Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield
Stuart Butterfield, founder of Flickr and Slack, shares product and leadership wisdom, discussing utility curves, the owner's delusion, hyper-realistic work-like activities, the importance of not making users think, and the cold rationality required for successful pivots. He emphasizes creating customer value and generosity.
Deep Dive Analysis
15 Topic Outline
Introduction to Stewart Butterfield
Stewart's Current Life and Philanthropic Work
Understanding Utility Curves in Product Development
The Concept of Divine Discontent and Rising Standards
The Importance of Taste and Craftsmanship in Product Design
"Tilting Your Umbrella": Empathy and Courtesy in Product
Balancing Friction and Comprehension in Product Design
The Value of Constant Dissatisfaction and Improvement
Embracing Continuous Improvement and Feedback
The Complexity of Making Anything Work
Parkinson's Law and Organizational Growth
Hyper-Realistic Work-Like Activities and Known Valuable Work
Advice on When to Pivot a Company
The Importance of Generosity in Leadership and Business
The Owner's Delusion in Product and Service Design
8 Key Concepts
Utility Curves
An S-curve representing the relationship between effort/cost (horizontal axis) and value/convenience (vertical axis). It illustrates that initial effort yields little value, then a 'magic threshold' produces significant value, after which continued investment brings diminishing returns, helping product teams decide where to invest resources.
Divine Discontent
This concept highlights that user standards continuously rise over time. As products and features improve across the industry, what was once considered good enough becomes insufficient, necessitating constant investment and iteration to meet evolving expectations.
Tilting Your Umbrella
A metaphor for creating a critical advantage by being considerate and empathetic to other people's experiences, particularly in product design. It suggests that addressing minor inconveniences or showing courtesy where competitors fail can build strong emotional connections with users.
Don't Make Me Think
A core principle for product design that emphasizes reducing the cognitive load and decision-making burden on users. The goal is to make software trivially easy to use, preventing users from feeling stupid or expending unnecessary mental energy, rather than just minimizing clicks or friction.
Parkinson's Law
The maxim 'work expands to fill the time available for its completion.' In organizations, this often leads to an overpowering impulse for people to hire more subordinates, which correlates with career trajectory and authority, but can result in inflated teams and less genuinely valuable work.
Hyper-Realistic Work-Like Activities (HRWLA)
Activities that superficially appear to be productive work (e.g., meetings, presentations, data analysis for negligible gains) but do not contribute to known valuable outcomes. These often arise when there's an imbalance between the number of employees and the supply of genuinely impactful tasks.
Known Valuable Work to Do
Tasks that are clearly understood, and whose completion is definitively known to generate significant value for the organization. While abundant in early startups, the supply of such work can become scarcer as companies grow, leading to HRWLAs if not managed properly.
The Owner's Delusion
The tendency of product owners or creators to assume that users share their high level of intent, understanding, and patience with a product. This often results in designs that are confusing, frustrating, or unhelpful for the average user who has minimal initial intent and many distractions.
10 Questions Answered
A utility curve is an S-curve representing effort/cost versus value/convenience. It helps product teams understand that initial effort yields little value, then a 'magic threshold' produces enormous value, after which continued investment sees diminishing returns.
Divine discontent refers to the continuous rise in user standards. It's crucial because it means products require ongoing investment and improvement, as what was once good enough will eventually fall short compared to evolving expectations.
'Tilting your umbrella' is a metaphor for being considerate and empathetic to user experience, especially in subtle ways. By addressing minor frustrations or inconveniences that competitors overlook, a product can build strong emotional connections with users.
Instead of solely focusing on reducing friction or clicks, product designers should prioritize reducing the amount of 'thinking' a user has to do. This involves making interfaces simple, comprehensible, and preventing users from feeling stupid when making decisions.
The default state for almost anything is 'not working' due to inherent complexity and multivariate factors. Getting things done requires not just resources and effort, but also navigating politicking, sociology, and overcoming numerous veto points within organizations and society.
Parkinson's Law states that 'work expands to fill the time available for its completion.' In organizations, this often manifests as people hiring more subordinates, leading to an overpowering impulse for growth that can result in inflated teams and less genuinely valuable work.
These are activities that look like work (e.g., meetings, presentations) but don't contribute to known valuable outcomes. They occur when the supply of valuable work diminishes as an organization grows, and employees, driven by a desire for recognition, create 'fake work' to fill their time.
A company should consider pivoting when it has genuinely exhausted all non-ridiculous, long-shot possibilities for its current idea. The decision should be coldly rational, not emotional, despite the inherent humiliation and pain involved in admitting a previous direction was wrong.
The owner's delusion is when product creators assume users share their high level of intent and understanding of the product. This leads to designs that are confusing or frustrating for average users who have minimal initial intent and are easily deterred by complexity or lack of clarity.
Generosity in leadership, such as fair policies for employees and customers, demonstrates a commitment to cooperation. This fosters trust, attracts ethical talent, creates a better work environment, and ultimately leads to long-term success by genuinely creating value for customers.
23 Actionable Insights
1. Prioritize Customer Value Creation
Measure success by the actual value created for customers, not just by demonstrating effort, as there’s no substitute for real value creation and it’s an ethical way to run a business.
2. Embrace “Perpetual Desire to Improve”
Cultivate a mindset of perpetual dissatisfaction and a desire to improve, viewing your current product as a “piece of shit” to drive continuous enhancement and innovation.
3. Minimize User Cognitive Load
Shift focus from merely reducing friction or clicks to preventing users from having to think and making decisions, as this reduces metabolic cost and avoids making users feel stupid.
4. Apply “Don’t Make Me Think”
Adopt “Don’t Make Me Think” as a core design mantra to minimize cognitive load, prevent decision fatigue, and ensure users can intuitively understand and use your software.
5. Leverage Empathy for Product Advantage
Create a critical advantage by being considerate, courteous, and empathetic to users’ experiences, as others’ failure to do so presents an opportunity for your product to delight.
6. Market the Outcome, Not Features
Don’t just build a great product; also create the market by communicating the problem it solves and the outcomes it achieves for customers, rather than just listing features, especially for novel solutions.
7. Make Rational Pivot Decisions
When considering a pivot, ensure you’ve exhausted all non-ridiculous possibilities and make a coldly rational, intellectual decision, separating it from the emotional pain and humiliation of admitting a prior idea didn’t work.
8. Invest Past Utility Threshold
Understand utility curves to determine if a feature has received enough investment to cross the “magic threshold” where it provides enormous value, or if it’s stuck in the low-value phase, to optimize resource allocation.
9. Anticipate Rising User Standards
Recognize that user standards continuously increase as they become familiar with software and as competitors improve, requiring ongoing investment and improvement to maintain quality and delight.
10. Avoid The Owner’s Delusion
Be conscious of “The Owner’s Delusion,” where product creators overestimate user intent and familiarity, leading to designs that are unclear or frustrating for new users with minimal motivation and many distractions.
11. Test as a “Regular Person”
When evaluating your product, consciously adopt the mindset of a “regular human being” with distractions and low intent, to identify areas of confusion or difficulty and ensure clarity.
12. Eliminate Hyper-Realistic Work
Actively identify and eliminate “hyper-realistic work-like activities” – tasks that superficially resemble productive work (e.g., endless meetings about presentations) but add no real value.
13. Provide Clear, Valuable Work
Leaders must ensure a sufficient supply of “known valuable work” for their teams by creating clarity, alignment, and explicit priorities, rather than blaming employees for engaging in non-valuable activities.
14. Counteract Parkinson’s Law in Hiring
Be aware that work expands to fill the time available, and most employees will seek to hire more people to report to them, which can lead to organizational bloat if not actively managed.
15. Demonstrate Generosity for Cooperation
Practice generosity with employees and customers as a strategic way to signal cooperation in an iterated game, fostering mutual benefit and attracting ethical talent and customers.
16. Implement Magic Link Login
For mobile apps, ask users for their email, then send a magic link that automatically opens the app and authenticates them, to avoid the terrible experience of typing complex passwords on a phone.
17. Guide Notification Defaults
For new users, set a default that aligns with initial expectations (e.g., all notifications), then proactively offer to switch to recommended, less noisy settings after a certain usage threshold to prevent overwhelm.
18. Add Friction to Prevent Misuse
Implement friction (e.g., a warning pop-up) for features that can be easily abused or cause annoyance, to shape user behavior and educate them on the impact of their actions.
19. Design Menus for Trivial Choices
For menus, present only the 2-3 most common actions upfront, grouping others behind an “other” option, prioritizing trivially easy choices over fewer clicks that require difficult comparisons.
20. Implement Staged Feature Rollout
For critical features with potential for conflict (like Do Not Disturb), pre-announce to administrators, set sensible organizational defaults, and allow both administrators and end-users to override settings.
21. Offer Proactive Customer Credits
Proactively offer generous, automatic credits for service disruptions or issues, even without customer input, to demonstrate commitment to customer value, though be mindful of scaling impacts for public companies.
22. Value Direct Improvement Feedback
Actively seek direct criticism and feedback, viewing every mistake or area for improvement as a valuable “gem” that can be collected and used to make your product or skills better.
23. Acknowledge Systemic Complexity
Understand that getting anything done is inherently difficult, requiring not just resources but also navigating complex social, political, and organizational dynamics, rather than blaming individual “bad actors.”
9 Key Quotes
I feel like what we have right now is just a giant piece of shit. It's just terrible, and we should be humiliated that we offered this to the public.
Stewart Butterfield
In the long run, the measure of our success will be the amount of value that we create for customers.
Stewart Butterfield
Your failure to really be considerate and exercise this courtesy and really be empathic about other people's experience is an advantage that you can create, a critical advantage.
Stewart Butterfield
If your software kind of stops me and asks me to make a decision, and I don't really understand it, you make me feel stupid.
Stewart Butterfield
If people could get over the idea of reducing friction as the number of goal or reducing the number of flexor taps or something, and instead focus on how can I make this simple? How do I prevent people from having to think in order to use my software?
Stewart Butterfield
The reality is, like, almost nothing works.
Stewart Butterfield
If something seems simple, probably you don't understand it.
Stewart Butterfield
Creating the distance so that you can make an intellectual, rational decision about it rather than an emotional decision is essential.
Stewart Butterfield
The reason I say you have to be coldly rational about it is because it's fucking humiliating.
Stewart Butterfield
1 Protocols
Slack's Do Not Disturb Feature Rollout Strategy
Stewart Butterfield- Inform all Slack administrators weeks before launch that the Do Not Disturb feature is coming.
- Set a default Do Not Disturb schedule for each organization (e.g., 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. or 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. in their local time zone).
- Allow system owners to override this default for their organization.
- Allow individual end-users to override the system owner's default.
- If the system owner changes the default again, it overrides all end-user preferences.
- End-users can then override the new system owner default again.