term effort and your long term commitment are surprisingly important.
- [20:35]
Jessi Hempel
Each episode delivers pragmatic advice. For right now, listen to hello Monday with me, Jessi Hempel on the LinkedIn podcast network or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [20:50]
Tomer Cohen
All right, we're back and I'm speaking with Noah Weiss, the former CPO of Slack.
- [20:55]
Noah Weiss
I want to shift us to something which I think Slack is really known for, the idea of consumerization, bringing the craft of building consumer products into B2B products. You being very much a consumer oriented leader coming into what is a B2B company I'm sure was a great fit in that sense. But I'm curious for you. What do you think consumer companies can learn from the B2B side? What is this something that surprised you or you think, wow, that would be wonderful for their career and for their products?
- [21:26]
Hmm. Yeah, it's the inverse of what typically folks ask. Honestly, I haven't worked on both sides. I think the best aspect of the B2B world, if you really throw yourself at it, is that you can focus on building something that people love enough so much they'd actually pay you for it. And obviously when you're selling to businesses, sometimes you just start with what would people pay me for? And then I'll try to build some functionality. I sold them. Something doesn't even work the way that it sounded. It would, but now build all the features people ask me for. But conversely, I think on the consumer side, especially more on the mobile side or on social as well, it's usually like if you build it and you get to enough scale, eventually you'll figure out, you know, can you throw ads in it? And I think that model has stopped working a long time ago. There's, you know, an oligopoly, if you will, especially in the ad tech side. So I don't think it's a very viable strategy. But you still see so many companies doing it and, and these consumer products wind up being more toys than actual tools. I mean, I found it incredibly freeing to actually work in a world where obviously you care a tremendous amount about the end user, about customer love. I mean, that's the consumer verization of the enterprise side, but also that you can measure your success of. Are we building something valuable that customers feel it's obviously worth paying for? Even at Slack, we talk a lot about where we want to push the product. It's all about thinking about whatever that next audience is going to be for Slack. How do we make Slack so obviously overwhelmingly valuable that the choice to pay for it is a trivial one. And I think bringing that same mindset to the consumer world is a great thing to do and frankly a little counterintuitive, especially if you come from more of a mobile or social background.
- [23:08]
It's a wonderful insight and one that tends to be pushed aside by consumer builders because they assume, to your point, that they can monetize once they reach a certain scale. Almost assuming that what happened to three companies will happen to them as well. Right. In the space of collaboration and communication. And this is interesting because you wrote to me that you're using Slack a lot more than email. So you're slow on email and you're fast on Slack. I'm curious. In this space, there's so many tools and unless you work at Slack, I don't think there's one dominant way to work. Right. You know, I look at LinkedIn, email is still very strong. And whether it's Office 365 or G Suite or Slack or Teams or Zoom, even like phone messaging. So when you think about it as a product builder, this is not a winner take Sol strategy. This is not how Do I get them off other products to join and use Slack? How do you think about who you're building for and, and what is kind of that Persona or job to be done that you have in mind?
- [24:10]
I'll give you a macro answer, a principled answer, and then what our actual audience is as we think about it. So the macro answer I think is if you look over the last decade in the world of enterprise software, the only constant has been that every year companies are using more software than the year before. I think the last I checked, the average Fortune 500 company has over 1100 unique vendors of software that they use. And I'm sure if you talk to the procurement department of Microsoft or Salesforce, they'll say that number is probably 2 or 5x that right? So 1. I think it's just the macro thing. It's not just in the world of collaboration or communication. I think it's in every single crevice of the knowledge worker kind of day that you're seeing this explosion of both horizontal and specialized job to be done style tools. But I think the beneficiary is obviously people in their working lives have incredible amount of leverage that they're getting from software they didn't used to get before. Okay, that's one second. And I can promise you this is one of our principles. Slack seeks to be the 1% of your software spend that makes the 99% that much better. And when you ask that, what do we do about this world where it is not winners Take all from the very early days, like literally the first version of Slack in beta, one of the killer features, if you will, was that there was 45 out of the box integrations with all of the top tools that small teams who built software needed. It was like GitHub and Jira and G Drive and whatever. And now there's I think something like 2,600 applications from third party vendors in the App Store. So basically you pick a software provider, they have an app in the App Store. And I think that honestly is how we've always viewed Slack is less about trying to win in every category and more about how do we make all the tools that your company's already buying and using that much better because they have this connective fabric of Slack that helps tie your tools, your data and your team all together in one place. Last thing, audience. I think this is a little bit also unique to Slack and it's a little bit the origin of the company is we are very much focused on the primary audience is a team. Even at large companies, we think about an atomic unit of a team and how do we make their working life simpler, more pleasant and more productive? I think maybe sometimes, for the chagrin of our enterprise sales team, we are never going to look at the CIO as the primary audience for Slack. They may sign the contract, they may be the person who gives the list of here's all the checkboxes that are unchecked or here's all the diligence we need to do. But fundamentally, the motion that has made Slack successful is that someone on a team says, I want to work in a different way. I'm tired of the old way of working. And they've heard about Slack and they create literally a team in the product. They invite a couple teammates and they see is this for them? And if you're at Amazon or Netflix or Disney, some of our big Fortune 1000 companies, or you're at an SMB, it always gets turned in the same ocean. And so for us, the fundamental thing is can we make that team more productive? Can we reduce the level of context switching and mundaneness in their job? And let's focus on above all else, an audience and a buyer at the atomic level of a team instead of an organization.
- [27:31]
This is great. I love it because it's different. I think if you ask many product builders who are you building for? They'll try to describe a person. I think it's rare for people to come back with like, my atomic unit is not a person, it's a team.
- [27:46]
Yeah.
- [27:46]
And this sounds like that's how you build internally. You're not thinking about a specific person. Another process that you do is looking at other products and trying to dissect them. And this is not necessarily a competitive analysis, but it's more around how can we build better products.
- [28:04]
It's very hard to be really honestly self critical of the features you build yourself. Right. Because you have a lot of vested interest in ego and everything in the mix. And so sometimes I think teams can get stuck. It's hard to look at it with fresh eyes. Obviously user research and other things can help, but we came up with this, we call it internally a complaint storm. But we mean complaint in like the positive sense of like find things that are worth complaining about to get inspiration. And what we'll do is as a team exercise, so the whole product design engineering group pick a product not from a competitive perspective, it could be from a totally different space, but that is solving a similar problem, problem that the team is working on. So let's say you're the onboarding team and you're like, let's do a complaint storm about, like the peloton onboarding and unboxing experience. One person drives, everyone else is kind of jotting notes and complaints out on the side. And then the idea is you're getting inspiration from a totally different domain to bring back to your own product area with hopefully fresh eyes. Not because, to be clear, setting up a peloton has anything to do with setting up a Slack team, but because people can get stuck in that onboarding space. Just as an example and as a group, it's doing this kind of critical thought exercise, if you will, and that winds up being just a really useful tool. Probably periodically, maybe every quarter or two, teams will sometimes go through this exercise or do kind of like a teardown of an interesting new product that just came out.
- [29:30]
Yeah, this ties back to your superpower, your curious mind. And I think you can learn a lot from how others are doing it, even if it's a whole different domain, because it could really spark ideas and curiosity.
- [29:43]
Okay.
- [29:43]
It's hard to end the podcast today without talking about the future, especially with AI. So obviously early days, I'm sure years from now we'll kind of laugh at what we thought about the future would be and how it changed dramatically. But I'm curious how you think about the future, the next kind of 3 to 5 to 10 years with AI or without AI, in the space of collaboration, communication, your space, your area of expertise. How will that change or not change, in your opinion?
- [30:12]
Yeah, I think it's interesting to think about how much this will change over the next five years. Because since 2008, when I worked on the ML team within Google Search, I've been following the space of 15 years.
- [30:25]
Tomer Cohen
And you were brought into Slack as the AI machine learning product leader, correct?
- [30:29]
Noah Weiss
Right. Yeah, that's how I kind of started. So I both have a tremendous amount of scar tissue from the last 15 years. Been a tremendous amount of optimism for the turning point I think we're in right now. So a couple things, and these are hot takes, these are predictions, these are not representative of our corporate position or anything like that one. I think inevitably we're going to have to see the model sizes for these LLMs go down so that eventually, for at least specific purposes, you can run them locally, device side, because right now the bottleneck in terms of everything effectively having to run in the cloud, lack of GPUs, and also you have all this computing capacity on everyone's mobile and Desktop device that's going underutilized. I think that's going to have to happen. What that will enable, I think, is that every text box at an OS or browser level is going to have the basic ability to expand or compress text, which is kind of the basic of what people are doing with LLMs. Right? You're either going from a kernel and growing it, or you're going from a very long thing and compressing in different ways. And I think that idea of summary or synthesis at a text box level is going to be embedded in the operating system, just like spelling and grammar correct is. Now, no application developer is building spell correct into their application because the operating system takes care of it. So then I think you're going to say, well, okay, well what are people going to be doing instead? And I think it's going to come back to the two things that have always mattered in the space of AI, which is the data your application has and the intention you have from users. I'm not betting on conversational, not conversational, proactive, not proactive. But I think we're going to go to a world where the basics of the text compression or synthesis is going to be at the OS level. The application level is going to have much cheaper models that run much more performantly, probably a mix of open source and closed source, but at a much different price point than today from both a hardware and model perspective. And I think what won't change? Just back at the question, I think how much customers and end users care about trust, privacy and security. That is the opposing force right now. I think in this world of generative AI, especially in the enterprise space, when you actually talk to any enterprise customer, the questions come back to how can I trust this? Will it produce accurate and real results? What is the security model? What happens to my data? And I think on the consumer side, frankly, what we've learned is people don't really care as long as the thing is really useful and really cheap. The enterprise space is very different and I think that will not change over the next five years.
- [33:13]
It's a great point. I think sometimes it tends to be assumed as regulation. In this case, companies care tremendously. It's their ip. Yeah, in a way that IP makes the teams better because in a conversation a team collaborates in an ideal form. New data is being created, new data fuels AI to become better. So just the conversation part inside of Slack or a quiz for collaboration should make the application much, much better, which is unique to a company because that's basically their ip totally. So I think there's something really special there that's really insight. No, this has been great. I've learned so much. I have notes here all over my desk. Thank you for joining me and thank you for helping us learn more about how you work.
- [33:55]
Thank you so much for having me. It's been a blast.
- [34:00]
Tomer Cohen
What a great, informative interview. There certainly was no shortage of takeaways, so let's get into them first. 1 Stay curious Noah prizes intellectual curiosity and one way for an organization to foster that is by encouraging a lot of internal mobility. That way teams can share and mix their experiences and lessons from many other different domains. That kind of mobility builds a mix of perspectives that then can cross pollinate and kindle innovation across the whole organization. Second, product market fit is a prerequisite for success, but not a guarantee for the future. You need to think about how you will expand beyond your initial user base while retaining them as well. For Slack, this meant first focusing on small teams in the software domain before expanding outward into other domains, and then expanding upwards into progressively larger enterprises as a whole. Each step required reevaluating the customer base and their product needs while preserving much of what worked in the earlier days. This makes product market fit a moment in time, not a continuous baseline. Third, I believe it is extremely important to align your team along some common principles or beliefs to make sure your product is built and expressed in consistent ways. Noah shares some great principles about how they build at Slack. The one that stood out for me was about seeking the steepest part of the utility curve. Product teams, especially in large companies, are notorious for launching new features or experiences and then leaving them half baked, underdeveloped or abandoned. At Slack, they believe you need to put enough investment into a feature such that you reach the point where that work starts to produce a large change in behavior or utility for the customer. You only stop when you reach a point of diminishing returns. Next, while Slack is one of those poster childs of bringing consumer product mindset into the enterprise, it was great to hear Noah talk about what consumer product builders can learn from enterprise development, and that's the viability of your product. Figure out what customers would love enough that they would actually be willing to pay you for it. Instead of relying on scaling first and then figuring out monetization, ask yourself, what would people value at the beginning? Lastly, know the breakdown of who you're trying to appeal to that might not even be a specific person or audience. Slack's primary audience are teams. They're not necessarily trying to appeal to the Chief Information Officer. Instead, they're trying to rally adoption from those teams who will be the most frequent users. That's how I got my own invitation to join Slack early on. When you think of this conversation, what guiding principles or beliefs would you introduce into your product or organization to better serve your customers? Remember, strong principles have teeth. They voice a clear opinion that is not always widely accepted. Let me know on LinkedIn I'm Tomer Cohen.
- [37:10]
Noah Weiss
Thank you for listening. I learned a lot from this conversation and I hope you did as well.
- [37:17]
Alexandria
We'll be back in two weeks with a new interview with the CPO of Cerebral Alexandria.
- [37:22]
Jessi Hempel
Street folks who went to three therapy sessions in their first month were more.
- [37:28]
Noah Weiss
Likely to stay past six months.
- [37:31]
Alexandria
Can't wait two weeks, Then tune in next week for a rapid fire question round with Noah where we get to know him better.
- [37:37]
Noah Weiss
I mean, my headspace is completely in the baby gear world.
- [37:42]
Alexandria
Building one is a LinkedIn editorial production. Our host is Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn's chief product officer. This episode was produced by Max Miller and Lolia Briggs. It's engineered and mixed by Assaf Gadran. Enrique Montalvo is our Executive producer. Dave Pond is head of news production. Courtney Koop is head of original programming. Dan Roth is the Editor in Chief of LinkedIn. Thanks to Alicia Mann and Jenna Kaplan. If you know of a product leader we could all learn from, send us a line@pitchinkedin.com.