The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google)
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.