The Feedback Loop – Part 2 of a conversation with Cal Henderson, Co-Founder of Slack
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Why does Slack focus so heavily on listening to customers?
You'd have to be so angry, so incensed, or on the other hands like so incredibly impressed to write in and tell a company what you thought of their product. That's just not something that normal people do. So that whole like survey that Microsoft sends out of would you recommend this version of Windows to other people? It's like, no, I don't recommend versions of Windows to anybody. I'm a normal person.
Welcome to Orbit, the HG podcast series, where we speak to leaders and innovators from across the software and tech ecosystem. To discuss the key trends that change how we all do business. This episode is the second part of a conversation recorded at H G's Technology Leader Summit in february twenty twenty two. Jason Richards, head of Portfolio Technology, speaks to Cal Henderson, co founder and CTO of Slack. Communication platform swiftly becoming ubiquitous across the modern business landscape.
I mean, clearly you guys are big users of your own products, so you know eating your dog food, drinking your champagne, whatever you want to call it. You also mentioned that there's this recognition you've got to be careful about these agile up and coming sort of organizations and those kind of things. So, how do you ensure that with Slack you continue to differentiate, create something compelling? Uh and perhaps if you create something that isn't compelling, you what do you do? Yeah, how do you maintain this position that you that you've fought hard to achieve?
I think the sounds corny and a lot of company every you know nearly every product company would say this, but it is a real focus on on customers and understanding customers. I think we we came at in some ways we came at building building Slack and building enterprise software from not really understanding enterprise software as an industry at all. And that this is definitely the industry has shifted over the last decade. But when we started, we thought we came from consumer software background. So we were like, we'll just make a product that people really want to use. And naively at the time said, we will never have to have a sales organization, because the software is just gonna sell itself, because it's gonna be so easy and so great.
And turned out not to be the case, because it turns out you just have to have a sales organization to sell anything to large companies, because there's a lot of complex process. But I think that coming from the point of view of building things for for end users, for customers, things that people would want to adopt, you know, this whole model of freemium, which was kind of new for business SaaS, of people will pick it up and use it and then because it's useful they will start paying. g just gives us a different orientation because the product has to be somewhat self-explanatory. You have to be able to pick it up and get value from it immediately by yourself. That's In one way for us has been a real challenge from the beginning because you don't just have to convince somebody to give Slack a try, you have to convince somebody to convince their co-workers to give Slack a try.
It's not valuable using it by yourself. There's no like solo mode for Slack.
How did Slack’s consumer‑software background shape its early product strategy?
You know, our very first alpha customers who were, you know, friends of ours at startups uh, you know, in San Francisco, we didn't just have to convince them, we had to convince them to to convince their coworkers. And this was a At a time when we'd just failed to you know build the the company that we were that we were building, the previous gaming company. So we're going to our friends and saying, try out this product. Use it for your business communication, something that's really important for, you know, for like making your startup successful and and get everybody to use it. And also trust us, it's gonna be great and it's definitely gonna be around a year from now. So that was a difficult proposition.
And I think, you know, that kind of difficulty has scaled with the company as well of today, you know, we we went through period of being a public company.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why does Slack focus so heavily on listening to customers?
0:01–2:38
2
How did Slack’s consumer‑software background shape its early product strategy?
2:38–5:49
3
What role does Twitter play in Slack’s feedback loop?
5:49–10:11
4
Which metrics does Slack use to measure product success without encouraging perverse behavior?
10:11–13:53
5
How is Slack being integrated and scaled within Salesforce after the acquisition?
13:53–17:16
6
Why does Slack consider playfulness an essential part of workplace communication?
17:16–20:40
7
What is the vision for a digital headquarters and the future of work?
20:40–22:51
8
What are the key takeaways for leaders looking to build adaptable, user‑centric software?
22:51–23:27
Speakers
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