The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process

Noah Weiss is Chief Product Officer at Slack, having spent about seven years there, and previously led product at Foursquare and worked as a PM at Google and Fog Creek Software. The conversation covers his lessons on working with product-minded founders, Slack's product principles and development practices such as complaint storms and customer love sprints, how Slack approaches AI, the self-service growth turnaround, and his views on what makes a great product manager.

01Key learnings

• Distill company-level product taste into a shared set of principles so teams can self-evaluate and founders are not the sole arbiter of every design decision.
• Involve founders early for strategy, goals and anti-goals, then again at the end to taste the product, and keep iterating in working code rather than static mocks.
• Run complaint storms by critiquing adjacent products' customer journeys first, which builds calibration and fresh empathy before critiquing your own product.
• Balance feature team roadmaps as a portfolio mixing incremental improvements with bolder bets, and use short customer love sprints to ship many small delightful fixes.
• Incubate new capabilities in dedicated small teams with space to prototype and learn quickly, outside normal planning cadences, before scaling them.
• When a growth curve plateaus, step back, form hypotheses about new levers for the next customer segment, and accept a period where learning matters more than impact.
• Find a predictive activation metric tied to retention and upgrades, such as getting a small critical mass of teammates using the product weekly, and rally teams around it.
• Use customer pilot programs with diverse companies, industries and countries to validate new functionality before broad launch, since internal dogfooding is less predictive.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.