September 30, 2024 • 52 mins
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Join us as we sit down with Johnny Rodgers, one of Slack's original employees. During his time at Slack - from the beginning until post-acquisition - Johnny wore several hats. Earlier this year, he and some other former early employees started sharing some stories about the early days (and beyond) of Slack. You can read those and subscribe for notifications as new posts are published at buildingslack.com.
Tune in to hear:
- Journey of Slack: Johnny discusses his transition from web development to joining the startup that became Slack. He shares insights on how Slack evolved from a gaming company into a revolutionary communication tool.
- Building Products People Love: The discussion delves into creating software that people can genuinely enjoy using, drawing from Slack's goal to replace email and streamline workplace communication.
- Customer Engagement and Feedback: They highlight the importance of listening to customer feedback to improve products and services continually. Johnny emphasizes the responsive approach Slack takes to incorporate user suggestions and resolve issues.
- Technology Adoption and Change Management: The episode covers strategies for effective technology adoption within organizations, including fostering internal advocates and understanding the challenges of introducing new tools.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of
OpsCast brought to you byMarketingOpscom, powered by the
MoPros out there.
I'm your host, michael Hartman,joined today by my co-host,
naomi Liu.
Mike Rizzo is off at Inbound2024 up in Boston.
So, naomi, how are things upthere?
Where are you again?
Somewhere in Canada?
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Vancouver, vancouver.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Sunny Vancouver.
I can't keep up with you thesedays.
You're all over the place.
I'm here, okay, good For thisweek.
For this week, well.
And this is a new situation forus, because Naomi actually has
someone sitting with her.
Our guest today, joining ustoday is Johnny Rogers.
So Johnny was one of theoriginal employees at what
(00:45):
became Slack.
During his time at Slack, fromthe beginning until
post-acquisition, johnny woreseveral different hats.
Earlier this year he and someother former early employees
from Slack started sharing someof the stories about the early
days and beyond of Slack and wethought it would be interesting
to share with our audience.
You can read and subscribe tothose for notifications as posts
go live.
(01:07):
It's under the domainbuildingslackcom and we'll share
that in our show notes as well.
Johnny, thanks for joining ustoday in your cozy little space
there.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Thanks so much for having me, Michael.
Thanks, David.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Yeah, no problem, michael and Johnny, I have to
say that I'm super excited thatjohnny's on the podcast today.
In the back of my mind, andhe's someone that I wanted to
bring on the show for a while,and I'm just glad that not only
could he be on here today, butactually sitting next to me
recording.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
So yeah, I think I was saying, I think this is a
first right.
We actually have a guest in theroom with one of us.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Well, despite, you know, going through COVID and
having to do remote work likeeverybody else, I never made the
jump to a good audio setup athome, so it's probably just as
well I'm here with Naomi'sprofessional microphone.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Well, you would be surprised at some of the
scenarios we've had with guests.
I think we had someone who waslike in one of those like phone
booth type setups in an officesharing place with no mic, no
headphones, and it still workedout.
So I think we'll be okay, nomatter what.
All right, well, I gave thetwo-second version of your
(02:21):
career path, particularly justthe Slack component of it, so I
know it's not complete.
Maybe if you could just do aquick overview of your career
path and how you ended up atSlack and then we'll kind of
pick up from there.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Yeah for sure it's funny.
I was just chatting with afriend of mine yesterday how we
were the lucky few who got theinternet at home when we were,
you know, young enough to havelots of time to spend kicking
around on the internet midnineties.
Um.
So yeah, when I was 12, we gota computer at home and it's
connected to the internet andhad a little bit of software and
I spent a lot of time just kindof like messing around and I
(02:59):
spent the last you know 25 yearsof my career pretty much doing
the same, but the last 25 yearsof my career pretty much doing
the same.
So when I finished university,I started a web development
studio just building sites forpeople.
This was around just after thedot-com boom and bust and I was
(03:21):
kind of just a generalist doinga little of everything a bit of
design, a bit of programming,figuring out how to deal with
clients and did that for aboutseven or eight years, eventually
went back to grad school, didmy master's here at SFU and
after grad school finished itwas the end of the financial
crisis and recession and jobswere scarce.
So I was looking around for jobsin software here in the city
(03:44):
and my wife who's the primaryteacher.
She actually had been usingthis game Glitch in her
classroom and she said this ismade right here in Vancouver and
it's the guys who used to makeFlickr.
And I had been a Flickr user.
So I applied.
I actually sort of cold calledStuart, went for coffee with
them and my skill set was justkind of general web dev and a
(04:05):
bit of design programming andthey were looking for somebody
to help out and so I joinedTinySpec, as it was called then
when they were working on thegame Glitch, and I came in
toward the latter end of that.
I only worked on the game forabout eight months before we
eventually shut it down andpivoted to Slack.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, it's so interesting, it's funny.
You mentioned two things that Ialmost at least I tried to
forget about them, I guess whichis the dot-com bubble and burst
and the financial crisis in theearly aughts, because those
were like right in the middle ofmy career.
So that's not fun.
So, thanks for that.
(04:47):
Appreciate it, johnny.
You know opening old wounds, no, so, you know, when Naomi
mentioned you as someone sheknew and as a potential guest,
it wasn't around that time, Ithink I happened to.
I also listened to a lot ofpodcasts in addition to this.
I heard a little bit of theorigin story about Slack from
(05:07):
the how I built this podcast,and so I don't remember all the
details.
But you mentioned right itstarted as a gaming company, so,
like, was there anything elseabout that?
I mean, it sounds like it wasan opportunistic kind of thing
as well, but what other thingsattracted you to the company?
(05:28):
Was it that the Flickr formerFlickr founders were part of it,
or was there more to it?
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Yeah, you know, there's actually kind of a few
threads came together thatreally pushed me in the
direction of wanting to work forthe company, of wanting to work
for the company.
Like I said, I had used Flickrand loved what the team had done
, you know, bringing photosharing to the web and kind of
this mix of like a sense ofhumor and, I don't know, I would
say, like love that theybrought to that.
(05:55):
You know, it was just a verydifferent time on the internet
and it was so much fun being onFlickr with people commenting
and leaving notes on photos andI don't know.
It seemed like this verygenuinely, um, delightful
community that I really enjoyed.
And it was also at the time, ifyou wanted to have a blog with
photos on it, you posted them onFlickr.
(06:17):
Um, you know, bloggercom wouldsay go go, createa Flickr
account and upload them thereand then paste the links over
here.
Um, and so that's how I becamea Flickr account and upload them
there and then paste the linksover here, and so that's how I
became a Flickr user, because Iwas a blogger at the time, just
like travel blog stuff.
So I've had a lot of positiveimpressions of the company and
the people behind it from whatthey had done with Flickr.
(06:38):
Beyond that, I had lived in NewZealand for a little while and
had briefly met who became ourCTO, cal Henderson, one of the
founders there when he wasgiving a talk at WebStock, a
great New Zealand web conference.
And then, finally, eric Costellowas one of the 34 co-founders
(07:00):
of Slack.
Co-founders of Slack he hadposted a lot of stuff online
early about building websitesHTML and CSS and JavaScript, you
know, tutorials basically andhe had always shared it sort of
out of the goodness of his heartand his own kind of like
passion and curiosity about thesubject.
Like he was never charging forthat content or anything.
(07:20):
That's kind of a different timeagain, and I can remember
learning techniques for how touse css for different layouts
from his website, and so, yeah,when I found out that it was
that group of people um, here invancouver, it just seemed
obvious to me like I don't carewhat they're really working on,
I want to work with those people, um, and in the end that ended
up being, you know, sort of thekey to the success, like I
(07:44):
wasn't a gamer and, like I said,I didn't get to work on Glitch
for very long, but working withactive people turned out to be a
really durable way to solveinteresting software problems
and build a business together.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
I've been reading, I read some of the stuff that you
posted on building Slack andwhen I actually jotted down a
couple of notes, because one ofSlack's evergreen goals you'd
mentioned is software for workthat people can love, and that's
just something that, like I, itresonates with me because you
know someone who is a lover oftechnology and the tools that I
(08:18):
use in my day job.
You know there's obviously toolsthat I cannot stand and there's
tools that I just love to useand it's just one of those
things like it's so nice toutilize tools and software in
your day to day, that where thatpremise is that backbone of
that, right, and it's just, it'sjust nice, right, because you
(08:47):
know you had also writtensomething about you'll know it's
working when you don't have touse email at work anymore and
it's while obviously we stilluse email, it's just a different
way of doing our jobs thatallows us to communicate and
stay connected and keeporganized with all of the
million other things that we'redoing every day.
And I just, I don't know.
I just really appreciate thatsentiment when it comes to
building those tools for peoplelike us.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Yeah, really, we always built the tool that we
wanted and I think that ensuredthat we were building something
that we love and that fit reallywell for the jobs we were
trying to do.
We weren't trying to build forsome imaginary person or team or
customer out there, we werebuilding for ourselves and
(09:24):
thinking about how it might beuseful in lots of different
industries and so that kind ofidea of like work software that
people actually love.
We were very lucky to sort ofhit court with folks and help
them off of sort of the emailhell of the time.
I can remember Stuart early onwhen he was pitching it, like
you know, we were using a toollike Slack internally that we
(09:47):
had cobbled together and thatwas my first time being out of
the job that did not email andit was great but it was still
very rough.
But he could really see wherethings were going and he would
say to us Slack or somethinglike it is inevitable.
And I think now, 2024, 10, 12years on, it's hard to imagine
working without this kind oftool.
(10:09):
And in the time since I leftthe company I've been doing some
volunteering and working withsome other groups and everybody
has Slack, no matter whatthey're doing, and it's pretty
amazing to see all the differentnooks and crannies that it's
found its way into since then.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
I think one of the reasons that that kind of
comment like really resonatedwith me software for works that
people can love is because, youknow, we as marketers we often
are designing programs andbuilding workflows and coming up
with nurture programs for thisgroup of unknown people in our
minds, not realizing that andthinking like, hey, actually we
(10:48):
are the target audience.
How would we receive thesetypes of campaigns?
Do we want to be nurtured to?
Every Monday at 12 pm, you know, with a hey, you know, sorry, I
missed you type of email Like.
I think it's easy to forgetthat we are our own consumers as
well and that's just somethingthat is an important reminder.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
Yeah, it's cool because I think it's kind of two
ways to think about it.
One is like the Silicon Valleystartup advice, which is like
scratch your own itch right, ifyou have a problem and you can
solve it with a product and youcan make it as good as you know
how to make it solve thatproblem, good chance somebody
else is going to have the sameor similar problem.
They're going to be interestedin it.
(11:28):
The flip side is like I don'tknow, it's like the golden rule
treat your customers the wayyou'd like to be treated.
And you know we've all usedshitty software and we've all
felt the funnel of like a growthteam sled deck pushing emails
and notifications at us to tryand get us to do something.
And you know we have.
(11:48):
We always try to avoid that andwe always try to address our
customers as people and,thinking through you know how we
could best make something thatwould help them solve their own
problems rather than, you know,buy our product, I guess, which
is tricky and it takes a lot ofeffort and decision-making at
(12:10):
every step and over a longperiod of time.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Naomi, you hit on something that I think I've as a
as a as a kind of a leader inmarketing ops, and one of the
roles I think we should all playis to be advocates for our
customers, Right, and I thinksometimes your ideas are thrown
out of things we could do rightTo.
You know, you both have sort ofpainted a little bit of a
(12:36):
picture of what that might looklike in.
Our job should be to go likeyeah, is this really what our
customers want?
Right, so I've nurtured a greatexample, Like I've sort of sour
.
I don't know that we don'tnecessarily need to do it, but I
do not believe there's anybodyout there who's going oh, I got
this email from company X.
I cannot wait till I get thenext one, Right, Whether it's a
day or a week or a couple ofweeks, Like I.
(12:57):
I just I don't know anybodywho's doing that, Right,
Everyone's busy.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yeah, when I get an email from a rep, I try to
figure out is this a nurtureright or are they actually
sending me a one-to-one email?
Speaker 1 (13:08):
yeah, well, it's funny because, like I I don't
know about you, naomi like I,almost never unsubscribed to
anything because, part of that,I'm trying to see what are these
companies doing.
Yeah, I want to see whatthey're doing and see if there's
a yeah, any commonality.
And so, by the way, that's toour audience who might be in
sales or something, that's notan invitation to start pushing
emails to me, just like um, I dounsubscribe occasionally, but
(13:31):
in general I try not to um, justbecause I think it's valuable
to see.
But I think that's that'sreally a good.
You know, johnny made the pointlike I mean, we wanted the
golden rule.
I love that's, that's a greatway of putting saying it.
I mean, like we should treatour customers the way that we'd
want to be treated.
Do?
Speaker 3 (13:48):
you?
You want an email from an AIwritten out of the script to
sell you some shit?
No, definitely not.
Do you want somebody to talk toyou about your problems and try
to help you solve them?
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Yeah, I mean literally the last two days.
We got a household product, youknow kitchen appliance kind of
thing, and it broke down.
It was still under warranty.
Contacting the company islovely.
They sent out a replacement.
It didn't come with a returnshipping label, so they got
(14:20):
FedEx to send it to me.
But dealing with trying tocoordinate with FedEx has
actually been a big problem.
And this is not a knock againstFedEx, I don't really have a
thing about that.
But it's like an example oflike I actually just wanted to
talk to somebody and I couldn'ttalk to somebody and it made it
hard to do that.
And I know they're all tryingto manage costs.
I understand why.
(14:40):
But it's like if they putthemselves in the customer's
shoes, your mindset right.
They're frustrated, they wanthelp, like make it easy for them
.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
This is something that was essential, I think, to
the DNA of the company and tothe success of the company.
So call it customer love orwhatever, but from the get-go,
from the top, you know, fromStuart, our CEO, and from Allie
Rail, who I'm writing andbuilding Slack with and who was
(15:13):
our head of customer experience,and eventually we deal the same
and then eventually, our CEOthe sort of bottom line was like
is this good for the peopleusing the product and are we
doing right by them?
And if you contact Slack forsupport in 2013, when we were in
our alpha and beta, or today,when millions of people are
(15:36):
using it, it's an actual personat the other end of the line who
reads your email, understandswhat's going on and will reply
as a human.
Now, of course, there's somescaling, like if there's a
widespread issue, you might geta macro type response.
But the core of people who workat Slack and have worked at
Slack over the last decadehundreds of folks in customer
(15:58):
support who take their job superseriously and are so empathetic
and supportive of our customersand the way we talked about
people who use their productinternally was always with, I
guess, a respect and sort ofreverence for their time, and so
we always kept that as like asort of fundamental value of the
(16:20):
company.
And when it comes to like howyou're spending the dollars you
have to allocate within acompany, you know, having a
bunch of humans full-time roundthe globe, round the clock,
answering customer supporttickets and doing so very
quickly, that costs a lot, me.
You know, having a bunch ofhumans full-time round the globe
, round the clock, answeringcustomer support tickets and
doing so very quickly, thatcosts a lot.
It costs a lot more than notdoing it, that's for sure, and
it costs more than having arobot do it or understaffing
(16:40):
that group of people, and, Ithink, even more than that.
This is where Allie could speakto her experience.
But you know she had a seat atthe executive table from the
get-go to represent the voice ofthe customer.
It wasn't just anotherdepartment you know like, oh,
we've got engineering, we've gotdesign, we've got customer
support over here or we've gotit overseas, or something like
(17:02):
that.
It was a core part of thebusiness and the needs of that
group and the voice of thecustomer was represented at the
top level in the CTO staff.
And I don't know if that'stypical, I think from what I've
seen from other companies andwhat I've experienced as a
customer of other companies, itsure doesn't seem typical Try
(17:23):
and email, google with theproblem.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah, it's interesting because what
immediately goes to my head,because I'm in dallas, is
southwest airlines and I don'tknow I don't know if this is
still true at southwest airlines, but when it started right, one
of the things that herbkelleher did was he made sure
that people were empowered atthe front line to delight
customers right, whether thatwas on the plane, at the
check-in, at you know all thatstuff.
(17:49):
So they, they had the freedom todo what they thought was right
to solve a problem.
I don't think that ever meant,like you know, doing something
that they didn't think was rightjust because the customer said
it right.
So that, yeah, just likecustomers always right is, you
know, not what they believe, butthey did want to have a
delightful experience and it's abig part of, in my mind with
how they grew so fast, soquickly, right.
(18:12):
So, yes, there's a cost to that.
At the same time, I thinkthere's what's hard is that
there's not, there's not alwaysthat easily quantifiable return
in the short run.
That's right, it's seen as acost center in the short term.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
Um, but yeah, we all have examples of companies that
we feel trust for and we feelare actually taking care of us
when we deal with them, thathave gone out of their way to
make this a priority, and itdoes add up in the long run.
I should have just said beforewhat I really like and, as an
example of this, slack took offreally quickly in the first few
(18:49):
years and grew beyond what wehad anticipated.
An example of this you knowSlack took off really quickly in
the first few years and grewbeyond what we had anticipated
as being probably a good toolfor people in tech and media,
and then it grew outside ofthose industries and many, many
others.
And as the companies usingSlack got bigger, you know, from
hundreds of thousands, tens ofthousands of people.
You know there's an overhead tothat kind of communication at
(19:10):
large organizations and one ofthe primary pieces of feedback
during those first couple yearswas we need threaded
conversations.
We need to be able to reply tomessages.
We can't just have a singlelayer in channels, which is what
we had at the time.
So for those who use Slack atthe time, you know conversation
in a channel would get reallybusy and you wanted to respond
to Michael's message, but sincethen Naomi and Dave have been
(19:31):
having a different conversation.
So how do you sort of segmentthat?
And people were desperate for abetter way to do that and we
eventually released threads.
And the reason I bring it up isbecause after we released
threads, after a couple of yearsof thousands of people sharing
their feedback about the needfor this, our customer support
team went back and replied toevery single one of those people
(19:51):
, even if it was from like twoyears prior.
You know old tweets, oldZendesk tickets, and they went
through and they said we heardyou, we listened.
It took us a while, but wethink we've got it right.
You know it's out now.
Please let us know if you thinkwe still want to make it better
.
And people were so, I guess,surprised by that that we kept
(20:12):
track and actually followed upwith them, but then delighted
and engaged to actually make itbetter.
So it took something that was ahugely disruptive change to the
product, that was not withoutits growing pains and bumps, and
, instead of having customersangry that it was wrong or that
it changed things, it gave us anopportunity to keep having a
(20:33):
conversation with them and saythis is what we think is best.
Here's where we're going withit.
What do you think?
And the million ways that theycame back to us with feedback
and ideas made the productbetter and it deepened that kind
of trust and sort of mutualappreciation for one another and
just trying to make the bestthing.
That we knew how.
And I think you know that's oneexample.
(20:55):
There were many others over theyears and I think it's, like I
said, essential to what thecompany was and for why people
talked about this piece ofsoftware and wanted to use this
piece of software and took it toother places their next
workplace or whatever.
In a way that's not true with alot of software that you use at
work which you're often happyto see the backup.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
I think one of my takeaways from that is that, you
know, in our line of work,something that can be a
challenge and super important istechnology adoption, finding
internal advocates and how do weget our stakeholders and
business partners on board withsome of the changes that we want
to bring a company throughright, Some of the digital
transformations that we aretrying to enact within an
(21:35):
organization.
And just kind of hearing someof your anecdotes about how you
treated customers and how youlistened to their pain points
and then took action to findsolutions for that is something
that I think a lot of ourlisteners can have a takeaway
from right.
And just listening to thepeople that we're supporting and
what are the things that arekeeping them up at night, how do
(21:58):
we help them meet theirbusiness goals, their revenue
goals, and what are the tools oreducation gaps that we can, as
marketing ops folks, help tofill.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Yeah, I agree, we can , as marketing ops folks, help
to fill.
Yeah, I agree, I think I hadthe same basic sentiment, naomi,
or free thought process is thatI think it's easy for folks in
marketing ops to get sort ofdefensive when they get feedback
that is negative aboutsomething they've done right or
solution they come up with.
And my, my view all along is aslong as it doesn't get personal
, it's like, take all that inright, I want that feedback, I
(22:35):
want as much of that as I wantit doesn't mean you have to go
do everything, but the more youdo that, the more you listen, I
think, the more likely you areto be able to support the team
broadly.
You'll help with prioritization, all those kinds of things.
So I think that would be mytakeaway is be open to getting
that feedback, whether it'spositive or not.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
Yeah, and we would always foster that.
We were really active onTwitter at the time, similarly,
sort of replying to everymessage, and people would have
all sorts of ideas.
Like you said, it's not like wewere going to just go and
implement whatever people askedfor, but we would hear every day
about little paper cuts thatpeople were having with the
(23:19):
product.
And the fact that we actuallylistened and would fix those and
turn around and say, hey, it'sfixed, it's better now, meant
that, A we would get morefeedback from that same person
again because they knew we werelistening, and B, it would make
it better for everybody else whohad that same feedback but
hadn't heard it right.
And so there's the big hardproblems that you're trying to
solve that take months or yearsand you're not just going to be
(23:40):
able to get around in a day.
But there's also tons of littlelow-hanging fruit that you can
address pretty quickly at prettylow cost and actually adds up
to a dramatically better productexperience and a much happier
group of customers.
I'm not involved in, you know,wrong-lifes software
organizations, the way you guysare talking about, but it seems
(24:04):
like the same kind of thing canbe true.
You know, see what's causingtrouble for people and what's
turning them off and what you'retrying to achieve together and
bring them in almost more aslike a part of it than as like
see, I know if mike was herehe'd be going like see, here's.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Here's my point about saying that marketing ops
should be like productmanagement.
So, um, all right.
So I'm curious.
It's funny that you didn't haveany.
Like you're not a gamer, or youweren't at the time, right, but
you end up at a gaming company.
But what?
Um, I heard a little bit aboutagain from that that you built a
, built something internallythat you needed as a team while
(24:43):
you're working on.
Was it glitch?
Is that the name that was atthe?
Yeah, so what?
Like, like, how did that evenstart?
Like, what was the?
Was it because you were alltired of email threads and like
you didn't want to use a wiki?
Speaker 3 (24:56):
I think wikis were around then, maybe um, so this
predates me, um, but you know, Iexperienced it when I joined
the company.
They had the founders and earlyemployees at glitch.
They had sort of cobbledtogether IRC, which is a
long-lived internet relay chatwhich kind of looks like Slack
(25:19):
if you squint at it, but it wassort of a simpler earlier chat
protocol from the web.
The biggest downfalls of it wasthat you only got the messages
if you were online, so there'sno archive to scroll back to if
you weren't connected.
It didn't have native filesharing.
It didn't have searchcapability.
It had, you know, pretty basicprofiles like to handle.
(25:40):
So it was like amazing chatfrom the 90s and they had taken
that for you know, real-timecommunication with the team and
then they had added all thosemissing bits and the additions
were very clunky.
Search was a web page you couldgo to which essentially just
formulated a SQL query andpulled stuff out of the database
.
For you, file sharing was justan FTP file server that would
(26:05):
post links into the chat andclick through to the archive,
which is done by stuffing, youknow, stepping stuff into a
database.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
I haven't heard that for a while.
Ftp.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Uh-huh oh.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Some people, anyone on the call is googling what FTP
is, or really throw them off.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
SFTP, right yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
Yeah, I thought that was pretty good, just the way
that I put files on that.
This is before we talked aboutthe content.
Oh my God.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
Anyway, you know they had taken IRC and they plugged
in the bits that made it moreuseful and everything happened
there.
When I joined Glitch I got anemail address but it was like I
I don't know.
I think I maybe got expensereport receipts there and that's
about it, but they again wouldbe in slack.
But we never used email forsomething in vacation.
(27:01):
It was all on IRC.
And the other thing that waslousy about IRC at the time was
like the mobile clients werewere pretty terrible for it.
So the idea was there to haveall your communication in one
place and be able to search overthis archive.
That would, you know, add valueover time, because a new person
wouldn't be starting fromscratch in an empty inbox.
(27:22):
They would have all this stuffto look back into.
Um, which was definitely truewhen I was, you know, sort of
getting my hands on the job, butit was was pretty clunky for
sure, and it was not the focusof the team at all.
Nobody was responsible for it.
It was just like some engineersadding stuff as we needed it If
something got too frustrating,and Stuart has talked about how
(27:43):
it was kind of the best way tosort of accidentally make the
great use of software is tospend as little time on it as
possible and only fix somethingwhen it's done and created,
because everybody's trying tomake a great game and make the
game a success.
So you know he has spoken aboutthis in print and on podcasts
before.
But when he and the otherfounders realized that the game
(28:06):
just was not going to be penableeconomically, you know it was
creatively very successful andthe people who played it
absolutely loved it.
It's kind of like an animalcrossing type of casual social
gaming.
It's really fun, really sweet.
But when they realized that,you know it's just going to cost
too much to make for the numberof people who are going to pay
to play it.
(28:27):
You know, luke's a creative guyand I think he kicked around a
handful of ideas, one of whichwas you know, I think this thing
that we built for our owninternal use could actually be a
real product.
And that's what he eventuallypitched to our company's season
board and said we can keep goingwith the game, but we're going
to crash in them and we're goingto run out of runway.
(28:48):
So why don't we take the moneythat we've got left and make
this product?
And he fixed it as potentiallya $100 million business and grew
to much, much beyond thateventually.
But it was this ambitious ideaand this was at a time when
(29:08):
companies were really running onemail and things like HipChat
and Campfire were used in somedev and tech teams but hadn't
sort of like penetrated broadlybeyond that.
So, yeah, he anticipated that,as I said, slack or something
like that was going to beinevitable, because email just
(29:29):
was not suitable to how we wereusing it really and I wanted to
build a product around it.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
So, like I know, there are people out there, I'm
married to one who getsfrustrated by Slack because it's
just yet another challenge,because email has not gone away,
nor has text messages.
There's all these differentways of communicating at the
organization, um, and I've seenthat myself too.
(29:57):
Right that you know pickingwhich one you use at the time.
You know when you, when youguys were rolling it out with
you know, maybe initially orover time, right, did you start
to find best?
I hate to use the term bestpractices, but things like
setting.
Are there certain things youshould do if you want to adopt
Slack as it relates to like?
(30:18):
Being very deliberate aboutthis is when we use Slack, this
is when we use email, this iswhen we use text message or
whatever other channels.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
It was something we spent a lot of time on and I
think on the the one hand we gotreally lucky because a lot of
teams who were really trulyearly adopters in that first
year or two were a lot like us,were software teams or media
teams where the real-time natureplus async just kind of made
sense to them and they're reallycomfortable in the tool and so
(30:51):
having them move everything overwas relatively pain-free.
As we started to expand outsideof those teams and, like you
know, the newsroom or the techedge team or something like that
, into other roles and otherindustries that had more
overhead for things like fathernaming and compliance and on the
(31:12):
record communications or didn'tsort of embrace the kind of
sync, async fluidity oforganizational communication,
then we had to start telling abit of a different story about
it and giving different kinds oftechniques.
So we would ask people in theearly days try and move your
whole team over to it for a week.
(31:33):
No email, no, nothing else fora week.
And if it's still working foryou on Friday, you should keep
doing that.
And if it was just one morething in the mix, it died.
It would just be kind of likewell, I'm here but the
accounting team's not here and Ican't ask this person a
(31:54):
question, and it just became onemore place and would sort of
die on the vine at those teams,whereas those who came over and
went all in, even for arelatively short period of time,
they stuck.
And those are the ones that wesaw sort of just grow and grow
and grow in seat count, whichwas how we charged for the
product over time.
We would also give tips about,as you say, being deliberate
(32:16):
about how to use it.
Um, so when you start a newteam or workspace as a call now,
um, you end up with twochannels general and random, and
even that is like it's prettyvague about what you're supposed
to do.
Um, you know, general is for alittle bit of everything, and
random you know sort ofrecognizing that people bullshit
a lot at work was for jokingaround.
(32:37):
You know sharing links andposting.
You know gifts and stuff now,um, but that didn't give you
much structure, right, and wehad to teach people.
Okay, a channel is a goodbucket for a topic, and that
topic might be a project thatyou're working on or a client
that you have a relationshipwith, or a department in your
(32:58):
company on, or a client that youhave a relationship with, or a
department in your company likeaccounting, as an example, or an
event like next month's offsiteor something like that.
And when we started to showexamples of that kind of thing
to people and show how channelskind of have their own life
cycle, that's when it wouldclick for people.
And what we also found, which Ithink, is I think there's some
(33:18):
you know clever name for this,but it's the same thing on
wikipedia.
Most of us never contribute towikipedia but we all get benefit
from it, right.
But there's this smallpercentage of it's like sub one
percent, right of people whospend a lot of time editing it
and making it good for everybodyelse and applying norms and
stuff.
And we found the same thinghappened with slack.
There's some people who take itupon themselves, either because
(33:39):
of their role like they're ayou know, a chief of staff or a
project manager or somethinglike that or just because of
their natural affinity fororganization and helping people
communicate.
Would take on the job of makingsure that channels you know had
a good name were not duplicatesof others, would encourage
people to have publicconversations and public
channels instead of you know,often people would kind of
(33:59):
conversations and publicchannels instead of, you know,
often people would kind of get alittle scared of defaults and
DMs or private channels.
So all these kinds of like good, good practices or best
practices, as you said, wouldsort of percolate that from
these folks and we tried toprovide resources and like
coaching to those people, thevideos via, like you know, pdfs.
Honestly, at the time it's likehere you're going to throw that
(34:21):
back, here's like five things totrack.
And then the biggest thing Ithink that worked was, you know,
giving demos to customers andsaying, like this is how we've
got things organized.
And you can immediately sort ofsee the light bulb in their
head, go on and say, oh well, Ican create a channel for my
department or my project orwhatever, and understand, oh
well, I could create a channelfor my department or my project
or whatever.
Uh, and understand that if youstart doing that and start
(34:42):
putting the right content in theright channels, it sort of
self-organizes in a way that ispretty legible to the next
person that you add to slack.
So there's some things that weworked on over the first couple
years.
That said, it's like far from asolved problem.
Um, you know you said yourwife's frustrated with slack as
one more thing to check.
I see that all the time.
Um, I joined the slack lastyear for the local environmental
(35:03):
group and you know there's somepeople who are on it all day
because I think they also use itat work and it's very easy for
them to flip over and check outwhat we're talking about.
And there's folks for whom it'slike oh, I got to remember to
check slack like once a week,which is definitely not how we
decided to be used, and so thatis tricky.
And you know I do feel the painof folks for whom it's one more
(35:23):
channel, and was that aWhatsApp message or an email, or
was it on the forum or was iton Slack?
And you know we didn't solvethat problem.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
I would say Now, naomi, I don't know about you,
but like my thought there again,like lesson learned, right,
those getting when you talkabout adoption of technology, or
most of our listeners would bedealing with right getting
getting one or two people whowill be the the early adopters
(35:54):
and advocates for it seems to bea really important piece of
this.
Like, do you see that too,really?
Speaker 2 (36:00):
yeah, especially when you're dealing with groups of
people where there may bediffering, uh, levels of
technical aptitude, right, and Ithink that you know, if you
don't want to spend your entireday, week, month, quarter, um,
just trying to enable users andkind of defaulting to a bit of
(36:20):
like a help desk IT situation,finding internal advocates and
those who have a highertechnical aptitude who can help
their teams and also kind of bethat resource and help them help
others too, I think is superimportant, especially in larger
organizations, because otherwiseit just you end up being kind
of a ticket desk for the samequestions over and over or
(36:42):
having like really gooddocumentation.
We use Vidyard internally tocreate, you know, self-help
videos that I've done over theyears to answer questions that I
know I will often get,especially for folks who are
onboarding or new to anorganization, and I've always
found that that should be superhelpful as well.
But technology adoption isalways going to be something I
(37:03):
think that you know.
If you're not in the tool andeven for myself, right, there's
certain tools that we have thatI'm not in it every day, that
I'm like, how did I do thisagain, right, so you know I can
feel that thing for sure- weended up formalizing this
program as what we call SlackChampions and it was kind of
like a loose network of folks atour different customers who
(37:26):
play this role that you'retalking about as internal
advocates and enable enablement.
Speaker 3 (37:31):
And you know, we would invite them to events and
we would give them swag and wewould give them sessions and
access to our folks who couldhelp answer their questions.
And then later on, when we gotto the point where you know we
were big enough and had bigenough customers that we had to
sort of like preview upcomingchanges with their admins and
with you know people internallyso we didn't surprise them with
(37:53):
a big change that Slack ChampionNetwork turned into this
incredible group of people whowould give us early feedback on
either prototype or upcomingreleases.
And so this would be a handfulof people at a giant company of
hundreds of thousands and we'dbe able to turn on a set of new
(38:14):
features for them and give thema real taste of what was coming
and we'd get feedback from themover months that would often end
up shaping the product or shapethe documentation, shape the
story that we were telling aboutit.
Why is this change happening?
Why do we think it's importantand what's the best way to adapt
to it.
(38:34):
To that end, we also hadinternally in the product and
design and engineering org forbig, big changes, like a big
interface change or a newfeature or something like that,
we would have an internaldocument called Change is Hard
and we would basically, from thecustomer's perspective, either
things that we were anticipatingor things that others had told
(38:56):
us, or the champions had told usall the things that were going
to be hard about this.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
I'm stealing that change is hard I was smiling
because, like, that was actuallywhat was going through my head
at the time when you just saidthat.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
So yep, done, I'm stealing it.
Speaker 3 (39:09):
There's no point in sugarcoating it, right?
I mean, when have you everopened a piece of software that
you're used to using and it'schanged?
And you've'd be like, yes, it'schanged, it's like it's awful,
it's like, well, the button'sdifferent and labeled, and like
nothing works the way I expect.
And so you gotta meet theperson where they are and
anticipate that this is probablynot going to be something
they're welcoming.
And it's twofold One, you haveto recognize and anticipate the
(39:34):
issues and try to address themas best you can and provide them
with pathways to get back to aplace where they feel like
they're in control of the tool.
And you have to do a good jobtelling the story of why you've
made the change, because I thinkthe most frustrating is when
software that you're used tousing changes and you don't
really know why it's different.
It's either just different fordifference sake or it's
(39:54):
different because of somebusiness model change.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
I'm looking at you instagram, it's like, it's like,
it's like why exactly?
And I have two accounts, andthen like one of the accounts
it's you know, the button here,and the other one it's somewhere
else, like it doesn't make anysense no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
It's funny because I'm working with a client right
now, um big global client, andwhat I'm helping with a client
right now a big global clientand what I'm helping with is
some transformational stuff andonboarding and I used to work
there, so I was on the otherside of it and I've been
coaching the team that's tryingto foster adoption of this
technology and part of what I'mdoing is building out out some
(40:36):
new, new templates for them tokind of do change management,
adoption, rollout, and in thatprocess I did some research.
I found this article I think itwas Harvard business review or
something like that that wasoriginally written in the
sixties or seventies, maybe theeighties, and what struck me was
everything I talked about aboutwhy change is hard and why
(40:59):
there's resistance.
Resistance is absolutely truetoday because it's human nature
and you know, you fast forwardto today and I actually think
it's more acute because peopleare so busy that even if a
change that they have been told,or even if they believe is
going to be beneficial, it'sstill a disruption right and
(41:20):
that transition time is hardbecause now you're going like I
used to do this this way, now Ican do it this other way and
maybe the outcome will be better.
But I have to learn this newway and it's, you know it won't.
It's not intuitive yet becauseI haven't gone through it right.
So, like you said, meet themwhere they are, and I totally
believe that If you've got ateam that you're trying to get
(41:42):
through adoption of a technology, you've got to be realistic
about they're either resistant,they're excited, they're ready,
they're not ready.
All those things should be afactor in how you approach it.
You can't just go and do itexactly the same to every team
in every scenario.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
That's right To steal .
Another sort of way that Stuartused to talk about it we'd say
nobody sits down at theircomputer to use software.
They're sitting down at theircomputer because they need to
show new thoughts or they needto reach out to somebody or they
need to, you know, design apiece of equipment in autocad or
whatever they're they're tryingto do.
(42:22):
They have some end in mind.
They're not trying to use yoursoftware and so much software is
so self-important and how itpresents things like change.
You know the software that Iuse infrequently infrequently
enough that every time I open itit's different, and every time
I open it it's different.
And every time I open it itgives me some marketing carousel
(42:45):
.
Here's a learning features andAI, this, and click on that and
take a tour, and you can't getpast it and it's like no, I'm
just trying to like get my fileor whatever it is I'm trying to
do, and I think like it's veryeasy to fall into that trap.
Okay Again, stuart, I.
And I think like it's very easyto fall into that trap.
Okay again, stuart.
I just steal all his storiesbecause he talks about this
stuff so long so long he callsthis the owner's dilemma or,
(43:09):
sorry, owner's delusion, pardonme.
And the best example is you opena website for a restaurant and
what you want is the hours andtheir phone number.
Maybe they're making, maybeprobably their location.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Make a reservation now.
Speaker 3 (43:24):
Yeah, but what do you get?
You get a video with music anda fancy slideshow of like
pictures of a wine glass and youcan't figure out where anything
is.
And that person, who you knowasked for that website to be
made, had this idea of, like howthey wanted to present
themselves, basically, insteadof thinking about what the
(43:45):
person using that websiteactually did.
And I think if you apply thatover tens of thousands of
product decisions for thesoftware that you use, you end
up in a pretty bad place, andyou know we always try to avoid
that.
I'm not saying we were perfectby any means, but I think it's
an important way of sort ofstaying humble and making sure
that you're always trying to, asI said before, make the
(44:07):
software that you want to useand treat the customer the way
that you would want to betreated as a as a user of
software.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
The only thing I could say about those restaurant
websites is at least I thinkthere's like three templates
that they all use so I canquickly figure out where.
That's funny.
Um, yeah, I mean this has been.
I think it's funny.
I'm sure our listeners when theystarted this, if they got this
far right, they're like how isthe story about slack gonna have
it help us?
(44:35):
And I think, like all thesethings about and again, again
I'll go with Mike like he wouldhave said, right, he's been
pushing that marketing opsshould be we should think of
ourselves as product managersand I'm sort of on the fence
about it.
I think this is a story thattells us like you need to listen
to and understand what youraudience, in this case, if you
(44:56):
call them customers I hatecalling them, like your internal
folks, customers, but that'sthe analogy, it's true, right, I
mean you should be trying tohelp them be able to do the work
they want to accomplish, notuse the software, like that's a
really good distinction, and youshould be listening to their
feedback and like all thosethings I think apply and then
(45:19):
how you get them to adopt it.
Like we talked through allthese different things, you meet
them where they are andunderstand the change is hard
and they're going to be goingthrough that.
How about you, naomi?
What are some key things youpicked up from this conversation
?
Speaker 2 (45:36):
Well, I'm switching the name of my QBRs.
To Change is Hard Right.
And that's the first thingpicked up from this conversation
.
Well, I'm, I'm, I'm switchingthe name of my QBRs to change
his heart Right.
And that's the first.
That's the first thing, no, but, um, in all seriousness, I, I
really do think that it isimportant to get that feedback
and I think that uh saysmarketing, ops, people,
professionals, we are very goodat telling what should be done,
(46:02):
how things should be done andwhat we think should be done.
But if we just take a bit of astep back and I think you know
I'm not saying run an NPS surveyto our internal business
partners, but I think it isimportant to talk to them and
just say hey, you know what'sworking for you and what's not
working for you.
What are some of the challengesthat you do have?
Are you not?
Are you getting the supportthat you need?
(46:22):
You know they say it takesseven times to hear something
before you.
It really sticks Right whenyou're trying to learn something
new.
You know, do you need this X, y,z training from us seven times?
You know not watching arecording seven times, but do
(46:44):
you need us to repeat it to youand show it to you?
And you know help, you do it,templatize things.
I think that's just reallyimportant and not just assuming
that everybody is, you know, onthe exact same knowledge path,
that we assume that they are.
And I think, if we can be opento listening to what they're
struggling with, I just Ihonestly think that it will help
the entire organization when itcomes to enacting programs and
(47:04):
what we all want generatingleads and pipeline new business,
open opportunities, things likethat.
Speaker 3 (47:10):
Something that's common in user research and
product development that mightbe useful is that you don't
necessarily have to talk toeverybody, right?
You can get a ton ofinformation if you just talk to
a handful of people and likewith a product.
If you put a product in frontof five to eight people, you're
probably going to pick up like95% of the issues Like you might
(47:33):
miss something, but you'regoing to get the majority of it
in terms of like.
Does this solve the problem?
Is this useful?
What did they trip over?
And you know, often with ourproduct prototypes that's what
we would do.
We would put it in front of ahandful of people, get a wave of
feedback, do it again, do itagain, rinse and repeat until
the point where we weren'tlearning anything from the small
groups of people and then westarted rolling it up to larger
(47:54):
groups of people and then wewould find different types of
issues at scale.
But I imagine the same kind ofthing might hold if you're
rolling something out to a largeorganization.
You don't want to put it up toeverybody and ask feedback.
You want to put it up to maybea handful of people who you have
a relationship with or who havebeen able to provide feedback
in the past or who you canfoster that relationship with,
(48:15):
and if you get five or ten ofthem to talk to you about what
they're seeing and what youmight've missed, you're probably
going to avoid exposing thatissue to the thousands of the
company.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:27):
Yeah, I do, I like that.
Speaker 1 (48:30):
Yeah, I think.
Yeah, I remember many years agoin my career I was responsible
for some website stuff and oneof the things I think similar to
what you're talking about,johnny, is when we, when we were
rolling out new things or, youknow, trying to traveling out
new designs or something likethat for set parts of the site
(48:51):
with our sort of internal teams,a lot of times I would just go
and have them, like here's thewebsite, you know, do what you
need to do here and see how itgoes, and the hardest part for
me was not talking right, notguiding them Right.
I really think that's so hard.
Speaker 3 (49:11):
But yeah, it's the software that you've made.
It's like it's a circle of hell.
Speaker 2 (49:16):
It is.
It's like no, just do it.
Speaker 1 (49:21):
Yeah, it's really hard to do that, Johnny.
This has been great.
I think I even picked up stufffrom here that maybe reinforced
some things that I believe thathadn't really been at surface
for a while.
So thank you for that.
I know you're working on thestorytelling about the early
(49:42):
days of Slack, but is thereanything else that you want to
share with our audience thatyou're doing or how they can
keep up with that?
Speaker 3 (49:49):
Yeah, well for sure.
Thanks so much for having me on.
It's really a pleasure.
Ali Rayl and I who's also veryearly along with me at Slack
have been at State for a longtime.
We've been writing this blog,buildingslackcom, which is
shared sort of from the originstory of shutting down Glitch
and starting Slack up to sort ofwhen we started to really
experience hypergrowth.
We took a little lull over thesummer.
(50:09):
Here we're about doing someother things, but we've got some
exciting stuff queued up forthe fall, sort of talking
through some of the challengeswe experienced when we, you know
, went from a tiny team of eightto a team of hundreds of
thousands and from, you know,billing for a million customers
to billing for tens of millionsof customers and everything in
between that led up to our ourIPO in 2019.
(50:31):
So we're into sort of the meatof the story and I hope that
you'll tune in and follow along.
We don't post super regularly,you know, but you might get one
or two newsletter emails a month.
We'd love to see you there andalso hear your feedback.
Those are kind of the most fun.
Actually, we've been doing aseries called you Asked, and
(50:52):
it's when people read somethingin the newsletter and they have
a question and they share itwith us and then we use that as
sort of the emphasis for anotherpost answering that question.
Speaker 1 (51:02):
So those have been some of the best ones.
Love that.
Love that like real-timefeedback.
All right, well, naomi, thanksfor hosting johnny uh in your
home studio there, and be a partof this.
Speaker 2 (51:12):
I'm about to go feed him lunch too now.
Speaker 1 (51:14):
Good for you, well, jenny.
Again thanks both of you,thanks to all of our audience
out there for continuing.
Good for you, well, againthanks to both of you, thanks to
all of our audience out therefor continuing to support us.
Hope you learned something fromthis episode.
If you have suggestions forguests or topics or ideas for
that, or if you want to be aguest or have a topic you want
to bring on to the show, feelfree to reach out to Naomi, mike
(51:36):
or me, through Slack, of course, or through whatever platform
you can get to us, on LinkedInor whatever.
Until next time everyone.
Bye now.
Bye everyone.
Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of
OpsCast brought to you byMarketingOpscom, powered by the
MoPros out there.
I'm your host, michael Hartman,joined today by my co-host,
naomi Liu.
Mike Rizzo is off at Inbound2024 up in Boston.
So, naomi, how are things upthere?
Where are you again?
Somewhere in Canada?
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Vancouver, vancouver.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
Sunny Vancouver.
I can't keep up with you thesedays.
You're all over the place.
I'm here, okay, good For thisweek.
For this week, well.
And this is a new situation forus, because Naomi actually has
someone sitting with her.
Our guest today, joining ustoday is Johnny Rogers.
So Johnny was one of theoriginal employees at what
(00:45):
became Slack.
During his time at Slack, fromthe beginning until
post-acquisition, johnny woreseveral different hats.
Earlier this year he and someother former early employees
from Slack started sharing someof the stories about the early
days and beyond of Slack and wethought it would be interesting
to share with our audience.
You can read and subscribe tothose for notifications as posts
go live.
(01:07):
It's under the domainbuildingslackcom and we'll share
that in our show notes as well.
Johnny, thanks for joining ustoday in your cozy little space
there.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Thanks so much for having me, Michael.
Thanks, David.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Yeah, no problem, michael and Johnny, I have to
say that I'm super excited thatjohnny's on the podcast today.
In the back of my mind, andhe's someone that I wanted to
bring on the show for a while,and I'm just glad that not only
could he be on here today, butactually sitting next to me
recording.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
So yeah, I think I was saying, I think this is a
first right.
We actually have a guest in theroom with one of us.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Well, despite, you know, going through COVID and
having to do remote work likeeverybody else, I never made the
jump to a good audio setup athome, so it's probably just as
well I'm here with Naomi'sprofessional microphone.
Speaker 1 (01:57):
Well, you would be surprised at some of the
scenarios we've had with guests.
I think we had someone who waslike in one of those like phone
booth type setups in an officesharing place with no mic, no
headphones, and it still workedout.
So I think we'll be okay, nomatter what.
All right, well, I gave thetwo-second version of your
(02:21):
career path, particularly justthe Slack component of it, so I
know it's not complete.
Maybe if you could just do aquick overview of your career
path and how you ended up atSlack and then we'll kind of
pick up from there.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Yeah for sure it's funny.
I was just chatting with afriend of mine yesterday how we
were the lucky few who got theinternet at home when we were,
you know, young enough to havelots of time to spend kicking
around on the internet midnineties.
Um.
So yeah, when I was 12, we gota computer at home and it's
connected to the internet andhad a little bit of software and
I spent a lot of time just kindof like messing around and I
(02:59):
spent the last you know 25 yearsof my career pretty much doing
the same, but the last 25 yearsof my career pretty much doing
the same.
So when I finished university,I started a web development
studio just building sites forpeople.
This was around just after thedot-com boom and bust and I was
(03:21):
kind of just a generalist doinga little of everything a bit of
design, a bit of programming,figuring out how to deal with
clients and did that for aboutseven or eight years, eventually
went back to grad school, didmy master's here at SFU and
after grad school finished itwas the end of the financial
crisis and recession and jobswere scarce.
So I was looking around for jobsin software here in the city
(03:44):
and my wife who's the primaryteacher.
She actually had been usingthis game Glitch in her
classroom and she said this ismade right here in Vancouver and
it's the guys who used to makeFlickr.
And I had been a Flickr user.
So I applied.
I actually sort of cold calledStuart, went for coffee with
them and my skill set was justkind of general web dev and a
(04:05):
bit of design programming andthey were looking for somebody
to help out and so I joinedTinySpec, as it was called then
when they were working on thegame Glitch, and I came in
toward the latter end of that.
I only worked on the game forabout eight months before we
eventually shut it down andpivoted to Slack.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Yeah, it's so interesting, it's funny.
You mentioned two things that Ialmost at least I tried to
forget about them, I guess whichis the dot-com bubble and burst
and the financial crisis in theearly aughts, because those
were like right in the middle ofmy career.
So that's not fun.
So, thanks for that.
(04:47):
Appreciate it, johnny.
You know opening old wounds, no, so, you know, when Naomi
mentioned you as someone sheknew and as a potential guest,
it wasn't around that time, Ithink I happened to.
I also listened to a lot ofpodcasts in addition to this.
I heard a little bit of theorigin story about Slack from
(05:07):
the how I built this podcast,and so I don't remember all the
details.
But you mentioned right itstarted as a gaming company, so,
like, was there anything elseabout that?
I mean, it sounds like it wasan opportunistic kind of thing
as well, but what other thingsattracted you to the company?
(05:28):
Was it that the Flickr formerFlickr founders were part of it,
or was there more to it?
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Yeah, you know, there's actually kind of a few
threads came together thatreally pushed me in the
direction of wanting to work forthe company, of wanting to work
for the company.
Like I said, I had used Flickrand loved what the team had done
, you know, bringing photosharing to the web and kind of
this mix of like a sense ofhumor and, I don't know, I would
say, like love that theybrought to that.
(05:55):
You know, it was just a verydifferent time on the internet
and it was so much fun being onFlickr with people commenting
and leaving notes on photos andI don't know.
It seemed like this verygenuinely, um, delightful
community that I really enjoyed.
And it was also at the time, ifyou wanted to have a blog with
photos on it, you posted them onFlickr.
(06:17):
Um, you know, bloggercom wouldsay go go, createa Flickr
account and upload them thereand then paste the links over
here.
Um, and so that's how I becamea Flickr account and upload them
there and then paste the linksover here, and so that's how I
became a Flickr user, because Iwas a blogger at the time, just
like travel blog stuff.
So I've had a lot of positiveimpressions of the company and
the people behind it from whatthey had done with Flickr.
(06:38):
Beyond that, I had lived in NewZealand for a little while and
had briefly met who became ourCTO, cal Henderson, one of the
founders there when he wasgiving a talk at WebStock, a
great New Zealand web conference.
And then, finally, eric Costellowas one of the 34 co-founders
(07:00):
of Slack.
Co-founders of Slack he hadposted a lot of stuff online
early about building websitesHTML and CSS and JavaScript, you
know, tutorials basically andhe had always shared it sort of
out of the goodness of his heartand his own kind of like
passion and curiosity about thesubject.
Like he was never charging forthat content or anything.
(07:20):
That's kind of a different timeagain, and I can remember
learning techniques for how touse css for different layouts
from his website, and so, yeah,when I found out that it was
that group of people um, here invancouver, it just seemed
obvious to me like I don't carewhat they're really working on,
I want to work with those people, um, and in the end that ended
up being, you know, sort of thekey to the success, like I
(07:44):
wasn't a gamer and, like I said,I didn't get to work on Glitch
for very long, but working withactive people turned out to be a
really durable way to solveinteresting software problems
and build a business together.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
I've been reading, I read some of the stuff that you
posted on building Slack andwhen I actually jotted down a
couple of notes, because one ofSlack's evergreen goals you'd
mentioned is software for workthat people can love, and that's
just something that, like I, itresonates with me because you
know someone who is a lover oftechnology and the tools that I
(08:18):
use in my day job.
You know there's obviously toolsthat I cannot stand and there's
tools that I just love to useand it's just one of those
things like it's so nice toutilize tools and software in
your day to day, that where thatpremise is that backbone of
that, right, and it's just, it'sjust nice, right, because you
(08:47):
know you had also writtensomething about you'll know it's
working when you don't have touse email at work anymore and
it's while obviously we stilluse email, it's just a different
way of doing our jobs thatallows us to communicate and
stay connected and keeporganized with all of the
million other things that we'redoing every day.
And I just, I don't know.
I just really appreciate thatsentiment when it comes to
building those tools for peoplelike us.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Yeah, really, we always built the tool that we
wanted and I think that ensuredthat we were building something
that we love and that fit reallywell for the jobs we were
trying to do.
We weren't trying to build forsome imaginary person or team or
customer out there, we werebuilding for ourselves and
(09:24):
thinking about how it might beuseful in lots of different
industries and so that kind ofidea of like work software that
people actually love.
We were very lucky to sort ofhit court with folks and help
them off of sort of the emailhell of the time.
I can remember Stuart early onwhen he was pitching it, like
you know, we were using a toollike Slack internally that we
(09:47):
had cobbled together and thatwas my first time being out of
the job that did not email andit was great but it was still
very rough.
But he could really see wherethings were going and he would
say to us Slack or somethinglike it is inevitable.
And I think now, 2024, 10, 12years on, it's hard to imagine
working without this kind oftool.
(10:09):
And in the time since I leftthe company I've been doing some
volunteering and working withsome other groups and everybody
has Slack, no matter whatthey're doing, and it's pretty
amazing to see all the differentnooks and crannies that it's
found its way into since then.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
I think one of the reasons that that kind of
comment like really resonatedwith me software for works that
people can love is because, youknow, we as marketers we often
are designing programs andbuilding workflows and coming up
with nurture programs for thisgroup of unknown people in our
minds, not realizing that andthinking like, hey, actually we
(10:48):
are the target audience.
How would we receive thesetypes of campaigns?
Do we want to be nurtured to?
Every Monday at 12 pm, you know, with a hey, you know, sorry, I
missed you type of email Like.
I think it's easy to forgetthat we are our own consumers as
well and that's just somethingthat is an important reminder.
Speaker 3 (11:07):
Yeah, it's cool because I think it's kind of two
ways to think about it.
One is like the Silicon Valleystartup advice, which is like
scratch your own itch right, ifyou have a problem and you can
solve it with a product and youcan make it as good as you know
how to make it solve thatproblem, good chance somebody
else is going to have the sameor similar problem.
They're going to be interestedin it.
(11:28):
The flip side is like I don'tknow, it's like the golden rule
treat your customers the wayyou'd like to be treated.
And you know we've all usedshitty software and we've all
felt the funnel of like a growthteam sled deck pushing emails
and notifications at us to tryand get us to do something.
And you know we have.
(11:48):
We always try to avoid that andwe always try to address our
customers as people and,thinking through you know how we
could best make something thatwould help them solve their own
problems rather than, you know,buy our product, I guess, which
is tricky and it takes a lot ofeffort and decision-making at
(12:10):
every step and over a longperiod of time.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
Naomi, you hit on something that I think I've as a
as a as a kind of a leader inmarketing ops, and one of the
roles I think we should all playis to be advocates for our
customers, Right, and I thinksometimes your ideas are thrown
out of things we could do rightTo.
You know, you both have sort ofpainted a little bit of a
(12:36):
picture of what that might looklike in.
Our job should be to go likeyeah, is this really what our
customers want?
Right, so I've nurtured a greatexample, Like I've sort of sour
.
I don't know that we don'tnecessarily need to do it, but I
do not believe there's anybodyout there who's going oh, I got
this email from company X.
I cannot wait till I get thenext one, Right, Whether it's a
day or a week or a couple ofweeks, Like I.
(12:57):
I just I don't know anybodywho's doing that, Right,
Everyone's busy.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yeah, when I get an email from a rep, I try to
figure out is this a nurtureright or are they actually
sending me a one-to-one email?
Speaker 1 (13:08):
yeah, well, it's funny because, like I I don't
know about you, naomi like I,almost never unsubscribed to
anything because, part of that,I'm trying to see what are these
companies doing.
Yeah, I want to see whatthey're doing and see if there's
a yeah, any commonality.
And so, by the way, that's toour audience who might be in
sales or something, that's notan invitation to start pushing
emails to me, just like um, I dounsubscribe occasionally, but
(13:31):
in general I try not to um, justbecause I think it's valuable
to see.
But I think that's that'sreally a good.
You know, johnny made the pointlike I mean, we wanted the
golden rule.
I love that's, that's a greatway of putting saying it.
I mean, like we should treatour customers the way that we'd
want to be treated.
Do?
Speaker 3 (13:48):
you?
You want an email from an AIwritten out of the script to
sell you some shit?
No, definitely not.
Do you want somebody to talk toyou about your problems and try
to help you solve them?
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Yeah, I mean literally the last two days.
We got a household product, youknow kitchen appliance kind of
thing, and it broke down.
It was still under warranty.
Contacting the company islovely.
They sent out a replacement.
It didn't come with a returnshipping label, so they got
(14:20):
FedEx to send it to me.
But dealing with trying tocoordinate with FedEx has
actually been a big problem.
And this is not a knock againstFedEx, I don't really have a
thing about that.
But it's like an example oflike I actually just wanted to
talk to somebody and I couldn'ttalk to somebody and it made it
hard to do that.
And I know they're all tryingto manage costs.
I understand why.
(14:40):
But it's like if they putthemselves in the customer's
shoes, your mindset right.
They're frustrated, they wanthelp, like make it easy for them
.
Speaker 3 (14:53):
This is something that was essential, I think, to
the DNA of the company and tothe success of the company.
So call it customer love orwhatever, but from the get-go,
from the top, you know, fromStuart, our CEO, and from Allie
Rail, who I'm writing andbuilding Slack with and who was
(15:13):
our head of customer experience,and eventually we deal the same
and then eventually, our CEOthe sort of bottom line was like
is this good for the peopleusing the product and are we
doing right by them?
And if you contact Slack forsupport in 2013, when we were in
our alpha and beta, or today,when millions of people are
(15:36):
using it, it's an actual personat the other end of the line who
reads your email, understandswhat's going on and will reply
as a human.
Now, of course, there's somescaling, like if there's a
widespread issue, you might geta macro type response.
But the core of people who workat Slack and have worked at
Slack over the last decadehundreds of folks in customer
(15:58):
support who take their job superseriously and are so empathetic
and supportive of our customersand the way we talked about
people who use their productinternally was always with, I
guess, a respect and sort ofreverence for their time, and so
we always kept that as like asort of fundamental value of the
(16:20):
company.
And when it comes to like howyou're spending the dollars you
have to allocate within acompany, you know, having a
bunch of humans full-time roundthe globe, round the clock,
answering customer supporttickets and doing so very
quickly, that costs a lot, me.
You know, having a bunch ofhumans full-time round the globe
, round the clock, answeringcustomer support tickets and
doing so very quickly, thatcosts a lot.
It costs a lot more than notdoing it, that's for sure, and
it costs more than having arobot do it or understaffing
(16:40):
that group of people, and, Ithink, even more than that.
This is where Allie could speakto her experience.
But you know she had a seat atthe executive table from the
get-go to represent the voice ofthe customer.
It wasn't just anotherdepartment you know like, oh,
we've got engineering, we've gotdesign, we've got customer
support over here or we've gotit overseas, or something like
(17:02):
that.
It was a core part of thebusiness and the needs of that
group and the voice of thecustomer was represented at the
top level in the CTO staff.
And I don't know if that'stypical, I think from what I've
seen from other companies andwhat I've experienced as a
customer of other companies, itsure doesn't seem typical Try
(17:23):
and email, google with theproblem.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
Yeah, it's interesting because what
immediately goes to my head,because I'm in dallas, is
southwest airlines and I don'tknow I don't know if this is
still true at southwest airlines, but when it started right, one
of the things that herbkelleher did was he made sure
that people were empowered atthe front line to delight
customers right, whether thatwas on the plane, at the
check-in, at you know all thatstuff.
(17:49):
So they, they had the freedom todo what they thought was right
to solve a problem.
I don't think that ever meant,like you know, doing something
that they didn't think was rightjust because the customer said
it right.
So that, yeah, just likecustomers always right is, you
know, not what they believe, butthey did want to have a
delightful experience and it's abig part of, in my mind with
how they grew so fast, soquickly, right.
(18:12):
So, yes, there's a cost to that.
At the same time, I thinkthere's what's hard is that
there's not, there's not alwaysthat easily quantifiable return
in the short run.
That's right, it's seen as acost center in the short term.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
Um, but yeah, we all have examples of companies that
we feel trust for and we feelare actually taking care of us
when we deal with them, thathave gone out of their way to
make this a priority, and itdoes add up in the long run.
I should have just said beforewhat I really like and, as an
example of this, slack took offreally quickly in the first few
(18:49):
years and grew beyond what wehad anticipated.
An example of this you knowSlack took off really quickly in
the first few years and grewbeyond what we had anticipated
as being probably a good toolfor people in tech and media,
and then it grew outside ofthose industries and many, many
others.
And as the companies usingSlack got bigger, you know, from
hundreds of thousands, tens ofthousands of people.
You know there's an overhead tothat kind of communication at
(19:10):
large organizations and one ofthe primary pieces of feedback
during those first couple yearswas we need threaded
conversations.
We need to be able to reply tomessages.
We can't just have a singlelayer in channels, which is what
we had at the time.
So for those who use Slack atthe time, you know conversation
in a channel would get reallybusy and you wanted to respond
to Michael's message, but sincethen Naomi and Dave have been
(19:31):
having a different conversation.
So how do you sort of segmentthat?
And people were desperate for abetter way to do that and we
eventually released threads.
And the reason I bring it up isbecause after we released
threads, after a couple of yearsof thousands of people sharing
their feedback about the needfor this, our customer support
team went back and replied toevery single one of those people
(19:51):
, even if it was from like twoyears prior.
You know old tweets, oldZendesk tickets, and they went
through and they said we heardyou, we listened.
It took us a while, but wethink we've got it right.
You know it's out now.
Please let us know if you thinkwe still want to make it better
.
And people were so, I guess,surprised by that that we kept
(20:12):
track and actually followed upwith them, but then delighted
and engaged to actually make itbetter.
So it took something that was ahugely disruptive change to the
product, that was not withoutits growing pains and bumps, and
, instead of having customersangry that it was wrong or that
it changed things, it gave us anopportunity to keep having a
(20:33):
conversation with them and saythis is what we think is best.
Here's where we're going withit.
What do you think?
And the million ways that theycame back to us with feedback
and ideas made the productbetter and it deepened that kind
of trust and sort of mutualappreciation for one another and
just trying to make the bestthing.
That we knew how.
And I think you know that's oneexample.
(20:55):
There were many others over theyears and I think it's, like I
said, essential to what thecompany was and for why people
talked about this piece ofsoftware and wanted to use this
piece of software and took it toother places their next
workplace or whatever.
In a way that's not true with alot of software that you use at
work which you're often happyto see the backup.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
I think one of my takeaways from that is that, you
know, in our line of work,something that can be a
challenge and super important istechnology adoption, finding
internal advocates and how do weget our stakeholders and
business partners on board withsome of the changes that we want
to bring a company throughright, Some of the digital
transformations that we aretrying to enact within an
(21:35):
organization.
And just kind of hearing someof your anecdotes about how you
treated customers and how youlistened to their pain points
and then took action to findsolutions for that is something
that I think a lot of ourlisteners can have a takeaway
from right.
And just listening to thepeople that we're supporting and
what are the things that arekeeping them up at night, how do
(21:58):
we help them meet theirbusiness goals, their revenue
goals, and what are the tools oreducation gaps that we can, as
marketing ops folks, help tofill.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Yeah, I agree, we can , as marketing ops folks, help
to fill.
Yeah, I agree, I think I hadthe same basic sentiment, naomi,
or free thought process is thatI think it's easy for folks in
marketing ops to get sort ofdefensive when they get feedback
that is negative aboutsomething they've done right or
solution they come up with.
And my, my view all along is aslong as it doesn't get personal
, it's like, take all that inright, I want that feedback, I
(22:35):
want as much of that as I wantit doesn't mean you have to go
do everything, but the more youdo that, the more you listen, I
think, the more likely you areto be able to support the team
broadly.
You'll help with prioritization, all those kinds of things.
So I think that would be mytakeaway is be open to getting
that feedback, whether it'spositive or not.
Speaker 3 (22:57):
Yeah, and we would always foster that.
We were really active onTwitter at the time, similarly,
sort of replying to everymessage, and people would have
all sorts of ideas.
Like you said, it's not like wewere going to just go and
implement whatever people askedfor, but we would hear every day
about little paper cuts thatpeople were having with the
(23:19):
product.
And the fact that we actuallylistened and would fix those and
turn around and say, hey, it'sfixed, it's better now, meant
that, A we would get morefeedback from that same person
again because they knew we werelistening, and B, it would make
it better for everybody else whohad that same feedback but
hadn't heard it right.
And so there's the big hardproblems that you're trying to
solve that take months or yearsand you're not just going to be
(23:40):
able to get around in a day.
But there's also tons of littlelow-hanging fruit that you can
address pretty quickly at prettylow cost and actually adds up
to a dramatically better productexperience and a much happier
group of customers.
I'm not involved in, you know,wrong-lifes software
organizations, the way you guysare talking about, but it seems
(24:04):
like the same kind of thing canbe true.
You know, see what's causingtrouble for people and what's
turning them off and what you'retrying to achieve together and
bring them in almost more aslike a part of it than as like
see, I know if mike was herehe'd be going like see, here's.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Here's my point about saying that marketing ops
should be like productmanagement.
So, um, all right.
So I'm curious.
It's funny that you didn't haveany.
Like you're not a gamer, or youweren't at the time, right, but
you end up at a gaming company.
But what?
Um, I heard a little bit aboutagain from that that you built a
, built something internallythat you needed as a team while
(24:43):
you're working on.
Was it glitch?
Is that the name that was atthe?
Yeah, so what?
Like, like, how did that evenstart?
Like, what was the?
Was it because you were alltired of email threads and like
you didn't want to use a wiki?
Speaker 3 (24:56):
I think wikis were around then, maybe um, so this
predates me, um, but you know, Iexperienced it when I joined
the company.
They had the founders and earlyemployees at glitch.
They had sort of cobbledtogether IRC, which is a
long-lived internet relay chatwhich kind of looks like Slack
(25:19):
if you squint at it, but it wassort of a simpler earlier chat
protocol from the web.
The biggest downfalls of it wasthat you only got the messages
if you were online, so there'sno archive to scroll back to if
you weren't connected.
It didn't have native filesharing.
It didn't have searchcapability.
It had, you know, pretty basicprofiles like to handle.
(25:40):
So it was like amazing chatfrom the 90s and they had taken
that for you know, real-timecommunication with the team and
then they had added all thosemissing bits and the additions
were very clunky.
Search was a web page you couldgo to which essentially just
formulated a SQL query andpulled stuff out of the database
.
For you, file sharing was justan FTP file server that would
(26:05):
post links into the chat andclick through to the archive,
which is done by stuffing, youknow, stepping stuff into a
database.
Speaker 2 (26:13):
I haven't heard that for a while.
Ftp.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Uh-huh oh.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Some people, anyone on the call is googling what FTP
is, or really throw them off.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
SFTP, right yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
Yeah, I thought that was pretty good, just the way
that I put files on that.
This is before we talked aboutthe content.
Oh my God.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
Anyway, you know they had taken IRC and they plugged
in the bits that made it moreuseful and everything happened
there.
When I joined Glitch I got anemail address but it was like I
I don't know.
I think I maybe got expensereport receipts there and that's
about it, but they again wouldbe in slack.
But we never used email forsomething in vacation.
(27:01):
It was all on IRC.
And the other thing that waslousy about IRC at the time was
like the mobile clients werewere pretty terrible for it.
So the idea was there to haveall your communication in one
place and be able to search overthis archive.
That would, you know, add valueover time, because a new person
wouldn't be starting fromscratch in an empty inbox.
(27:22):
They would have all this stuffto look back into.
Um, which was definitely truewhen I was, you know, sort of
getting my hands on the job, butit was was pretty clunky for
sure, and it was not the focusof the team at all.
Nobody was responsible for it.
It was just like some engineersadding stuff as we needed it If
something got too frustrating,and Stuart has talked about how
(27:43):
it was kind of the best way tosort of accidentally make the
great use of software is tospend as little time on it as
possible and only fix somethingwhen it's done and created,
because everybody's trying tomake a great game and make the
game a success.
So you know he has spoken aboutthis in print and on podcasts
before.
But when he and the otherfounders realized that the game
(28:06):
just was not going to be penableeconomically, you know it was
creatively very successful andthe people who played it
absolutely loved it.
It's kind of like an animalcrossing type of casual social
gaming.
It's really fun, really sweet.
But when they realized that,you know it's just going to cost
too much to make for the numberof people who are going to pay
to play it.
(28:27):
You know, luke's a creative guyand I think he kicked around a
handful of ideas, one of whichwas you know, I think this thing
that we built for our owninternal use could actually be a
real product.
And that's what he eventuallypitched to our company's season
board and said we can keep goingwith the game, but we're going
to crash in them and we're goingto run out of runway.
(28:48):
So why don't we take the moneythat we've got left and make
this product?
And he fixed it as potentiallya $100 million business and grew
to much, much beyond thateventually.
But it was this ambitious ideaand this was at a time when
(29:08):
companies were really running onemail and things like HipChat
and Campfire were used in somedev and tech teams but hadn't
sort of like penetrated broadlybeyond that.
So, yeah, he anticipated that,as I said, slack or something
like that was going to beinevitable, because email just
(29:29):
was not suitable to how we wereusing it really and I wanted to
build a product around it.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
So, like I know, there are people out there, I'm
married to one who getsfrustrated by Slack because it's
just yet another challenge,because email has not gone away,
nor has text messages.
There's all these differentways of communicating at the
organization, um, and I've seenthat myself too.
(29:57):
Right that you know pickingwhich one you use at the time.
You know when you, when youguys were rolling it out with
you know, maybe initially orover time, right, did you start
to find best?
I hate to use the term bestpractices, but things like
setting.
Are there certain things youshould do if you want to adopt
Slack as it relates to like?
(30:18):
Being very deliberate aboutthis is when we use Slack, this
is when we use email, this iswhen we use text message or
whatever other channels.
Speaker 3 (30:28):
It was something we spent a lot of time on and I
think on the the one hand we gotreally lucky because a lot of
teams who were really trulyearly adopters in that first
year or two were a lot like us,were software teams or media
teams where the real-time natureplus async just kind of made
sense to them and they're reallycomfortable in the tool and so
(30:51):
having them move everything overwas relatively pain-free.
As we started to expand outsideof those teams and, like you
know, the newsroom or the techedge team or something like that
, into other roles and otherindustries that had more
overhead for things like fathernaming and compliance and on the
(31:12):
record communications or didn'tsort of embrace the kind of
sync, async fluidity oforganizational communication,
then we had to start telling abit of a different story about
it and giving different kinds oftechniques.
So we would ask people in theearly days try and move your
whole team over to it for a week.
(31:33):
No email, no, nothing else fora week.
And if it's still working foryou on Friday, you should keep
doing that.
And if it was just one morething in the mix, it died.
It would just be kind of likewell, I'm here but the
accounting team's not here and Ican't ask this person a
(31:54):
question, and it just became onemore place and would sort of
die on the vine at those teams,whereas those who came over and
went all in, even for arelatively short period of time,
they stuck.
And those are the ones that wesaw sort of just grow and grow
and grow in seat count, whichwas how we charged for the
product over time.
We would also give tips about,as you say, being deliberate
(32:16):
about how to use it.
Um, so when you start a newteam or workspace as a call now,
um, you end up with twochannels general and random, and
even that is like it's prettyvague about what you're supposed
to do.
Um, you know, general is for alittle bit of everything, and
random you know sort ofrecognizing that people bullshit
a lot at work was for jokingaround.
(32:37):
You know sharing links andposting.
You know gifts and stuff now,um, but that didn't give you
much structure, right, and wehad to teach people.
Okay, a channel is a goodbucket for a topic, and that
topic might be a project thatyou're working on or a client
that you have a relationshipwith, or a department in your
(32:58):
company on, or a client that youhave a relationship with, or a
department in your company likeaccounting, as an example, or an
event like next month's offsiteor something like that.
And when we started to showexamples of that kind of thing
to people and show how channelskind of have their own life
cycle, that's when it wouldclick for people.
And what we also found, which Ithink, is I think there's some
(33:18):
you know clever name for this,but it's the same thing on
wikipedia.
Most of us never contribute towikipedia but we all get benefit
from it, right.
But there's this smallpercentage of it's like sub one
percent, right of people whospend a lot of time editing it
and making it good for everybodyelse and applying norms and
stuff.
And we found the same thinghappened with slack.
There's some people who take itupon themselves, either because
(33:39):
of their role like they're ayou know, a chief of staff or a
project manager or somethinglike that or just because of
their natural affinity fororganization and helping people
communicate.
Would take on the job of makingsure that channels you know had
a good name were not duplicatesof others, would encourage
people to have publicconversations and public
channels instead of you know,often people would kind of
(33:59):
conversations and publicchannels instead of, you know,
often people would kind of get alittle scared of defaults and
DMs or private channels.
So all these kinds of like good, good practices or best
practices, as you said, wouldsort of percolate that from
these folks and we tried toprovide resources and like
coaching to those people, thevideos via, like you know, pdfs.
Honestly, at the time it's likehere you're going to throw that
(34:21):
back, here's like five things totrack.
And then the biggest thing Ithink that worked was, you know,
giving demos to customers andsaying, like this is how we've
got things organized.
And you can immediately sort ofsee the light bulb in their
head, go on and say, oh well, Ican create a channel for my
department or my project orwhatever, and understand, oh
well, I could create a channelfor my department or my project
or whatever.
Uh, and understand that if youstart doing that and start
(34:42):
putting the right content in theright channels, it sort of
self-organizes in a way that ispretty legible to the next
person that you add to slack.
So there's some things that weworked on over the first couple
years.
That said, it's like far from asolved problem.
Um, you know you said yourwife's frustrated with slack as
one more thing to check.
I see that all the time.
Um, I joined the slack lastyear for the local environmental
(35:03):
group and you know there's somepeople who are on it all day
because I think they also use itat work and it's very easy for
them to flip over and check outwhat we're talking about.
And there's folks for whom it'slike oh, I got to remember to
check slack like once a week,which is definitely not how we
decided to be used, and so thatis tricky.
And you know I do feel the painof folks for whom it's one more
(35:23):
channel, and was that aWhatsApp message or an email, or
was it on the forum or was iton Slack?
And you know we didn't solvethat problem.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
I would say Now, naomi, I don't know about you,
but like my thought there again,like lesson learned, right,
those getting when you talkabout adoption of technology, or
most of our listeners would bedealing with right getting
getting one or two people whowill be the the early adopters
(35:54):
and advocates for it seems to bea really important piece of
this.
Like, do you see that too,really?
Speaker 2 (36:00):
yeah, especially when you're dealing with groups of
people where there may bediffering, uh, levels of
technical aptitude, right, and Ithink that you know, if you
don't want to spend your entireday, week, month, quarter, um,
just trying to enable users andkind of defaulting to a bit of
(36:20):
like a help desk IT situation,finding internal advocates and
those who have a highertechnical aptitude who can help
their teams and also kind of bethat resource and help them help
others too, I think is superimportant, especially in larger
organizations, because otherwiseit just you end up being kind
of a ticket desk for the samequestions over and over or
(36:42):
having like really gooddocumentation.
We use Vidyard internally tocreate, you know, self-help
videos that I've done over theyears to answer questions that I
know I will often get,especially for folks who are
onboarding or new to anorganization, and I've always
found that that should be superhelpful as well.
But technology adoption isalways going to be something I
(37:03):
think that you know.
If you're not in the tool andeven for myself, right, there's
certain tools that we have thatI'm not in it every day, that
I'm like, how did I do thisagain, right, so you know I can
feel that thing for sure- weended up formalizing this
program as what we call SlackChampions and it was kind of
like a loose network of folks atour different customers who
(37:26):
play this role that you'retalking about as internal
advocates and enable enablement.
Speaker 3 (37:31):
And you know, we would invite them to events and
we would give them swag and wewould give them sessions and
access to our folks who couldhelp answer their questions.
And then later on, when we gotto the point where you know we
were big enough and had bigenough customers that we had to
sort of like preview upcomingchanges with their admins and
with you know people internallyso we didn't surprise them with
(37:53):
a big change that Slack ChampionNetwork turned into this
incredible group of people whowould give us early feedback on
either prototype or upcomingreleases.
And so this would be a handfulof people at a giant company of
hundreds of thousands and we'dbe able to turn on a set of new
(38:14):
features for them and give thema real taste of what was coming
and we'd get feedback from themover months that would often end
up shaping the product or shapethe documentation, shape the
story that we were telling aboutit.
Why is this change happening?
Why do we think it's importantand what's the best way to adapt
to it.
(38:34):
To that end, we also hadinternally in the product and
design and engineering org forbig, big changes, like a big
interface change or a newfeature or something like that,
we would have an internaldocument called Change is Hard
and we would basically, from thecustomer's perspective, either
things that we were anticipatingor things that others had told
(38:56):
us, or the champions had told usall the things that were going
to be hard about this.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
I'm stealing that change is hard I was smiling
because, like, that was actuallywhat was going through my head
at the time when you just saidthat.
Speaker 2 (39:07):
So yep, done, I'm stealing it.
Speaker 3 (39:09):
There's no point in sugarcoating it, right?
I mean, when have you everopened a piece of software that
you're used to using and it'schanged?
And you've'd be like, yes, it'schanged, it's like it's awful,
it's like, well, the button'sdifferent and labeled, and like
nothing works the way I expect.
And so you gotta meet theperson where they are and
anticipate that this is probablynot going to be something
they're welcoming.
And it's twofold One, you haveto recognize and anticipate the
(39:34):
issues and try to address themas best you can and provide them
with pathways to get back to aplace where they feel like
they're in control of the tool.
And you have to do a good jobtelling the story of why you've
made the change, because I thinkthe most frustrating is when
software that you're used tousing changes and you don't
really know why it's different.
It's either just different fordifference sake or it's
(39:54):
different because of somebusiness model change.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
I'm looking at you instagram, it's like, it's like,
it's like why exactly?
And I have two accounts, andthen like one of the accounts
it's you know, the button here,and the other one it's somewhere
else, like it doesn't make anysense no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
It's funny because I'm working with a client right
now, um big global client, andwhat I'm helping with a client
right now a big global clientand what I'm helping with is
some transformational stuff andonboarding and I used to work
there, so I was on the otherside of it and I've been
coaching the team that's tryingto foster adoption of this
technology and part of what I'mdoing is building out out some
(40:36):
new, new templates for them tokind of do change management,
adoption, rollout, and in thatprocess I did some research.
I found this article I think itwas Harvard business review or
something like that that wasoriginally written in the
sixties or seventies, maybe theeighties, and what struck me was
everything I talked about aboutwhy change is hard and why
(40:59):
there's resistance.
Resistance is absolutely truetoday because it's human nature
and you know, you fast forwardto today and I actually think
it's more acute because peopleare so busy that even if a
change that they have been told,or even if they believe is
going to be beneficial, it'sstill a disruption right and
(41:20):
that transition time is hardbecause now you're going like I
used to do this this way, now Ican do it this other way and
maybe the outcome will be better.
But I have to learn this newway and it's, you know it won't.
It's not intuitive yet becauseI haven't gone through it right.
So, like you said, meet themwhere they are, and I totally
believe that If you've got ateam that you're trying to get
(41:42):
through adoption of a technology, you've got to be realistic
about they're either resistant,they're excited, they're ready,
they're not ready.
All those things should be afactor in how you approach it.
You can't just go and do itexactly the same to every team
in every scenario.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
That's right To steal .
Another sort of way that Stuartused to talk about it we'd say
nobody sits down at theircomputer to use software.
They're sitting down at theircomputer because they need to
show new thoughts or they needto reach out to somebody or they
need to, you know, design apiece of equipment in autocad or
whatever they're they're tryingto do.
(42:22):
They have some end in mind.
They're not trying to use yoursoftware and so much software is
so self-important and how itpresents things like change.
You know the software that Iuse infrequently infrequently
enough that every time I open itit's different, and every time
I open it it's different.
And every time I open it itgives me some marketing carousel
(42:45):
.
Here's a learning features andAI, this, and click on that and
take a tour, and you can't getpast it and it's like no, I'm
just trying to like get my fileor whatever it is I'm trying to
do, and I think like it's veryeasy to fall into that trap.
Okay Again, stuart, I.
And I think like it's very easyto fall into that trap.
Okay again, stuart.
I just steal all his storiesbecause he talks about this
stuff so long so long he callsthis the owner's dilemma or,
(43:09):
sorry, owner's delusion, pardonme.
And the best example is you opena website for a restaurant and
what you want is the hours andtheir phone number.
Maybe they're making, maybeprobably their location.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Make a reservation now.
Speaker 3 (43:24):
Yeah, but what do you get?
You get a video with music anda fancy slideshow of like
pictures of a wine glass and youcan't figure out where anything
is.
And that person, who you knowasked for that website to be
made, had this idea of, like howthey wanted to present
themselves, basically, insteadof thinking about what the
(43:45):
person using that websiteactually did.
And I think if you apply thatover tens of thousands of
product decisions for thesoftware that you use, you end
up in a pretty bad place, andyou know we always try to avoid
that.
I'm not saying we were perfectby any means, but I think it's
an important way of sort ofstaying humble and making sure
that you're always trying to, asI said before, make the
(44:07):
software that you want to useand treat the customer the way
that you would want to betreated as a as a user of
software.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
The only thing I could say about those restaurant
websites is at least I thinkthere's like three templates
that they all use so I canquickly figure out where.
That's funny.
Um, yeah, I mean this has been.
I think it's funny.
I'm sure our listeners when theystarted this, if they got this
far right, they're like how isthe story about slack gonna have
it help us?
(44:35):
And I think, like all thesethings about and again, again
I'll go with Mike like he wouldhave said, right, he's been
pushing that marketing opsshould be we should think of
ourselves as product managersand I'm sort of on the fence
about it.
I think this is a story thattells us like you need to listen
to and understand what youraudience, in this case, if you
(44:56):
call them customers I hatecalling them, like your internal
folks, customers, but that'sthe analogy, it's true, right, I
mean you should be trying tohelp them be able to do the work
they want to accomplish, notuse the software, like that's a
really good distinction, and youshould be listening to their
feedback and like all thosethings I think apply and then
(45:19):
how you get them to adopt it.
Like we talked through allthese different things, you meet
them where they are andunderstand the change is hard
and they're going to be goingthrough that.
How about you, naomi?
What are some key things youpicked up from this conversation
?
Speaker 2 (45:36):
Well, I'm switching the name of my QBRs.
To Change is Hard Right.
And that's the first thingpicked up from this conversation
.
Well, I'm, I'm, I'm switchingthe name of my QBRs to change
his heart Right.
And that's the first.
That's the first thing, no, but, um, in all seriousness, I, I
really do think that it isimportant to get that feedback
and I think that uh saysmarketing, ops, people,
professionals, we are very goodat telling what should be done,
(46:02):
how things should be done andwhat we think should be done.
But if we just take a bit of astep back and I think you know
I'm not saying run an NPS surveyto our internal business
partners, but I think it isimportant to talk to them and
just say hey, you know what'sworking for you and what's not
working for you.
What are some of the challengesthat you do have?
Are you not?
Are you getting the supportthat you need?
(46:22):
You know they say it takesseven times to hear something
before you.
It really sticks Right whenyou're trying to learn something
new.
You know, do you need this X, y,z training from us seven times?
You know not watching arecording seven times, but do
(46:44):
you need us to repeat it to youand show it to you?
And you know help, you do it,templatize things.
I think that's just reallyimportant and not just assuming
that everybody is, you know, onthe exact same knowledge path,
that we assume that they are.
And I think, if we can be opento listening to what they're
struggling with, I just Ihonestly think that it will help
the entire organization when itcomes to enacting programs and
(47:04):
what we all want generatingleads and pipeline new business,
open opportunities, things likethat.
Speaker 3 (47:10):
Something that's common in user research and
product development that mightbe useful is that you don't
necessarily have to talk toeverybody, right?
You can get a ton ofinformation if you just talk to
a handful of people and likewith a product.
If you put a product in frontof five to eight people, you're
probably going to pick up like95% of the issues Like you might
(47:33):
miss something, but you'regoing to get the majority of it
in terms of like.
Does this solve the problem?
Is this useful?
What did they trip over?
And you know, often with ourproduct prototypes that's what
we would do.
We would put it in front of ahandful of people, get a wave of
feedback, do it again, do itagain, rinse and repeat until
the point where we weren'tlearning anything from the small
groups of people and then westarted rolling it up to larger
(47:54):
groups of people and then wewould find different types of
issues at scale.
But I imagine the same kind ofthing might hold if you're
rolling something out to a largeorganization.
You don't want to put it up toeverybody and ask feedback.
You want to put it up to maybea handful of people who you have
a relationship with or who havebeen able to provide feedback
in the past or who you canfoster that relationship with,
(48:15):
and if you get five or ten ofthem to talk to you about what
they're seeing and what youmight've missed, you're probably
going to avoid exposing thatissue to the thousands of the
company.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:27):
Yeah, I do, I like that.
Speaker 1 (48:30):
Yeah, I think.
Yeah, I remember many years agoin my career I was responsible
for some website stuff and oneof the things I think similar to
what you're talking about,johnny, is when we, when we were
rolling out new things or, youknow, trying to traveling out
new designs or something likethat for set parts of the site
(48:51):
with our sort of internal teams,a lot of times I would just go
and have them, like here's thewebsite, you know, do what you
need to do here and see how itgoes, and the hardest part for
me was not talking right, notguiding them Right.
I really think that's so hard.
Speaker 3 (49:11):
But yeah, it's the software that you've made.
It's like it's a circle of hell.
Speaker 2 (49:16):
It is.
It's like no, just do it.
Speaker 1 (49:21):
Yeah, it's really hard to do that, Johnny.
This has been great.
I think I even picked up stufffrom here that maybe reinforced
some things that I believe thathadn't really been at surface
for a while.
So thank you for that.
I know you're working on thestorytelling about the early
(49:42):
days of Slack, but is thereanything else that you want to
share with our audience thatyou're doing or how they can
keep up with that?
Speaker 3 (49:49):
Yeah, well for sure.
Thanks so much for having me on.
It's really a pleasure.
Ali Rayl and I who's also veryearly along with me at Slack
have been at State for a longtime.
We've been writing this blog,buildingslackcom, which is
shared sort of from the originstory of shutting down Glitch
and starting Slack up to sort ofwhen we started to really
experience hypergrowth.
We took a little lull over thesummer.
(50:09):
Here we're about doing someother things, but we've got some
exciting stuff queued up forthe fall, sort of talking
through some of the challengeswe experienced when we, you know
, went from a tiny team of eightto a team of hundreds of
thousands and from, you know,billing for a million customers
to billing for tens of millionsof customers and everything in
between that led up to our ourIPO in 2019.
(50:31):
So we're into sort of the meatof the story and I hope that
you'll tune in and follow along.
We don't post super regularly,you know, but you might get one
or two newsletter emails a month.
We'd love to see you there andalso hear your feedback.
Those are kind of the most fun.
Actually, we've been doing aseries called you Asked, and
(50:52):
it's when people read somethingin the newsletter and they have
a question and they share itwith us and then we use that as
sort of the emphasis for anotherpost answering that question.
Speaker 1 (51:02):
So those have been some of the best ones.
Love that.
Love that like real-timefeedback.
All right, well, naomi, thanksfor hosting johnny uh in your
home studio there, and be a partof this.
Speaker 2 (51:12):
I'm about to go feed him lunch too now.
Speaker 1 (51:14):
Good for you, well, jenny.
Again thanks both of you,thanks to all of our audience
out there for continuing.
Good for you, well, againthanks to both of you, thanks to
all of our audience out therefor continuing to support us.
Hope you learned something fromthis episode.
If you have suggestions forguests or topics or ideas for
that, or if you want to be aguest or have a topic you want
to bring on to the show, feelfree to reach out to Naomi, mike
(51:36):
or me, through Slack, of course, or through whatever platform
you can get to us, on LinkedInor whatever.
Until next time everyone.
Bye now.
Bye everyone.
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