The PodKnowledge|← All Episodes
Based on Lenny's Podcast data
Lenny's Knowledge Sketch

Working with Opinionated Founders
& Building at Scale

Noah Weiss
Chief Product Officer, Slack
15+ YEARS IN PRODUCT
The Framework

Working with Product-Minded Founders

STARTENDHIGHENGAGEMENT(U-CURVE)
"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.
Based on Noah Weiss' episode on Lenny's Podcast. All ideas on this page are from the episode.Watch on YouTubeFollow @noah_weiss on X
GO DEEPER IN THE EPISODE
04:22 Advice for new parents07:23 Lessons learned from Foursquare11:33 Working with strongly opinionated founders14:14 Thinking of involvement on a U-shaped curve16:53 Principles at Slack19:32 Implementing ML, AI, and LLMs25:11 How Slack structures AI teams26:59 Complaint storms30:01 Slack’s approach to prioritization32:26 How delight is baked into the DNA of Slack34:41 How Slack thinks about competition38:04 Building a culture that takes big bets41:40 Rituals at Slack44:51 How Slack revived their self-serve business52:01 Slack’s early success58:08 Slack’s pilot programs for testing new features1:02:03 Noah’s famous blog post: “The 10 Traits of Great Product Managers”1:10:15 Book recommendations to improve your writing1:12:30 Managing up and data fluency1:14:54 The most important skills to improve as an early-career PM and as a senior PM1:17:16 Lightning round
Every sketch here began as a transcript.

Send us yours and we’ll draw it. $1 a transcript.

Sketch mine →
𝕏︎ X / Twitterin LinkedIn📸 Instagram🔗 Copy link
0:00