Noah Weiss: How to Master Product-Led Growth; Scaling PLG to Enterprise at Google & Slack | E1026

Noah Weiss is the Chief Product Officer of Slack, overseeing the product team’s strategy and development. Over his seven years at Slack, Noah has led various parts of the product organization, including the self-service SMB business and product-led growth; the Virtual HQ team that launched huddles and clips; and the search and machine learning teams. Prior to Slack, Noah served as SVP of Product and Analytics at Foursquare. He started his career at Google leading the structured data search team and working on display ads.

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Timestamps:

0:00 What Noah Learned at Google
3:01 What Noah Learned at Foursquare
8:28 What are your product principles?
16:15 How To Do Product Reviews
17:50 How Slack Changed for Hybrid Work
24:19 How To Maintain Simplicity with Scale
30:49 Is innovation slowing at Slack?
33:49 Problems Startups Face Scaling to Enterprise
41:38 How To Know a Product Is Working
45:35 Mergers & Acquisitions
50:28 What Product Wisdom is BS
52:45 Quick-Fire Round
54:31 Is Product Art or Science?

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In Today’s Episode with Noah Weiss We Discuss:

1.) Entry into Product and Road to Slack CPO:

How did Noah make his first foray into the world of product with Google?
What are 1-2 of his single biggest takeaways from his time with Google and Foursquare?
What model did Noah learn at Google that he applies to product today?

2.) Product 101: The Foundations:

Is product more art or science? If Noah were to put a number on it what would it be?
What are product principles? What makes good vs bad product principles?
What are the biggest mistakes that founders make when instilling product principles?
Does Noah believe with Gustav Soderstrom, “talk is cheap and so we should do more of it”?

3.) How to Master Product-Led-Growth:

What are some of Noah’s biggest lessons on how to master PLG?
What are the biggest mistakes Noah sees early stage founders make today when going for the PLG approach? How does he advise them?
When is the right time to move into enterprise? What needs to change?
How do you change who you build product for? The buyer or the user?
Why does Noah believe product speed will always be the most important thing in product?

4.) The Internals of Slack:

How does Slack do post-mortems today? Who comes? Who sets the agenda? How has this changed in a world of remote? What does it take to do them well?
How do Slack do product testing pre-launch of new products? Do they know when something is going to be a hit? What did they think would be a massive hit that turned into a flop?
What does Noah believe is the biggest near death product experience for Slack? What happened? How did they get through it?
Why do Slack buy other companies? How do they think through the decision of buy vs build?
When do acquisitions work? When do they not work?

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