Working with Opinionated Founders & Building at Scale
Noah Weiss
Chief Product Officer, Slack
15+ YEARS IN PRODUCT
The Framework
Working with Product-Minded Founders
"The best working relationship is a U-curve: high involvement early (alignment on vision & principles), freedom in the middle, and then high involvement again at launch for quality refinement."
Get founder alignment on vision & principles early
Give teams creative freedom to explore in the middle
Involve founder heavily at launch for co-creation
Use principles as a common language for feedback
Slack's Core Principles
4 Principles That Shape Every Product Decision
Be a Great Host: Relentlessly save people's steps. Foresight like clean towels on a bed.
Make Discourse Possible: Help teams communicate across silos and differences.
Respect Attention: Protect people's time & focus. Don't interrupt gratuitously.
Take Bigger Boulder Bets: Avoid local optimization. Look beyond the next hill.
4
core principles
5y+
consistent language
Why principles matter
Without shared principles, every design review becomes "No, not quite right. Again, no, exactly that." With principles, teams can self-evaluate and the feedback is constructive instead of arbitrary.
The Turnaround
How Slack Revived Self-Service Growth (2019)
The Problem: Self-service growth plateaued after 2017. Fundamentals looked unhealthy.
The Root Cause: Slack had peaked with early adopters. New customers had different needs and sophistication levels.
The Pivot: Threw away the roadmap. Spent 6 months learning instead of optimizing impact.
The Discovery: Two new levers: Comprehension (Do people understand what this is for?) and Desirability (Why should they care?)
The insight
Early adopters want to try new tools. Later majority don't want to adopt new tools—they want to do their job. Product needs to answer "Why is this worth the switching cost?"
The result
Doubled new pay customer growth rate. Self-service business re-accelerated for years. Proved that being humble and learning beats forced optimization.
Staying Connected
Complaint Storms & Live Research
Read raw tweets: Slack employees find tweets about product issues and share at all-hands
Live usability sessions: Entire team (PM, eng, design) watches real users and comments live in Slack thread
Real-time feedback: Thread becomes source of truth—100+ people's reactions embedded in the report
Humble learning: Watching someone use your "brilliant" product and discovering flaws is humbling and constructive
The distance problemAt scale, you're not designing for yourself anymore. The larger your user base becomes, the harder it is to maintain a pulse on what customers actually need and feel.
Contrarian
Product Leadership Myths
✗Opinionated founders limit your agency as a PMINSTEAD →✓ You'll learn the most from a product-minded founder. Yes, you'll be frustrated sometimes. That's the trade-off.
✗Use data to optimize everythingINSTEAD →✓ Be data-informed but don't lose the pulse of what real people feel. User research matters because it poses questions, not answers.
✗Growth slowing? Optimize faster and harderINSTEAD →✓ Sometimes you need to sacrifice impact for learning. Throw away the roadmap. Spend 6 months understanding before optimizing.
✗Early adopter success scales to the majorityINSTEAD →✓ Early adopters want new tools. Later majority wants to do their job. Different customers, different motivations, different product strategy.