Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more

Merci Grace is a former game designer, founder, venture investor, and head of growth/new user experience at Slack, and now a founder again and co-founder of Women in Product. The conversation covers her path into product, lessons from Slack's onboarding and product-led growth experiments, how to judge whether a business can be product-led, when to hire salespeople, how she hires for product roles, and building diverse teams.

01Key learnings

• Open pitches and presentations with the most surprising insight or action rather than market background, since the goal is to capture attention immediately.
• Remember that a product's onboarding should be designed from first contact, and it should teach users by using the product itself rather than relying on generic plug-and-play onboarding frameworks.
• Regularly watch real users go through signup and onboarding; conversion numbers hide the emotional and confusion details that drive changes.
• Surface invites early and often in the product so socially inclined users can find them, while still making them optional for everyone else.
• Assess product-led viability by checking whether an individual can adopt the product without a company-wide buy-in and whether the product delivers value on day zero.
• Hire a first salesperson only when the founder can no longer keep up with demand or when customers themselves expect to speak with sales.
• When hiring PMs, give candidates a realistic, paid-or-unpaid problem to solve and judge their solution quality, communication, and narrative rather than credentials.
• To build a diverse team, proactively seek out and interview women and underrepresented candidates rather than relying on passive inbound referrals, since early diversity creates a self-reinforcing flywheel.

02Frameworks mentioned

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