Noah Weiss
Chief Product Officer at Slack
Noah Weiss is CPO at Slack, where he has spent seven years. Previously head of product at Foursquare and a PM at Google and Fog Creek Software, he led Slack through a self-service plateau and into AI product development.
Dimension Profile
Key Themes
Episode Summary
Noah Weiss shares Slack's approach to ambitious product development through 'bigger boulder bets' and Complaint Storms, a process for systematically identifying product pain points. He covers the 10 traits of great PMs, how to work with opinionated founders, lessons from Slack's self-service business plateauing in 2019, and how they're incubating AI capabilities by listening to what customers wish was possible.
Leadership Principles
- → Take bigger boulder bets — teams can get lost crawling up a hill without realizing there's a beautiful range behind it
- → Incubate new teams from scratch in new areas before those areas mature
- → Use Complaint Storms to systematically identify product pain points
Notable Quotes
"We have this mental metaphor — 'Take bigger boulder bets.' Teams can often get lost crawling up that hill, not realizing that there's a huge, incredibly beautiful range behind it."
— On Slack's approach to ambitious product bets beyond incremental improvement
"In the AI space, we're trying to hear from customers what they wish Slack could do with new superpowers. Incubate teams, give them space to run, then get something to launch that blows people away."
— On Slack's formula for building AI features
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