Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield
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This is 2014. That was the year that Slack actually launched. I was interviewed by MIT Technology Review and asked if we were working to improve Slack. I said, 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 offer this to the public. To me, that was like, you should be embarrassed. If you can't see almost limitless opportunities to improve, then you shouldn't be deciding. - Slack was famous for being one of the early consumerized B2B SaaS products. At more than one company, all hands, I made everyone in the company repeat this as a chant. In the long run, the measure of our success will be the amount of value that we create for customers. Then you can put effort into demonstrating that you have created this value and stuff like that, but there's no substitute for actually having created it. - Something else I heard that you often espouse is friction in the product experience is actually often a good thing. - It became an assumption that you should always be trying to remove friction when the challenge is really comprehension. - 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. If people could get over at the idea of reducing friction as a number of goal or reducing the number of flexor taps or do 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? - You started two companies, both famously pivoted. I imagine many people come to you for advice on pivoting. - The decision is about have you exhausted the possibilities? Creating the distance so that you could make an intellectual, rational decision about it, rather than an emotional decision, this is essential. And the reason I say you have to be coldly rational about it is because it's fucking shimily, any. - Today, my guest is Stuart Butterfield, a founder and product legend who rarely does podcasts. Stuart founded Flickr and then Slack, which he sold to Salesforce in one of the biggest acquisitions in tech history at the time.
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