Name: The secret sauce behind Slack’s product development
Uploaded: 2020-10-06
Duration: 8 min 26 s
Description: Slack’s Tamar Yehoshua and Ethan Eismann talk about the app’s design principles.

The secret sauce behind Slack’s product development

Design

Slack's product leads discuss the app’s design principles.

Slack’s Tamar Yehoshua and Ethan Eismann talk about the app’s design principles.

I'm fascinated by these, uh, examples of conversations that you have with the Ambassadors network. But how do you, um, go deeper than that? And make sure you understand You know how the company works and how it's organized and what its processes are and what is trying to accomplish, because I suspect that being able to understand that then enables you to frequently tell customers how to use, uh, slack in ways that they themselves they may not have a lot of using. Slack is change management. It's not taking what you did on email and taking that same way of working and translating that to slack. It's actually changing the way you work so that you get the most value out of it. So we have a number of the avenues where we get embedded with our customers and customer feedback. We have an amazing research team, uh, user research team, who spent a lot of time with our customers either doing with new users who've never used black before with experience tenured users. So they do a lot of the traditional user experience research, but they're also embedded with the team. So when we do large projects we embed a researcher with us from the beginning, So not only are we prototyping giving the prototypes were also doing traditional user studies. They also do what you would think of as more marketing type studies with things like MPs. What's the reaction? How are people liking our software? And then we also have our customer success team that they're the people who help implement flak at our large enterprises. They work very closely with us very closely with the product managers who work on specific features for their customers. So a lot of the product managers are in talking to customers with the customer success managers and then for the people who are not of a large the large enterprises. We have our customer experience team who responds to every tweet out there. We get a lot of love on and not always love. We call them beef tweets and love tweets. Uh, and we have our customer success. Our customer experience team responds to every single one, and then they give us feedback on the in the product or organization. So we have all these different avenues and product managers get feedback from all of them. I would say that while we have those avenues be what's crucial its product managers, its designers also the engineers. You can hear stories you know, translated to you from somebody else, you know? But there's nothing that beats actually sitting with the customer and hearing from them directly, because then you get the candid emotional, you know, sort of like this. This this response from them that helps you learn and understand their needs. I wonder if you could maybe tell me a little bit about this, uh, you know, question of how you use data and data analysis, Uh, tools because you've talked about, uh, very interactive things and the kind of directly back that you get from customers. But presumably there's a lot of information that you can also be that you can also glean just by looking and seeing how people are using the platform itself without having to interact with them at all. We have a difficult data analysis team, and we absolutely look at all the metrics and how the product is used. We, um we have a motto of data informed but not data driven, so that I know I'm giving you a lot of different mottoes here. But the, uh, we absolutely want to understand the data. We want to understand how people are using it, but you don't want to make product decisions purely on the data. You have to have an intuition of what's going to work better. The data is not always going to point you in the right direction, because let's take our on boarding close if you're If you, um if you look at the data to closely, sometimes it will cause you to just iterate on small improvements and not take a step back and, like, blow up a whole flow and redo it, it gets you to more incremental. It can get you stuck in more incremental improvements, but you have to know it. You have to know where the parts of your flow are breaking down. So we absolutely look at data. But like a credit to success criteria for the new you. I was not a metric. It was how people feel and use it. But then we measured everything to know what the impact was going to be and different things Go ahead. Do you think, um, so to tomorrow's point, um, you know we want to be data informed that data driven when we think about data, it's also much broader than, um, just the numbers. So, for example, in this redesign project, we had a number of signals that we were collecting. So one was obviously the feedback from these, uh, black champions, these sort of sophisticated users in the shared channel. We then created a separate group, which was another champions group. But it was folks who are a bit newer to slack, so these weren't admins. These are folks who had just been using flak for a few months at their organizations. We wanted to get their perspective on the design, and then we did new user studies. So we basically did usability studies, um, and did sort of on the ground user research with folks in New York. Um, this is pre covid, and these are folks who are new to slack. And so we had their perspective as well. And then we had the internal feedback. So all the people that slack who are using the new interface as well So we have these four vectors, and what was fascinating about that is, while by the end of the project. The team working on it knew that what we were building wouldn't satisfy 100% of people who use slack in 100% of their ways. We had a high level of confidence that we would know why would work for some people and why it might not work. For some people, it was fascinating and we had the shadow metric, which is will we get feedback on part of the that we hadn't predicted before launch. And you know, you talk about these big companies doing big launches. They don't know what's going to happen when they launch, you know, they just sort of launched out there and then hopefully it works. This was one of the first times that I've experienced launching something with a very high level of confidence that it would play out the way that we expected it, that some people would really be excited about this one thing. And then there might be a few people who are concerned about a specific part of the project. So we use all of those signals to have a real holistic sort of perspective on the different types of people who might use the product and we consider that different forms of data. You know, one of the things that is interesting about Flaccus that is designed to be so, um so inclusive of other products. I mean, it really does kind of work and play well with with other platforms. And that's part of the reason that people I love it, Um, but it's an interesting, uh, propositions of business strategy because there are other companies whose philosophy is more. Let's were trying to hurt people into our closed environment and keep them using our related products. We are an open platform that is definitely a part of our ethos is that we want you the customer, to be able to use the best of breed products, so you should be able to use whatever it is that is the best product for you, and you should integrate very seamlessly. We are the engagement layer were the engagement layer that can engage with any kind of product. You have any events you have, and we want to make sure that we make your other software that you have purchased your other software more valuable. You can go to slack and you can start a zoom call from straight within slack and you can default to all of black holes can be on June because that's what our customers want. And that's what makes it really easy and seamless. We're not going to be the best at everything. So we want our customers to have the best products, and we want them to come together and slap. We know that our customers spend all day every day in black, and we want that experience to be the best it can be. And we think if we focus on that on being a channel based messaging system that brings all of your that brings all of your systems together and your software together, we're going to be the best of that, and we're going to be really good at that, and we know we can be really good at that.