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

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

Lenny Rachitsky

Technology, Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 11 July 2022

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Merci Grace has been a founder, an investor (at Lightspeed Ventures), head of product and growth (at Slack), and is now a founder again (Panobi). She’s also one of the co-founders of Women in Product, and Fast Company named her one of the Most Creative People in 2017.

—

Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible:

• Dovetail: https://dovetailapp.com/lenny

• Mixpanel: https://mixpanel.com/startups

• Whimsical: https://whimsical.com/lenny

—

In this episode, we cover:

[3:41] Merci’s path to Head of Product and Growth at Slack

[4:42] What Merci learned from being a VC that helps her be a better founder

[6:50] How to tell a compelling story

[9:43] What most people don’t know about Slack

[10:27] Why Slack hasn’t created a consumer/social product

[15:14] How Slack innovated the PLG motion

[17:14] Slack’s early growth strategy

[19:57] Slack’s activation point

[22:10] Why it’s important to find connectors within a company

[26:40] Lessons from optimizing Slack’s onboarding flow

[32:12] Most common mistakes in going PLG

[35:56] Signs you can go PLG

[38:10] PLG vs. bottom-up

[40:23] Importance of day-zero value in your tool

[42:17] When to bring in your first salesperson

[44:47] How to hire amazing people

[50:21] Storytelling and Slack’s culture

[51:04] How and when to build a growth team

[52:08] How to build a more diverse team

—

Where to find Merci:

• Panobi: https://panobi.com/

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/merci/

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/merci

• Website: https://mercigrace.co/

• Women in Product: https://www.womenpm.org/

Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Mercy Grace has been a founder and investor, head of growth at Slack and now a founder again.
0:09.0	She's also one of the co-founders of Women and Product, which if you listen to this podcast you know I'm a huge fan of.
0:15.6	In our conversation, we cover what she's learned from her time helping Slack build a product team
0:20.5	and figure out growth, how Slack innovated the concept of product-like growth
0:24.3	and scale it to become one of the biggest B-to-B companies in the world. The most common
0:28.6	mistakes companies make when going product-led, signs you can and should-go should go product lead, when to hire your first
0:34.8	had a growth and what to look for, a bunch of advice on hiring, something Mercy is incredibly good at,
0:40.7	and so much more. I hope that you enjoy this episode with Mercy Grace.
0:49.4	So many product managers are basically treated like project managers. They get higher thinking
0:54.0	they'll be deep in product strategy, vision, and getting to another customers,
0:57.8	only to wind up organizing other people's work and refining backlogs and
1:01.4	organizing tiny, tiny features.
1:04.0	If that sounds familiar, you need dovetail.
1:07.0	Because dovetail gets that the true heart of product management
1:10.4	is understanding what customers want, why they want it, and how to give it to them.
1:15.0	That's why Dovetail build a suite of user research products that help you get to the core of what your customers really want and why they want it.
1:22.8	Dufftail offers powerful analysis tools to help you identify themes, patterns, and insights
1:27.7	in your customer interviews, allowing you to make better data-informed decisions about
1:32.4	what solutions you should build next.
1:34.6	Organizations the world over, like Atlassian, Canva, Data Dog, GetLab, Neels at Norman Group,
1:40.9	sketch, Deloitte, all use Dovetail to get a better understanding of their
1:45.0	customers and build better products.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Lenny Rachitsky, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Lenny Rachitsky and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.