The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google)
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
Lenny Rachitsky
5.0 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 23 July 2023
⏱️ 86 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Noah Weiss is Chief Product Officer at Slack, where he leads all aspects of the product organization, including the self-service SMB business, the team that launched huddles and clips, and the search and machine-learning teams. Prior to Slack, Noah served as SVP of Product at Foursquare. He started his career at Google, leading the structured data search team and working on display ads. In today’s episode, we discuss:
• The top 10 traits of great PMs
• How “complaint storms” helped Slack teams foster empathy
• How Slack’s product team is approaching AI
• “Comprehension desirability” and other key factors leading to Slack’s success
• Why you should be customer-aware but not customer-obsessed
• Important areas of growth for both new PMs and senior PMs
Curious to learn more about Slack? You can try Slack Pro and get 50% off using this link.
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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/the-10-traits-of-great-pms-how-ai-will-impact-your-product-and-slacks-product-development-process/
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Where to find Noah Weiss:
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/noah_weiss
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahw/
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Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
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In this episode, we cover:
(00:00) Noah’s background
(04:22) Noah’s advice on new parenthood
(07:23) Lessons learned from leading product at Foursquare
(11:33) Advice for working with strongly opinionated founders
(14:14) Thinking of involvement on a U-shaped curve
(16:53) Principles at Slack
(19:32) Implementing ML, AI, and LLMs in meaningful ways
(25:11) How Slack structures AI teams
(26:59) Complaint storms and how they help foster empathy
(30:01) Slack’s approach to prioritization
(32:26) How delight is baked into the DNA of Slack
(34:41) How Slack thinks about competition
(38:04) Building a culture that takes big bets
(41:40) Rituals at Slack
(44:51) How Slack unlocked new levers of growth and revived their self-serve business
(52:01) Slack’s early success and the factors that made them successful
(58:08) Slack’s pilot programs for testing new features
(1:02:03) Noah’s famous blog post: “The 10 Traits of Great Product Managers”
(1:10:15) Book recommendations to improve your writing
(1:12:30) Managing up and the importance of data fluency
(1:14:54) The most important skills to improve as an early-career PM and as a senior PM
(1:17:16) Lightning round
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Referenced:
• Emily Oster: https://emilyoster.net/
• Dennis Crowley: https://denniscrowley.com/
• Stewart Butterfield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/stewart
• Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability: https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited-Usability/dp/0321965515
• Gustav Söderström on Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/lessons-from-scaling-spotify-the-science-of-product-taking-risky-bets-and-how-ai-is-already-impacting-the-future-of-music-gustav-soderstrom-co-president-cpo-and-cto-at-spotify/
• Seth Godin: https://seths.blog/
• Noah’s blog post on the 10 traits of great PMs: https://medium.com/@noah_weiss/10-traits-of-great-pms-a7776cd3d9cd
• Five Dangerous Myths about Product Management: https://medium.com/@noah_weiss/five-dangerous-myths-about-product-management-d1d852ed02a2
• Paul Graham: http://paulgraham.com/
• Ben Horowitz on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bhorowitz
• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft: https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Memoir-Craft-Stephen-King/dp/1982159375
• On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction: https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-Classic-Guide-Nonfiction/dp/0060891548
• Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t: And Other Tough-Love Truths to Make You a Better Writer: https://www.amazon.com/Nobody-Wants-Read-Your-Tough-Love/dp/1936891492
• Several Short Sentences About Writing: https://www.amazon.com/Several-Short-Sentences-About-Writing/dp/0307279413
• Paige Costello on Twitter: https://twitter.com/paigenow
• Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs: https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Selection-Inside-Apples-Process/dp/1250194466
• The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail: https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Technologies-Management-Innovation/dp/1633691780
• Radical Candor: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Candor-Revised-Kim-Scott/dp/1250258405
• Leadership: In Turbulent Times: https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Turbulent-Doris-Kearns-Goodwin/dp/1476795924
• Succession on HBO: https://www.hbo.com/succession
• The Bear on Hulu: https://www.hulu.com/series/the-bear-05eb6a8e-90ed-4947-8c0b-e6536cbddd5f
• Nanit: https://www.nanit.com/
• Snoo: https://www.happiestbaby.com/products/snoo-smart-bassinet
• Uppababy: https://uppababy.com/
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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.
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Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.
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 | We have this mental metaphor that we talk a lot about getting to the next hill. |
| 0:03.5 | The actual wording is, take bigger boulder beds. |
| 0:06.3 | I think teams can often get lost crawling up that hill, not really. |
| 0:09.7 | There's a huge, incredibly beautiful range behind it. |
| 0:13.4 | We've over-tying, freighted, kind of new teams from scratch |
| 0:16.6 | that YouTube ate in a new area before the area is mature. |
| 0:19.6 | So we did that with a lot of these kind of native |
| 0:21.8 | audiovisual products like huddles and clips early in the pandemic because our customers were demanding it from us. |
| 0:27.0 | And I think in the AI space, we're trying to hear from customers, what do you wish Slack could do and have had these new superpowers. |
| 0:33.4 | And let's be incubate a couple teams. |
| 0:35.0 | A prototype gives them space to run and pilot |
| 0:38.0 | and then get something to launch that's amazing, |
| 0:39.8 | blows people away. |
| 0:40.8 | That's kind of a formula that we've seen. |
| 0:48.6 | Welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's |
| 0:51.9 | most successful products. |
| 0:53.4 | Today my guest is Noah Wice. Noah is chief product officer at Slack where he spent the last seven years. |
| 0:59.8 | Prior to that he was head of product at Foursquare, which is near and dear to my heart, as you'll |
| 1:04.6 | hear at the top of this episode. |
| 1:06.5 | Prior to that, he was a PM at Google and at Fau Creek software. |
| 1:10.1 | And in our conversation, we cover the 10 traits of great product managers, how to work effectively with strongly opinionated and product-minded founders. |
| 1:18.0 | What NOAA has learned about working effectively with AI in your product over his last 15 years at Google and Foursquare and now it's Slack. |
... |
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