How Slack Builds Products People Love to Use, with Chief Product Officer Rob Seaman

Transcript

This has been generated by AI and optimized by a human. 

Jess Carter:

The power of data is undeniable. And unharnessed, it's nothing but chaos.

Show ID:

The amount of data was crazy.

Show ID:

Can I trust it?

Show ID:

You will waste money.

Show ID:

Held together with duct tape.

Show ID:

Doomed to failure.

Jess Carter:

This season we're solving problems in real time to reveal the art of the possible. Making data your ally, using it to lead with confidence and clarity, helping communities and people thrive. This is Data-Driven Leadership, a show by Resultant. 

Hey guys, welcome back to Data-Driven Leadership. We're so excited about today's episode because we're sitting down with Rob Seaman, the chief product officer of Slack at Salesforce. I want to be honest with you guys, I was intimidated, and for good reason. Rob is this wealth of knowledge. You can't talk to this guy without realizing that he's a lifelong learner. He learns quickly. He's humble, hungry, smart (to use Patrick Lencioni's words). He had so many references.

This is one where I would sit down with a pen and paper and write down everything he suggests that you should read and you should. We're going to grab some of that and put it in the show notes for you, and also that'll be where you can connect with him. 

Things that really stood out to me: Rob is really thoughtful about answering a question that I've been asking others in life lately, which is can you be mission-oriented as a private sector firm and what does it look like? He is so passionate that you have to be in this market and you have to be successful in the private sector when it comes to attracting talent, when it comes to being successful and understanding your customers.

So, he's just really inspirational to hear that. You can tell he digs deep and when he shows up for the work he does, he shows up as his full self and I think that's a good reminder for all of us. I also really appreciate the way he talks about staying close to your clients and how to do that, your customers. And so, there's a bunch of different ways he talked about Slack, but he also was really open at the end about if you aren't this huge firm that has access to all these resources, how do you do the most right things and how do you figure out what those are when it comes to client feedback or customer feedback?

And then when it also comes to technology and taking on AI or data or whatever it might be that you are looking out as your next mountain that you have to scale. So, I'm sure you're going to enjoy this. I say that pretty confidently and he's just really easy to talk to. So, it was a pleasure talking to Rob. I know you're going to enjoy it. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to Data-Driven Leadership. I'm your host Jess Carter. Today we have Rob Seaman, chief product officer of Slack at Salesforce. Walk us through a little bit of that.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

Yeah, so I was actually at Salesforce when the intent to acquire Slack was announced and I immediately started working on the integration of Slack and Salesforce and got to know Stewart and Tamara and Cal and the product team, Mali and Noah that way.

Jess Carter:

Awesome.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

And there was previously a head of enterprise product that left and went on to Airtable and now is at Checkr. Ilan Frank is his name. Awesome guy. Shout out to Ilan.

Jess Carter:

Wow.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

But they said, "Hey, why don't you come over?" I'd been working with him for a while and so I joined Slack, the product team, three and a half years ago, almost four years ago now.

Jess Carter:

I want to hear about what was the most fun part, what surprised you? Walk me through what it's like to integrate a solution or these solutions, how to bring those together in some meaningful way. I'm just curious about what was it like, what was the day in your shoes like?

Rob Seaman, Slack:

I mean, we're still doing it, frankly. I mean just like any product, you're just flat-out never done. I mean, I think the promise of these two companies together is you have on the Salesforce side, I mean we are one company, but on the Salesforce side, you have this massive customer base. I mean the company created effectively on demand or SaaS CRM, right? And so, you've got this massive customer base for sales, service, marketing, platform, building custom apps, you name it, and it's a really loyal customer base. Then you have Slack, which is an amazing product that is consumer-grade that people love to use.

And then the thing was you could combine that consumer-grade love for the software with this incredible install base and incredible go-to-market machine that is Salesforce. And just the sum of those two parts would be much greater than the two individually. The thing that as we've gone along the path, transitioning work from or just software, I think generally from forums and lists and user interfaces into conversations and agents and AI is a tough transition. You're seeing that play out now, right?

And I think that's been the thing that we've been working through is how do you take these workloads that have traditionally been very human-oriented and done through visual interfaces and moving them over into something that's very conversational. It starts with, say, a notification in Slack and then plays out through a series of back and forths and a Slack channel as opposed to a point-and-click interface. And the advent of LLMs and agents has certainly helped us accelerate that. And so, it hasn't been without its frustrations, but it's been fun and it's been cool to see the customers adopting.

Jess Carter:

This is so interesting to me. When you said you're never done, throughout our careers, I feel like we meet people who are comfortable with that concept and people who are like, "No, I want a rigid scope and a rigid thing." And I have love, I have an adoration for some of those people that are really... because they get things done. But I've also really learned the value proposition of, and it's never going to be done. You work until 11:00 every single night. The work's going to be there tomorrow, it's going to be there. Do you have people on your team that are both kinds of those things?

Rob Seaman, Slack:

I think, yeah, I mean we do for sure. And you encounter those every single place that you go. I often go back to, I think there was something Ben Horowitz wrote a long time ago, it might've been Marty Cagan on a project versus product mindset. And that comes down to that as products have a finite completion, and products to me are like children where you're just you're never done. I think there's benefit to both, honestly. I tend personally when building product teams, I definitely look for that product mindset interspersed with the project mindset, right? But I want the product mindset to be the majority because I think that just breeds an obsession over quality.

Users will never be a hundred percent happy, but you should always strive for them to be and therefore, you'll never be done. But that project mindset I think gives you a bias for action and pace. I think there are times where product managers, designers, data scientists, engineers could wait ostensibly forever to give something to people because they don't think it's good enough. Whereas that project mindset will give you like, "Okay, let's make it as good as we possibly can and have it be as lovable as we possibly can with some finite data. Otherwise, you're just navel-gazing forever."

Jess Carter:

You don't want to spend millions of dollars on one small enhancement.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

No, absolutely not.

Jess Carter:

What's “good enough” is always an eternal question, right? It's like I liked your lovable. That's a great phrase. So, I like the concept too of how do you build a good product team? You need this mixed mass. It's not everybody is constantly able to flex wherever they need to, or hold things loosely. One of my questions for you is, when you're going through some of this in the last three years, one of the things that's really important for me in my career is these really cathartic moments is that they don't have to happen often. But when you sit back and you're like, "Holy crap, we're doing something meaningful, this matters."

So, when you look at some of this, I don't know, the work you've done in the last three years, do you have any of those cathartic moments where you're like, "I know exactly where I was standing and I watched this release go live and I realized or I heard a user talk about their experience and you're like, oh, this matters"? Because I think a lot of people think private sector product companies can't innately be missional, and I don't think that that's true at all.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

I don't think that's true at all. I mean the mission may not be on the tip of the average consumer's tongue, like Google's organizing world information might be. But I think it's absolutely possible for private enterprise companies to be mission-oriented. I think it's incredibly important and that's one of the things, frankly, I look for in product people. It's one of the things I look for when I'm personally evaluating jobs is it needs to be mission-oriented and there needs to be a strong culture around it. And I think that's something that Slack had in a way that I hadn't seen before and I think you see it in Salesforce as well, which is very mission-oriented and the culture aligns to that in particular.

And one of the things I love working on the Slack product is just using the Slack product and just the way that we use it, we get so much feedback from our customers. And it can be positive, it can be negative, it can be extremely negative, it can come from Twitter, it can come from our end product feedback, it could come from tickets that are logged through our customer support team, but we actually have a daily user survey feedback Firehose, the channel.

Jess Carter:

Cool.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

I'll look through there occasionally and any one of those things that in and of themselves with the millions of users that we have are not something you would make a decision on. But they are qualitative things that I think are fun to look at relative to priorities and just being in there and seeing somebody say how much time it saved them or like, "Oh my gosh, I didn't use Slack at my last company and I do now and now I understand what people are talking about or this is so fun to use." Our jobs are hard and aren't always fun and to have something they're using day-to-day that actually helps make it less hard and is somewhat enjoyable, that gives me a level of satisfaction.

Frankly, I haven't had that in a lot of products I've worked on before. To give you a really specific one recently, when we were working on Agentforce, which is Salesforce's platform for building and deploying agents, we've been working on it for quite some time. And you also saw a lot of the agentic companies like Cursor, Vercel, and the others popping up on the side. We were doing all this work for Agentforce and then we're like, this actually makes a ton of sense for Cursor, Vercel and these other products and to see them starting to take advantage of it…this is just in the last six months to see them taking advantage of it and just the volume and pace of customer adoption within Slack, that also gives me a ton of, I don't know, it just makes you feel good.

Jess Carter:

That's cool. Yeah. Well, and to your point, I think Slack, there's this disruption to I think about COVID and everybody working from home. And there was this sense of, it felt more like you were texting a friend. It felt more like you were in community just because you were using these platforms, whether it's Teams or Slack, Slack, I understand, but there's something interesting happening where an email feels more formal and these message, you get a lot of work done by not having to have a meeting for everything, by not having to send an email where everyone realizes it feels like you're papering up and you're just actually collaborating.

And even joking around, I've had a lot of people come from as clients that they just use it the platform so differently, and some of them are still pretty formal or they barely use it. And some people are like, "I answer those chats all day every day and I get to my email a couple times a day." So, even just seeing the pace in which you can build momentum really quickly and keep work moving, remove blockages, it's like an incredible value proposition.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

It really is. And speed is, not to use a sports analogy, but I guess I can't think of another word, but the biggest difference to me...

Jess Carter:

Permission.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

The biggest difference to me in any level of sports, whether you're going from 12U baseball to high school, to college, to minors and pros, it's the same thing with football or basketball, is like the speed jump. When you watch an NBA basketball game relative to a college basketball game, even in March Madness like holy cow, that is so faster and it's that way with soccer, baseball, all those kind of things. And I believe that about companies too. And especially now, it's the ones that move fastest are the ones that are going to win. I really don't want to make this an ad for Slack, but I really do think our product can help with it.

Jess Carter:

Sure.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

And that's one of the things we say internally is operating at the speed of Slack. It's just faster. It's like having a conversation like the social contract around response times and stuff like that. Everything just moves faster and it's cool to see products, ideas, marketing campaigns, all that kind of stuff come to life in Slack.

Jess Carter:

Yeah. Sorry if I sound naive here, do people talk about seeing those kinds of platforms like Slack as a benefit? It's literally, I want to work at a company that had... is that real?

Rob Seaman, Slack:

It is real. Yeah, absolutely. I mean we've seen engineers, I mean even prior to my time at Salesforce and Slack, we'd be interviewing engineers at startups and they'd be like, "Do you Slack?" It's one of the things that people ask as part of an interview process. I mean we do see it play out in our customer base as well. If you look at specifically the sales space where we're together, Salesforce and Slack, the products really help sales organizations. One of the things it's most important and it's time to what we call AE productivity or account executive productivity, which is what's the amount of time from their hire date to the time they sell their first thing. And we can dramatically reduce that time and make it faster.

And so, we see it both on engineers, designers, and product people when they're interviewing want to know if tools like this are being used, but we're also seeing it play out in our customer base.

Jess Carter:

Okay. So, I'm geeking out with you about Slack, but I do want to ask you, so back up for a second and if you…say that you got this job all over again three years ago, I'm curious about how you might advise, or say a friend got the job now that you got three years, say that they're walking into this new product leadership role. What would you encourage someone, what's their first move? Is it the whole first 90 days thing? What is it that you would encourage anyone stepping into product leadership to think about first?

Rob Seaman, Slack:

If I could go back three years, I say this a lot, I was intimidated coming into Slack and I think that I didn't make decisions as fast as I should have sometimes because I was intimidated. So, when I came over, I have predominantly been an enterprise product leader, and there was a lot of the leaders within Slack had come from Google or Foursquare or had been with Slack since part of the original eight, had been there forever and just had this incredible consumer software background. And I was intimidated to go beyond my enterprise bubble, if you will.

Jess Carter:

Sure.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

Looking back, I definitely would've made some decisions faster and gotten outside my comfort zone, because I think the thing that I would tell people when they're joining new roles is you're probably there because of your ability to pattern match. Good judgment comes from experience. And so, I think you go through that over your career and you develop the ability to pattern match in these situations and that's where you can really help. So, I would hop in quick, run to the hardest problems. I'll never forget this. At a startup was at, there was an engineer named Nate Ford. I think he's at Google now. He literally came in first day and was like, "Hey, what's the hardest thing on the backlog?"

And was like, "Give me that." And that just was such a profound experience to me. It was like, okay, run to the fire, for lack of a better word.

Jess Carter:

That's cool.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

So, I would definitely go to the hardest thing, lean on your experience and don't be afraid to pattern match and to help the team, but I also think that first period of time really working on how...it's easy to understand what's important, but I think that first 30-, 60-, 90-day period of how you act and how you do things and get things done, learning that and starting to build that as a muscle is incredibly important, because that's a big part of how I and we evaluate people is it's not just what you achieve, but it's how you did it. That's probably the harder thing to learn within any given company within that first period and probably most important.

Jess Carter:

I appreciate those insights because I think it's easy to walk in, look at the what and decide is it good or is it bad? And then if it's bad, it's sometimes like, "Well, is the what bad or is the how you're bringing it about broken?" Maybe it's not bad. Maybe it's the delivery.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

Exactly.

Jess Carter:

Maybe it's the implementation and it's really easy to just square peg round hole and you've missed it, right? Really fast, you've missed it. That's super cool. I don't always say these things on the podcast. I'm more of a people, it's almost like an empath skill. So, it's actually hilarious in a weird way where I can tell something's going on with the people in the room. But if I were to guess what it is, I'd be wrong nine times out of 10. So, my job is to be like, "Hold on, something's happening, but I don't know what." But when it comes to the what, I can figure things out with facts pretty easily, but reading, especially if you have a leadership team, are they bought in or not?

Are they saying yes and it's total garbage? They're not bought in, they're just saying it to get out of the room. And my sensing of that is very high, more so than is the code good?

Rob Seaman, Slack:

Yeah, I think that's so important. You call it a point. I remember specific examples of that over the course of the last few years, where it's like when you join a place, you can very easily tell inter-personally, like if something's not working out, you don't need a bunch of domain context necessarily, but you also don't have the baggage of having been there. So, you can point it out as it doesn't seem like you're all on the same page about this. And then the conversation that flows from that is incredibly valuable. It often gets to the root of some problem that can help you achieve much more and much faster.

Jess Carter:

Yeah, yeah, fresh eyes, fresh perspective is always helpful. Let me ask you this. So, a lot of times, we talk about data noise versus a real signal. So, in the kind of companies that we're describing, I would imagine there's a lot of data everywhere. Everyone's got a data-driven decision. Everyone has, they're bringing their thoughts with their proof. Not everyone has that, right? Not everyone works in a company where that's as buttoned up as I imagine you guys are. When you are working on something like Slack, how would you differentiate between data noise and a real signal and maybe even some of your feedback from clients, is it good? To your point, you quickly were like, "This is anecdotal, it's not statistically significant," right?

Rob Seaman, Slack:

So, we have multiple ways. We are probably a little further along than some companies might be, and we have-

Jess Carter:

I imagined.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

... a pretty rigorous approach to it. It's very consumer-oriented in that regard, so we get a lot of feedback on social, on what people like to talk about Slack on Twitter, and so we have a team that monitors that. We actually have a research team that runs our NPS surveys and the surveys, the feedback that goes out in the product and they will consolidate that. You also have our customer support team who gets feedback through feedback at Slack.com and also-

Jess Carter:

Sure.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

... through the product, and we'll feed that into us. And then we run high-touch customer pilots and experiments. And so, we have data and we have our regular instrumentation. So, we look at daily active users, weekly active users, monthly, et cetera, features, retention, that kind of stuff. We have it coming at us from all different angles. I'd say the most important thing, not every company can do this, but I think a really important thing about the way that we are structured is that we have data scientists and researchers within the pizza teams, for lack of a better word with the product team, so it's product design, engineering and RNA together. We call it RNA, research and analytics-

Jess Carter:

Sure.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

... together so that it's those four people together from the beginning of consideration of a potential product strategy to a plan for a given quarter to a weekly team meeting about how a feature we just shipped is actually tracking. You have all four of those together and we lean hard on our RNA counterparts to help us distill signal from noise. And then we lean very hard on our qual researchers to help us get qualitative feedback to ensemble with the hard data that we're getting from the data science team. It's a mix of all of that, but I think the most important thing is that research analytics and basically research and data science are equal to and together with product design and engineering from the beginning.

Jess Carter:

I love that. I feel like at a smaller firm and talking to some of our clients, I think just even hearing one, I think there's this tendency to collect data and it's like, "Well, hang on. It's got to be useful. You don't just have whole departments that are collecting data for no reason." I think we have some clients who are just to your point, way, way early on their journey that you are so much more mature on. And so, I think even for some of them, there's this sense of like, "Hey, how do I collect this data? How do I justify its value?"

I don't want to just put it on a shelf after I've collected it, but I just think even organizationally to learn the two phrases, acknowledging when you're using anecdotal data and acknowledging when you have statistically significant insights, just knowing and being able to talk about, "Hey, I just saw this comment on the Firehose. It says this thing about whatever." That's anecdotal and our ability to be like, I see it there. Is there a theme or not? Is there an affinity diagram? Are we collecting any data that conveys that at scale versus it's just one thought, but it really bothers you and that's okay too, right?

It's okay. To your point, you're probably seeing some of those comments and you're like, "Oh my gosh, I really want us to release this feature."

Rob Seaman, Slack:

Oh, a hundred percent. One of the things we're particular about is we say that we are data-informed very intentionally as opposed to data-driven for a few reasons, and it's because there are situations where going after the anecdotal thing makes sense, right? And it's often a situation where it's a potentially emerging pattern that just hasn't shown up in the data yet, or it's a different approach to something that we hadn't considered. I think we intentionally say data-informed, because we want to have a mix of data-driven, statistically significant decisions based on statistically significant situations that we're making decisions and anecdotal.

Jess Carter:

Us too. We talked about, I was like, "When do we have to change it to be AI-Driven Leadership?" I don't know. It's like informed. I like informed. That might be good. Do you have any insight or suggestions about how to help keep those teams like, yes, we have to operate in the weeds and in the noise, but how do we come up for air and how do we make sure we're heading towards our due north together? Do you have any insights on that?

Rob Seaman, Slack:

I guess it depends a little bit on the feature area or product area that people are working on, but-

Jess Carter:

Sure.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

...one of the things that we are doing more and more of is getting our product teams actually talking to the customers themselves. We are lucky in that regard. We can roll a feature out and within two weeks know, but we don't always know what the biggest customers or the absolute smallest really think about it and how it makes them feel. And so, I think one of the ways to elevate people from the weeds or the sheer volume of data is to have a cohort of customers, whether that's a customer advisory board or a product advisory board that they can go to or pilot customers that they can go to and just say, "Show me how you use this. I see that you're using it. I don't know how.

Can you walk me through how and why are you doing this versus the alternatives and how did you do this before?" That kind of in-situation observation I think often brings you back to why you even started. You can stare at numbers and be like, "Okay, we're retaining people. That's great. We should try and retain two percent  more." But then you go and talk to customers and you're like, okay, we could make this dramatically bigger and better based on what they're saying if we did X, Y, and Z.

Jess Carter:

Yeah, you're getting back to that missional mindset, right? Again, is it just the two percent more or the margin we need to increase? No, it's about people are using it for a reason to accomplish real meaningful impacts, and so what are those things and how do we build it better for that, right? I'm in a professional services firm. I think about connecting finance to a direct client like, "Hey, how do you get our invoices? What's it like? Is it easy?” And it's just an example, but I'm like, that's such a cool idea to think about who is working on the business that isn't always connected to the client, and how do you make that connection more deliberate? I think that's a really neat idea.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

I mean, you see it with product teams in particular. I mean, it can become a crutch to have this much data, right? And I think teams will often do design sprints, and this is beyond Slack, but they'll often do design sprints periodically and they'll have customers at the beginning and customers at the end of the week. And then they don't really actually truly talk to customers other than in those venues, which are infrequent. And I think that's just a good thing to come back to your true north.

Jess Carter:

For sure. I think one of the other things that is impressive to me about you, and yes, it's a deep sigh, is you are obviously ahead of some amount of curve. I'm going to assume that you're an early adopter. Am I right?

Rob Seaman, Slack:

Yes, absolutely.

Jess Carter:

You're a technology... okay.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

Yes, a hundred percent.

Jess Carter:

Leaning into version one.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

Half the stuff I use doesn't work.

Jess Carter:

So, I am curious about do you have advice for how you stay ahead or, a different question could be for someone who's not an early adopter, who's very risk-conscious and doesn't diving into, I know it's going to work because I'm afraid it's going to waste my time, could you convert me?

Rob Seaman, Slack:

I mean, I take so much inspiration from my team, honestly. We have a channel of how we AI products, and it's all of our product managers going back and forth on how they're using AI to make their jobs better. And I've watched this and I'm like, "Holy cow." And then I go take that, and I'm like, "Okay, I see that I could turn that pattern a little bit sideways and that could actually help me with something in my personal life, or it could actually help me with the way that I communicate through the broader Salesforce." So, I definitely take a ton of inspiration from that. I do live in the Bay Area, and you can't go literally anywhere without hearing about it. I read a ton.

I just think that honestly, more often than not, even when I try something and I don't like it or it doesn't work, I learn something either about that particular product or about myself. And a lot of times, I'm learning something about myself, which is like, you know what, I need to go read more on this particular area, or I am behind because I'm not ready for this concept. There are times where I'm like, okay, that product obviously needs to improve for X, Y, and Z reasons, but it's as much to me a reflection back on me of what I need to grow and change and read more about as it is the products themselves. So, I take so much joy in trying those things, but I also try to make things myself and fail all the time. So, it's just...

Jess Carter:

You're the coolest nerd I've ever met.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

I'm one hundred percent a nerd. I make things and they don't work all the time, and I keep trying to make them and I'm going to have to keep working because I spend so much of my own personal money on things. It's hopeless.

Jess Carter:

It's awesome. You've converted me, because you've also made it missional. I like this concept of I'm learning something about me or about it or about that technology, and I know how to grow. There's this continuous learning component there where it's like, "Hey, if we're not learning, what are we doing with our lives," right?

Rob Seaman, Slack:

Exactly, yeah.

Jess Carter:

I love it. It's awesome. All right, you work at this huge company, obviously everything's amazing. You have all this data, whatever. If you got to work at a teeny-tiny startup again, are there any components of that that just sounds so fun to you, where if somebody is listening and they're in this little tiny startup that's chaotic right now and they just wish that they were with Rob at Slack and Salesforce, what makes you a little jealous?

Rob Seaman, Slack:

Yeah, I mean, having worked at those small ones, I will tell you there were nights that I literally beat my head against the wall in a shower. Not very like, "What am I doing with my life?" But I look back at those times so fondly, the downside is you're not burdened by customers. The upside is you're not burdened by customers, right? You don't have international customers. You don't have to worry necessarily about contract renewals. You're just in this beautiful free, creative space and it's extremely stressful because every single day, you're finding out you were wrong. And it's just about how fast you can respond to being wrong and get righter, for lack of a better word. So, it is crazy making, but I don't know, it's really, really fun.

On a personal level, I love growing teams and I love having a large customer base to experiment with given my current life stage. But ignoring all of that stuff, being in a small company, that's incredible. I think everybody should do it once. If you're in the middle of it and you're…obviously make your own personal decisions, but just enjoy it. Your rate of learning, to our earlier topic, is so high in those small situations that it's just invaluable.

Jess Carter:

Yeah, there's something about, to your point, it's more creative, it's heightened. There's more of this sense of you feel like you can't fail, but you also feel like you're feeling every day. But that sense of learning is so heightened because of all of that. It's like there's a thousand micro learnings happening each day that you have to channel and figure out how to discard the stuff that's not the best use of your time. And the same thing is true to a larger firm. It just feels more vulnerable or more raw in a smaller firm, there's something about it that feels more gritty.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

If any one part fails within a smaller firm, there's a higher probability that the whole thing falls apart, right? I think that's the thing that every single person often holds within them and often doesn't say outside. It's like, if I don't do my part, this whole thing could fall apart, right?

Jess Carter:

Yeah.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

Realistically, in the bigger companies, just the law of large numbers, the probability of one person having that big of a negative effect on a company is much less probable.

Jess Carter:

But isn't that interesting? Because I'm like, it's not actually different. It's a different vibe.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

It is.

Jess Carter:

But it's like to you, the challenge is there's so many things that would have to go wrong for something to substantially fail because of you. It's a little bit like, well then how do I make sure I'm the crux to what went right?

Rob Seaman, Slack:

Yes. Now that we're talking about big companies, this reminds me, did you ever read Komoroski's Slime Molds?

Jess Carter:

No.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

He was a product leader at Google. But if you just searched Komoroske with a K and then Slime Molds, it'll come up and it is a really fun, simple emoji-style presentation builds. It must be like 350 slides, but you just click through it really quickly. But it talks about one of the downsides of large organizations that you don't see happen in smaller teams is when there's something exciting, people start coming out of the woodwork wanting to work on something and just the coordination cost is large and it compounds. And you just inherently don't have that problem in smaller companies.

And so, I think one of the things that I try to do to make sure that we are successful and the things that I work on are successful and we believe that Slack has just reduced that coordination cost as much as you possibly can to keep small teams with directly responsible individuals moving things forward.

Jess Carter:

That's the pizza teams, right?

Rob Seaman, Slack:

Exactly.

Jess Carter:

I love it. Coordination, I love it. It's a good word, Rob. Well, if people want to follow you, how do they do it? Where do they find you?

Rob Seaman, Slack:

I would say LinkedIn is my primary, so that would be the primary place to find me. Most people tend to find us through Twitter or send feedback through to Slack, and we appreciate every single bit. Actually at the end, I would just say to anybody out here that uses Slack, thank you. We appreciate you and don't hesitate to pop the feedback button or respond to one of those surveys or tweet at us. We listen to everything. Can't guarantee we do it all, but we do listen to everything.

Jess Carter:

Well, we will make sure to put your LinkedIn in the show notes and then I may try and find that and just put it in the show notes too that you mentioned, the Komoroske. Think that sounds really cool. All right. Hey, before we head out, is there anything else you wanted to talk about that we didn't?

Rob Seaman, Slack:

I mean, just on the topic of being data-driven, one thing I would say we are ahead of where most companies are at full stop. And so, it can be intimidating to be at zero and think, how do I get to be like a Slack or a Salesforce or Facebook or Google or whatever? The thing I would say, one of the things that we try to preach, for lack of a better word than Slack, is what's the next hill? There used to be a big high fidelity photograph of Everest in the Slack lobby and I mean it was like 10 feet wide. And when you stood back from, it just looked like this black and white photo of Everest. But as you got closer to it, you saw these little dots of yellow at the bottom. And as you got closer and closer, you realize that was base camp.

You're like, "Holy cow. That's a long way from base camp to the top." And so, we definitely want to get to the top, which is where everything is hyper-instrumented and every single product team has the data sciences, but you can't start there. You can't just go ask for 10 million in funding and be data driven all of a sudden, but look, what's the next hill, right? There's a series of hills that you have to get to the top of Everest. And so, one of the things I would just tell everybody is like, what's the next hill? Just start with the next little feature that you're working on, start looking at the data for that and then start building from there. Otherwise, it can be intractable.

Jess Carter:

And you're never done.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

Exactly. You're absolutely never done.

Jess Carter:

Full circle, we did it.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

We did.

Jess Carter:

Hey, thank you so much for your time. This is amazing and it's so cool to talk to you. I am blown away and would reserve the right to ask you to come back on whenever you would like to because this is...

Rob Seaman, Slack:

I'll be happy to, but you have to tell me what your two coffee syrups are behind you. As somebody who drinks the umbrella drink of coffee over here, I have to know what those syrups are.

Jess Carter:

I was raised on hazelnut. I'm from Chicago, Papa Nicholas, and then we do have vanilla as well. We're basic, but we do really enjoy.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

Strong plus one on the vanilla over here.

Jess Carter:

Okay. All right, good. We actually just set up our coffee bar, so I'm going to tell my husband that you were jazzed about it.

Rob Seaman, Slack:

There you go.

Jess Carter:

Thank you guys for listening. I'm your host, Jess Carter. Don't forget to follow the Data-Driven Leadership wherever you get your podcasts and rate and review letting us know how these topics are transforming your business. We can't wait for you to join us on the next episode.