Recode Decode: Slack chief product officer April Underwood

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Vox Media Podcast Network

Technology, Business

4.3 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 5 September 2018

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

April Underwood, the chief product officer at workplace collaboration platform Slack, talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about her career, diversity in Silicon Valley and the future of work. In this episode:02:06 - How Underwood got from Texas to tech05:36 - Moving to Oregon to work for Intel, and back to Texas07:09 - What does a product manager actually do?09:32 - Organizing content at Google11:01 - Why she left Google for Twitter15:50 - Why Slack is better than email20:02 - AOL at Work and the danger of outages24:15 - Slack’s growing valuation and staying independent27:55 - How Slack works and how it integrates with other services32:34 - Security and innovation35:43 - The biggest obstacles Slack faces40:45 - The features users are asking for the most45:45 - #Angels and “the gap table"49:55 - How does Slack fare on diversity?51:22 - Is Silicon Valley getting better at diversity and inclusion?53:13 - “Where we are now is the dark timeline"56:52 - What would Underwood do if she were running Twitter?58:43 - The future of work Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Sabotage hired goons and a landfill in Utah.
0:05.0	How Steve Jobs' revolutionary catastrophe of a computer, the Apple Lisa, earned a brief
0:10.7	second life and then was buried for good.
0:14.8	Watch the Verges documentary Lisa's final act now on YouTube.
0:19.6	Hi, I'm Cara Swisher, Editor-at-large of Recode.
0:24.9	You may know me as someone who spends all day on Slack making new emojis of Peter Kafka's
0:28.6	face, but in my spare time I talk tech and you're listening to Recode Decode on the Vox
0:32.6	Media Podcast Network.
0:34.2	Today in the red tier is someone I've wanted to talk to for a while.
0:36.9	April Underwood, the chief product officer at Slack.
0:39.9	She's been at Slack for three years now, but before that spent nearly five years as
0:43.1	a director of product at Twitter.
0:44.9	Lots to talk about there.
0:46.1	We're taping this episode in late August, but releasing it just before the Slack frontiers
0:49.7	conference in San Francisco.
0:51.5	April, welcome to Recode Decode.
0:53.1	Thanks so much for having us.
0:54.1	So, there's so much to talk about.
0:55.4	So, what do I want to do?
0:56.6	You guys just raised a whole bunch of money.
0:58.4	There's been all kinds of Slack has done a lot of stuff in the past couple of years.
1:02.6	So let's just get your background.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

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

Generated transcripts are the property of Vox Media Podcast Network and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.