Slack founder: Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield

This is two thousand and fourteen. That was the year that Slack actually launched. I was interviewed by MIT Technology Review and asked if we were working to improve Slack. I said, I feel like what we have right now is just a giant piece of shit. It's just terrible and we should be humiliated that we offer this to the public. To me, that was like you should be embarrassed. If you can't see almost limitless opportunities to improve, then you shouldn't be dividing. Slack was famous for being one of the early consumerized B2B SaaS products. At more than one company all hands. I made everyone in the company repeat this as a chant. In the long run, the measure of our success will be the amount of value that we create for customers. And you can put effort into demonstrating that you have created this value and stuff like that, but there's no substitute for actually having created it. Something else I heard that you often espouse is friction in the product experience. You should always be trying to remove friction when the challenge is really comprehension. If your software kind of stops me and asks me to make a decision and I don't really understand it, you make me feel stupid. If people could get over the idea of reducing friction as a number goal or reducing the number of flexor taps or something, and instead focus on how can I make this simple? How do I prevent people from having to think.

in order to use my software. You started two companies both famously pivoted. I imagine many people come to you for advice on pivoting. The decision is about like have you exhausted the possibilities, creating the distance so that you can make an intellectual rational decision about it rather than an emotional decision is essential. And the reason I say you have to be coldly rational about it is because it's fucking humiliating. Today my guest is Stuart Butterfield, a founder and product legend who rarely does podcasts. Stuart founded Flickr and then Slack, which he sold to Salesforce in one of the biggest acquisitions in tech history at the time. There is so much product and leadership wisdom locked away in his head. I feel like our conversation just scratched the surface. We chat about utility curves, something he calls the owner's delusion, a hilarious pattern he sees at companies, he calls hyper realistic work like activities.

What he's learned about product and craft and taste and Parkinson's Law, why you need to obsess with not making your users think. The backstory on his legendary We don't sell saddles here memo. And so much more, a huge thank you to Noah Weiss, Chris Cordle, Ali Rail, and Johnny Rogers for suggesting topics for this conversation. This is a really special one and I really hope to have Stuart back to delve even deeper. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously.

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