Slack’s CPO Noah Weiss on the continuous pursuit of product-market fit

“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.”

I first became acquainted with workplace collaboration tool Slack in the same way I learned about a lot of other products – someone invited me to it. What’s unique about Slack though, unlike those others, is that it’s not a consumer product. However, it approaches the enterprise space with the same focus on product craft and user-centric mindset. 

That’s why I was excited to sit down with Noah Weiss. After being the head of product at Foursquare, Noah was recruited to Slack in 2016 to lead Machine Learning. He went on to lead Slack’s product expansion, eventually heading all product management. While he recently stepped down, his insights and learnings still hold. 

There’s no shortage of takeaways from our extensive conversation. Here are my top ones:

Build aligned on common principles 

“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 in the culture… The three that we talk about the most: don't make me think, be a great host, and then seek the steepest part of the utility curve.”

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 shared some great principles about how they build at Slack. The one that stood out for me was 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, under-developed 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 stop when you reach a point of diminishing returns. 

Harness internal mobility to serve innovation

“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 in scar tissue in every different direction, encouraging a lot more internal mobility is really critical.”

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 different domains. That kind of mobility builds a mix of perspectives that then can cross-pollinate and kindle innovation.

Product-market fit is a moving target

“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.”

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 still retaining them. For Slack, this meant first focusing on serving 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 re-evaluating the customer base and their product needs while preserving much of what worked for the earlier fans. 

A lesson for consumer product builders

“How do we make Slack so obviously overwhelmingly valuable that the choice to pay for it is a trivial one. 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.”

While Slack is known for bringing a consumer product mindset into the enterprise, it was great to hear Noah talk about what consumer product builders can learn from B2B development — understanding the viability of your product. Instead of relying on scaling first and then figuring out monetization; ask yourself what people would value enough to pay for from the beginning.

Understand who you are really building for

“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.”

Slack's primary audience are teams, even at large companies. They're not necessarily trying to appeal to the CIO, the Chief Information Officer, they're instead rallying adoption from those teams who will be the most frequent users. It builds champions from within. That’s how I got my invite to join Slack early on. 

Are there guiding principles you’ve introduced into your product or organization to better serve your customers?

Let me know in the comments.

🎧 Check out the full episode of BuildingOne for many more great insights. Listen, follow and rate the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.