The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google)
Noah Weiss, CPO at Slack, shares insights on product leadership, including 10 traits of great PMs, working with product-minded founders, effective AI integration, and how Slack revived its self-service business using "complaint storms" and a new North Star metric.
Deep Dive Analysis
18 Topic Outline
Advice for New Parents and Returning from Paternity Leave
Lessons Learned from Leading Product at Foursquare
Working with Strongly Opinionated Product-Minded Founders
Slack's Core Product Principles and Design Philosophy
Integrating AI, ML, and LLMs into Product Development
Structuring AI Teams and Prototyping at Slack
Using Complaint Storms to Foster Empathy and Improve Product
Prioritizing Product Roadmaps with a Portfolio Approach
Baking Delight into Slack's Product DNA
Slack's Approach to Competition and Customer Obsession
Building a Culture that Takes Bigger, Bolder Bets
Unique Rituals and Traditions on Slack's Product Team
Reviving Slack's Self-Serve Business and Unlocking Growth
Factors Behind Slack's Early Success and Product-Led Growth
Scaling Customer Feedback with Pilot Programs
The 10 Traits of Great Product Managers
Essential Skills for Early-Career and Senior Product Managers
Book Recommendations for Product and Leadership
8 Key Concepts
U-Shaped Curve of Founder Involvement
This model suggests involving a product-minded founder heavily at the very beginning of a project for strategic buy-in and alignment on principles, then giving the team space to explore, and finally re-engaging the founder heavily at the very end for quality assurance and final polish, ideally with working software.
Be a Great Host (Slack Principle)
One of Slack's core product principles, it emphasizes a high level of craft and foresight in product design, relentlessly saving users steps and anticipating their needs, similar to how a thoughtful host prepares for guests.
Don't Make Me Think (Slack Principle)
A Slack principle inspired by the book title, it focuses on making software simple, comprehensible, and understandable. It cautions against 'owner's delusion' where builders assume users will care as much about the product's intricacies as they do, advocating for clear design patterns and sometimes more clicks for user confidence.
Complaint Storms
An internal process at Slack where teams critically review products (starting with adjacent products, then their own) by going through the customer journey and documenting every confusing element or pain point. This helps teams develop fresh eyes and empathy for new users, generating inspiration for improvements.
Customer Love Sprints
A tactical approach at Slack where teams dedicate a two-week sprint, similar to a hackathon, to address a burndown list of low-effort, high-impact changes that will generate more 'love' from customers in a specific feature area. The goal is to ship all these delightful improvements.
Take Bigger, Bolder Bets
A strategic principle at Slack that encourages teams to look beyond incremental improvements and constant KPI optimization. It uses the metaphor of 'getting to the next hill' to inspire teams to pursue larger, more innovative projects that might uncover new, significant opportunities.
Comprehension and Desirability
Two key factors identified by Slack for new user success, especially beyond early adopters. Comprehension refers to whether new users understand what the product is for and how it works, while desirability addresses why they should care enough to adopt it and convince coworkers, given their existing job responsibilities.
Successful Teams (North Star Metric)
A key activation metric Slack developed, defined as five people using Slack the majority of the work week to communicate. Achieving this critical mass significantly increases the likelihood of a team upgrading to a paid plan, serving as an earlier funnel indicator for long-term revenue.
9 Questions Answered
Focus on getting a little better every day, don't over-extrapolate from the early days, and fully immerse yourself in parenting by being present and doing tasks like changing diapers and feeds.
Establish alignment on product principles and overall vision to create a common language for design, and strategically involve the founder in a U-shaped curve: heavily at the start for strategic buy-in, and heavily at the end for quality and polish, ideally with working software.
Ensure the UI's promise matches the underlying data's quality, be transparent about data sources to build trust, and design products with virtuous cycles that generate training data as a byproduct of natural usage to make models smarter.
Slack maintains a 'customer-obsessed but competitor-aware' stance, focusing on building a product customers love enough to tell their co-workers about. They also embrace an open ecosystem, recognizing that many customers happily use Slack alongside other tools like Microsoft Teams.
Slack cultivates a 'small startup' spirit, encourages 'bigger, bolder bets' to avoid incrementalism, and structurally incubates new teams from scratch in emerging areas like AI, giving them space to prototype, learn quickly from users, and pilot before a wider launch.
Slack shifted focus from optimizing existing strategies to generating new hypotheses about what the next generation of customers needed, optimizing for learning over short-term impact. Key levers included a trial strategy for paid features and a new North Star metric called 'successful teams'.
Slack built a consumer-grade product that customers loved enough to put their own social capital on the line to get coworkers on board, and it was easy to use and get value from without sales interaction. This led to organic adoption by small teams and independent teams within larger enterprises, which then powered enterprise sales.
Early-career PMs should prioritize impeccable execution, building a nose for impact (even locally), and becoming highly fluent in data and research to bring valuable insights to their team.
Senior PMs should focus on facilitating the pace and quality of decision-making across teams, living in the future and working backwards to define longer-term strategy, and developing strong writing skills as a scalable way to influence the organization.
52 Actionable Insights
1. Build a Product Worth Sharing
Create a product that customers love so much they are willing to put their social capital on the line to get coworkers on board, enabling organic, word-of-mouth growth.
2. Define a Predictive North Star
Establish a new North Star metric (e.g., ‘successful teams’ defined as 5 people using Slack most of the work week) that is earlier in the funnel but highly predictive of long-term paid customer growth.
3. Optimize for Learning Over Impact
When a business plateaus, be humble and willing to ’throw the roadmap away,’ sacrificing short-term impact for several quarters to focus on learning and identifying new levers for growth.
4. Take Bigger, Bolder Bets
Avoid incrementalism by encouraging teams to ’take bigger, bolder bets’ and ‘get to the next hill,’ thinking beyond immediate challenges to discover new, expansive opportunities.
5. Diversify Product Roadmap Portfolio
Structure your product roadmap as a diversified portfolio, balancing new capabilities with daily improvements, risky bets with known bets, and impact-driven work with learning-focused exploration.
6. Focus on Comprehension & Desirability
For new user acquisition beyond early adopters, prioritize ensuring users comprehend what the product is for and why they should care, addressing both understanding and motivation.
7. Implement Paid Product Trial
Offer a trial strategy that gives users a taste of the full premium product experience at various points in their journey, making them unwilling to revert to a free tier.
8. Enable Bottom-Up Enterprise Adoption
Allow individual teams within large enterprises to independently discover and adopt your product, creating organic ‘sprouts’ that can later be consolidated into broader enterprise deals.
9. Leverage Usage Data for Sales
For enterprise sales, identify companies with significant existing bottom-up usage (e.g., by sorting customer domains by active users) and use this data to initiate conversations about broader deployments.
10. Scale Customer Pilot Programs
Implement a robust pilot program with thousands of diverse customers (industry, size, location) who have higher risk tolerance and are motivated to provide feedback on new functionality.
11. Gather Feedback from Pilots
Systematically collect feedback from pilot customers through dedicated channels like Slack Connect and surveys to gain confidence in new features before broad launch, especially for multiplayer products.
12. Align on Product Principles
Distill the founder’s intuition and taste into clear product principles that become the common language for the company, enabling all teams to design products through a shared lens and have more constructive reviews.
13. U-Curve Founder Involvement
Involve product-minded founders heavily at the beginning of a project for strategic alignment (vision, principles, goals) and again at the very end for quality assurance and refinement, allowing teams space to explore in between.
14. Refine in Code, Not Mocks
When involving founders for final product refinement, ensure you are working with actual code, not static design mocks, as experiencing the software is crucial for identifying necessary polish and changes.
15. Collaborative ‘Bug Bash’ Reviews
Conduct collaborative ‘bug bash’ style reviews with the entire development team (engineers, design, product, user research) and the founder to collectively refine the product and raise the craft bar.
16. Prioritize Prototyping Over Mocks
Shift from extensive design explorations with static mocks to rapid prototyping in real software, even if messy, to quickly experience and iterate on how the product feels, avoiding lengthy design debates.
17. Conduct ‘Complaint Storms’
Gather a team to critically review the customer journey of other products (especially adjacent ones), identifying every confusing element or pain point to generate inspiration for improving your own software.
18. Implement Quarterly Love Sprints
Conduct dedicated ‘customer love sprints’ (2-week hackathon-style) at least once a quarter for user-facing teams, focusing on shipping low-effort, high-impact changes to delight customers.
19. Integrate Customer Experience Insights
Establish a strong pipeline for customer experience (CE) team insights (obstacles, pain points, frequent complaints) to directly inform product teams, helping prioritize work that enhances user delight.
20. Conduct Live User Research
Make user research interactive by having PMs, engineers, designers, and researchers live-respond in a Slack thread during usability sessions, fostering real-time insights and collective understanding of user behavior.
21. Incubate New Teams for Bets
Create new teams from scratch to incubate in emerging areas, giving them autonomy and a ‘jail-free card’ from standard processes to prioritize rapid prototyping and user learning.
22. Hire Consumer/Game Talent
To operationalize delight in enterprise products, hire PMs, designers, and engineers with consumer or game company backgrounds, as they bring a focus on playful, consumer-grade experiences.
23. Share Raw Customer Feedback
Regularly share raw customer feedback, including frustrated complaints from social media, at all-hands meetings to keep teams grounded in user sentiment and prevent distance from a diverse user base.
24. Customer-Obsessed, Competitor-Aware
Focus primarily on obsessing over customers and building what they love, while remaining aware of competitors without letting them dictate your strategy.
25. Adopt Open Ecosystem Approach
Position your product as a ‘connected tissue’ that enhances other tools, fostering an open ecosystem and platform approach rather than a closed, competitive one.
26. Match UI Promise to Data
Ensure the user interface’s promise aligns with the underlying data quality, especially for AI, to avoid undermining user trust when the system is incorrect or ‘hallucinating.’
27. Build Trust with AI Transparency
Incorporate transparency about data sources in AI products to help users build credibility and trust in the tool, especially when the AI might appear overly confident.
28. Design Virtuous AI Feedback
Design products to have natural virtuous cycles where user interaction generates training data, making the underlying AI model smarter, more accurate, and more predictive over time.
29. Flexible AI Team Structure
When AI technology is evolving rapidly, adopt an ad hoc, flexible approach to team structure, with a central ML/search team providing infrastructure and multiple smaller teams prototyping in parallel.
30. Live in Future, Work Backwards
As a PM, dedicate time to developing a longer-term vision (6 months to 2 years out), immersing yourself in the problem space to bring back ideas and inspiration to the team.
31. Prioritize Customer & Business Impact
Focus primarily on delivering impact to the customer experience and the business, as consistently building loved products and changing business direction solves most PM issues.
32. Amplify Your Team’s Work
Adopt a facilitator mindset to amplify the work of your team, creating energy and momentum by helping them generate and execute ideas rather than solely creating things yourself.
33. Facilitate Quality Decision-Making
Focus on facilitating the pace and quality of decision-making within your team, rather than making all decisions yourself, to foster a healthy team dynamic.
34. Maintain Impeccable Execution
Ensure impeccable execution by being organized, following up, and maintaining clarity on expectations and timelines, as this is a baseline expectation for effective PMs.
35. Cultivate Data Fluency
Become fluent in various forms of data (quantitative, surveys, customer meetings) to gain deep insights that inform higher-likelihood product bets.
36. Develop Great Product Taste
Cultivate great product taste, developing an intuition for what users will love before testing, combining it with data fluency for a powerful product development approach.
37. Optimize for Learning Pace
Prioritize optimizing for the pace of learning, taking bold bets and being willing to be wrong in the short term, knowing that this will drive long-term impact by discovering new levers.
38. Develop Strong Writing Skills
Cultivate strong writing skills, as it is the most scalable way to influence a larger product organization, especially in senior roles.
39. New PM Focus: Execution, Impact, Data
For new PMs, prioritize mastering execution, building a knack for local impact to gain momentum and credibility, and becoming fluent in data and research to provide valuable team insights.
40. Senior PM Focus: Decisions, Vision, Writing
Senior product leaders should focus on facilitating high-quality decisions for teams of teams, shaping medium-to-longer-term strategy, and leveraging strong writing skills to scale influence across the organization.
41. Be a Great Host
Design products with a ‘be a great host’ mindset, focusing on high craft and relentlessly saving users steps, anticipating their needs like clean towels in an Airbnb.
42. Don’t Make Me Think
Aim to make software simple and comprehensible, avoiding the ‘owner’s delusion’ by not reinventing existing design patterns and catering to diverse user backgrounds to reduce cognitive load.
43. Prioritize Confidence Over Clicks
In non-transactional software, allow for more clicks if they help users understand what they’re doing, build confidence, and trust the steps, as this can lead to a better overall experience.
44. Read ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’
Read ‘The Innovator’s Dilemma’ and ‘The Innovator’s Solution’ by Clayton Christensen for fundamental insights into product strategy, whether working at a large company or a startup.
45. Read ‘Radical Candor’
Read ‘Radical Candor’ by Kim Scott to improve leadership and management skills, particularly for effective soft influence as a PM.
46. Read ‘Leadership in Turbulent Times’
Seek inspiration from ‘Leadership in Turbulent Times’ by Doris Kearns Goodwin to understand how leadership styles evolve and adapt during crises, offering insights beyond typical tech books.
47. Improve Writing with Books
Enhance writing skills by reading ‘On Writing Well’ (for conciseness), ‘Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit’ (for engagement), and ‘Several Short Sentences’ (for clarity).
48. Embrace Imperfection in Parenting
Give yourself permission to not be perfect as a new parent, focusing on getting ‘a little bit better every day’ and accepting that some days won’t go great.
49. Maintain Perspective with Newborns
Avoid over-extrapolating from the challenging early days of parenting, as babies develop rapidly and the initial period (fourth trimester) is not indicative of the next 18 years.
50. Full Digital Detox for Parenting
Fully immerse yourself in new parenthood by doing a digital detox, putting devices away, and being completely present with your child to foster connection and make the experience more rewarding.
51. Customize Your Slack Sidebar
Customize your Slack sidebar into sections with specific settings (e.g., show unread only, sort by recency) and collapse sections to structure inbound information, fitting your preferred workflow.
52. Master Slack Quick Switcher
Utilize the Slack Quick Switcher (Cmd/Ctrl+K) for rapid navigation between channels, people, files, and actions, enhancing efficiency and making interaction feel like a video game.
7 Key Quotes
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 want it to achieve. And 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 to take away from that?
Noah Weiss
If you're joining a company and the CEO does the role that is your functional area of expertise, it's probably the area where you'll learn the most because they're hopefully world-class at it. But also, when will you? You'll be the most frustrated at times because you're going to feel like you have less agency.
Noah Weiss
The promise of the UI has to match the quality of that underlying data.
Noah Weiss
We're customer-obsessed but competitor-aware.
Noah Weiss
If the team is consistently building things people love and changing the direction of the business, everything else is just an input.
Noah Weiss
If you're a PM for a feature team, you're part of a big company, I don't know, making this up, you're on the AdWords team at Google and you're responsible for the you know bid input selector or something and probably is a whole team honestly now at this point you've got such a set of blinders on that I think it can be hard to think about like what else could this team become what else could you drive beyond the thing that's right in front of you so optimizing for learning being willing to take those boulder bets knowing you can be wrong in the short term but that you'll learn new levers that will be really fruitful in the long term it's a portfolio approach to product but I think a really important one
Noah Weiss
Your job is to facilitate the pace and quality of decision making.
Noah Weiss
5 Protocols
U-Curve Founder Involvement
Noah Weiss- Involve the founder/CEO heavily early on for strategic buy-in, agreement on principles, strategy, approach, goals, and anti-goals, especially for big new projects.
- Allow the team space to run, explore, and do creative work, knowing it's aligned with the high-level vision.
- Involve the founder/CEO heavily at the very end to ensure the product meets the company's quality bar and delights customers, ideally refining directly in code rather than static mocks.
Complaint Storms Process
Noah Weiss- Gather a team, often including leadership.
- Start by critically reviewing other products in adjacent spaces, going through their customer journey from landing on the website to achieving value.
- Project the product on one screen and have participants fill in every issue, confusing element, or pain point (not just bugs).
- Generate inspiration from this critical review for potential improvements to your own product.
- Apply the same critical review process to your own software, using the insights gained from reviewing other products.
Customer Love Sprint
Noah Weiss- Identify a feature area and create a burndown list of lowest-effort, highest-impact changes to generate more customer love.
- Have the design, product, and engineering team sprint for two weeks, similar to a hackathon.
- Aim to ship all identified improvements by the end of the sprint.
- Celebrate the shipped delightful things as a fun change of pace from larger feature work.
User Research Session with Live Feedback
Noah Weiss- Conduct usability sessions with actual users.
- Have PMs, engineers, designers, and user researchers dial in and watch the session.
- Encourage the team to write their real-time thoughts, reactions, and ideas in a Slack thread as they observe the user.
- Use this live Slack thread as a primary source of truth for the research report, linking back to it.
Slack Sidebar Customization
Noah Weiss- Customize your sidebar by creating different sections.
- Apply specific settings to each section, such as 'show unread only', 'sort by recency', or 'sort by alphabetical order'.
- Collapse sections you don't need to see all at once to manage inbound information effectively.