This is 2014. That was the year that Slack actually launched. I was interviewed by MIT Technology Review and asked if we were working to improve Slack. I said, I feel like what we have right now is just a giant piece of shit. It's just terrible and we should be humiliated that we offered this to the public. To me, that was like, you should be embarrassed. If you can't see almost limitless opportunities to improve, then you shouldn't be deciding. Slack was famous for being one of the early consumerized B2B SaaS products. At more than one company all hands, I made everyone in the company repeat this as a chant. In the long run, the measure of our success will be the amount of value that we create for customers. And you can put effort into demonstrating that you have created this value and stuff like that. But there's no substitute for actually having created it.
Something else I heard that you often espouse is friction in the product experience is actually often a good thing. It became an assumption that you should always be trying to remove friction when the challenge is really comprehension. If your software kind of stops me and asks me to make a decision, and I don't really understand it, you make me feel stupid. If people could get over the idea of reducing friction as a number of goals, reducing the number of plexer tabs, or something, and instead focus on, how can I make this simple? How do I prevent people from having to think in order to use my software?
You started two companies both famously pivoted. I imagine many people come to you for advice on pivoting. The decision is about like, have you exhausted the possibilities, creating the distance so that you can make an intellectual, rational decision about it, rather than an emotional decision is essential. And the reason I say you have to be coldly rational about it is because it's fucking humiliating.
Today, my guest is Stuart Butterfield, a founder and product legend who rarely does podcasts. Stuart founded Flickr and then Slack, which he sold to Salesforce in one of the biggest acquisitions in tech history at the time. There is so much product and leadership wisdom locked away in his head. I feel like our conversation just scratched the surface, which had about utility curves, something he calls the owner's delusion, a hilarious pattern. He sees a company's, he calls hyper realistic work like activities. What he's learned about product and craft and taste and Parkinson's law, why you need to obsess with not making your users think.
The backstory on his legendary We Don't Sell Saddles here, memo, and so much more, a huge thank you to Noah Weiss, Chris Cordell, Allie Rail, and Johnny Rogers for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation. This is a really special one, and I really hope to have Stuart back to delve even deeper. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get 17 incredible products for free for an entire year, including Devon Lovable Reflit Bolt, Init and Linear Superhuman Descript, Whisper Flow Gamma, Proplexity, Warp Grenole, and Magic Patterns, Raycast, Jepur, D&Mobbin.
关于他那篇传奇的《我们这里不卖马鞍》备忘录的背景故事,以及更多内容,特别感谢 Noah Weiss、Chris Cordell、Allie Rail 和 Johnny Rogers 为这次对话提供了话题和问题的建议。这次交流非常特别,我真的希望今后能邀请 Stuart 回来进行更深入的探讨。如果您喜欢这个播客,请不要忘记在您常用的播客应用或 YouTube 上订阅和关注,这对我们帮助很大。此外,如果您成为我新闻通讯的年度订阅者,您将免费获得包括 Devon Lovable Reflit Bolt、Init 和 Linear Superhuman Descript、Whisper Flow Gamma、Proplexity、Warp Grenole 以及 Magic Patterns、Raycast、Jepur、D&Mobbin 在内的 17 款超棒产品,为期整整一年。
Head on over to Lenny's newsletter.com and click product pass. With that, I bring you Stuart Butterfield after a short word from our sponsors. Here's a puzzle for you. What do open AI, cursor, Proplexity, Versel, Platte, and hundreds of other winning companies have in common? The answer is they're all powered by today's sponsor, Work OS. If you're building software for enterprises, you've probably felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, skim, our back, audit logs, and other features required by big customers.
Work OS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Whether you're a seed-stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer, or a unicorn expanding globally, Work OS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise-ready and unlocking growth. They're essentially striped for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started, or just hit up their slack support where they have real engineers in there who answer your questions super fast. Work OS allows you to build like the best with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to WorkOS.com to make your app enterprise-ready today.
Work OS 是一个专为 B2B SaaS 搭建的现代开发平台,它将那些阻碍交易的因素转化为可直接使用的 API。无论你是一家试图赢得首个企业客户的初创公司,还是正在全球扩张的独角兽公司,Work OS 是最快让你做好企业准备并实现增长的路径。它们基本上就是为企业功能打造的“Stripe”。访问 workos.com 即可开始,或者通过他们的 Slack 支持联系,那里的工程师会非常迅速地回答你的问题。Work OS 提供愉悦的 API、详尽的文档和流畅的开发体验,让你像最顶尖的企业一样构建应用。立即访问 WorkOS.com,让你的应用具备企业级准备吧。
This episode is brought to you by Metronome. You just launched your new shiny AI product. The new pricing page looks awesome, but behind it, last minute glue code, messy spreadsheets, and running ad hoc queries to figure out what to build. Customers get invoices they can't understand, engineers are chasing billing bugs, finance can't close the books. With Metronome, you hand it all off to the real-time billing infrastructure that just works, reliable, flexible, and built to grow with you. Metronome turns raw usage events into accurate invoices, gives customers bills they actually understand, and keeps every team in sync in real-time. Whether you're launching usage-based pricing, managing enterprise contracts, or rolling out new AI services, Metronome does the heavy lifting so that you can focus on your product, not your billing. That's why some of the fastest growing companies in the world, like OpenAI and Anthropic, run their billing on Metronome. Visit metronome.com to learn more. That's metronome.com.
本集内容由 Metronome 赞助。你刚刚发布了全新的 AI 产品,新定价页面看起来很棒,但背后却是一片混乱:最后时刻的粘合代码、杂乱的电子表格,还有为了弄清楚产品构建需求而进行的临时查询。客户收到的发票看不懂,工程师疲于修复计费错误,财务部门无法完成账单结算。而有了 Metronome,你可以将这一切交给实时计费基础设施,它高效可靠、灵活多变,并且可以随你的业务一起成长。Metronome 能将原始使用数据转化为准确的发票,让客户收到真正看得懂的账单,并保持各个团队的实时同步。无论你是要推出基于使用量的定价、管理企业合同,还是发布新的 AI 服务,Metronome 都能为你承担繁重工作,让你专注于产品而不是计费。这也是为什么全球增长最快的一些公司,如 OpenAI 和 Anthropic,选择在 Metronome 上运行他们的计费系统。请访问 metronome.com 了解更多信息。网址是 metronome.com。
Stuart, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. I'm excited. I'm even more excited. I'm so honored to have you here. I never told you this, but you've been towards the very top of my wish list of guests I have on this podcast ever since I started this podcast a few years ago, so I'm very excited. They're finally making this happen. I have so many questions for you. My first question is just what the heck are you up to these days? I feel like ever since you left Slack, we haven't heard much from Stuart. I'm curious which up to you. Hopefully you're just chilling.
I'm mostly just chilling. I left Salesforce two and a half years ago, and I have a two and a half year old. So she was actually born three days after my last day. So a lot of time with family, and it's like enormous privilege to be able to spend time with young kids while they're young. No new company to announce or anything like that. I do get a lot of emails and texts. Bees who look every three to six weeks, there's this cycle because Calhenderson who's the CTO of Slack and who also we work together on Flickr, so I've worked together now for 23 years. I've been talking about what we want to do next if there is something, but honestly, the big challenge has been, I think these things are kind of destroying the world. And what we're good at is making software. So you can find some way to make software that helped people use their phones less often than that would be a big winner, but haven't come up with anything good.
A lot of philanthropic work, nothing to an out there yet, but there's like some cool projects that I'm working on, and a lot of like, just personal creative art projects and supporting other artists and stuff like that. To prep for this chat, I talk to so many people that have worked with you over the years to try to figure out what you taught them about building product, building teams, building companies that most stuck with them, that most helped them build amazing products. The first is a concept called Utility Curves, this game of a bunch across so many people that have worked with you. Talk about what is Utility Curves, how you think use that to build better products.
This is pretty easy because it's a very familiar has curve where you have, it's flat, it starts arcing up, and then there's a really steep part and then it levels off again. And on the horizontal access, you can think of cost or effort. And on the vertical access, it's value or convenience. It kind of depends exactly what you're talking about. But the idea is the first bit of effort you put into something doesn't result in a huge amount of value. And then there's some magic threshold where it produces an enormous amount of value and then continued investment doesn't really pay off. The most basic example I can think of is let's say you're making a hammer and on that bottom access, it's now quality. And if the hammer has a handle that breaks with any impact, then it's totally useless. And if you make it a little bit stronger, it's still pretty useless. And it's kind of like junk, junk, junk, junk, okay, good, great, then it doesn't matter anymore.
If you're making an app, okay, this app's gonna have users. And so let's make a user's table and a database. And so far, you have generated no value. The reason I felt like this was so important is because we would talk about a feature and usually features are thought of as a binary, like you either have this feature or you don't. And so the argument I guess was, have we just not invested enough in this or have we got all the value or convenience or quality or whatever that we could get out of this and we've had the minute appointed to mission returns and it just doesn't matter. And I think in many cases, people will add a feature. It's not good enough. And so people don't use it or appreciate it. But now you've added some complexity to the app and then people give up or take it back or they try something in casting and they don't get the results they want. And so they decide that this is the thing that we're doing.
And so we would try to really investigate and decide whether we were on the first child part of the curve, the second child part of the curve or we were just coming up to it. So I think it's a lot easier to understand the value of this when you're talking about a specific app and a specific feature. But I think it was ultimately helpful on getting people to understand whether something was worth it or not. Okay, so just to be back what I'm hearing, there's kind of this, if you visualize this curve at the bottom, it's like, I don't even know what this is and then up the curve is like, okay, I sort of get it. And then at the top is, okay, I can't live without this. Now that I understand what this is for, it feels like it's like a really, it's a different way of thinking about getting to the aha moment for someone where they see, okay, save items, I get it. I need to use this constantly.
So it feels like this works both for a specific feature and also just for Slack, like getting people to even understand. Here's what Slack can do for you and then now I can't live without Slack. And essentially this is a lens you use to figure out where to spend product resources because if you don't get up that curve to, I get it and I can't live without it, nothing else matters. Is that the way, is that the framework? Yeah, yeah. And I think then you layer on another concept like the Basis use the term divine discontent. The line actually moves because once people are familiar with a piece of software or the way a feature is implemented or something like that, their standards go up.
And so there's like this competition. And again, this access can be, utility is the best general term for it, but could be quality, convenience, speed, it could be any number of things. But as you improve your search capability or if, as you improve your login experience or your password experience or your checkout experience or whatever, everyone else is as well. And so there's this continued investment. And when, you know, forget about thinking about a new feature, you're looking at how the product works overall and usually things get kind of implemented once. And then if they're lucky, they get improved upon periodically. Most things get improved upon very infrequently and something's getting improved upon never.
And, you know, I just want to give an example at the absolute extreme because I don't actually don't know how long this has been, but I try not to criticize other people's software so much because I'm very familiar with the trade-offs and prioritization and how hard it can be and blah, blah, blah. But, okay, so most people have the Gmail calendar app on their phone. I travel a fair bit. I'm mostly in the Eastern time zone, sometimes in mountain times, sometimes in the Pacific, sometimes in English time, sometimes in Japan, Central Europe. There's like a, you know, maybe 10 time zones, 12 time zones that I would ever choose.
When you hit the option to set the time zone on an event in Google Calendar on the iOS app, it presents all the time zones in the world in alphabetical order. And that's like the, I mean, there's probably worse orderings, but there's no value in that. And even when you start searching, it still presents them in alphabetical order by country with that turn. So I'm in California and I'm trying to send it away with a next week when I'm back in New York and I type in EAST, that I get a bunch of garbage, okay, East urn, ERN. And then the first one is Eastern Australia, New South Wales. And then Eastern Australia, Queensland. And then Eastern Australia, Daylight Sagaans and Eastern Australia, Standard Time.
当你在 iOS 版的 Google 日历应用中设置活动的时区时,它会以字母顺序显示全世界的时区。虽然可能有更糟糕的排序方式,但这种排序方式并没有什么实际价值。即便你开始搜索,它仍然会根据国家的字母顺序来显示时区。比如我在加州,现在想设置下周回纽约时的日程,当我输入 "EAST" 时,结果得到一大堆无用的信息,比如 East urn,ERN 之类。结果第一个显示的是东澳大利亚,新南威尔士,然后是东澳大利亚,昆士兰,再然后是东澳大利亚,夏令时和东澳大利亚,标准时间。
And then you're like, well, fuck, what? I can't remember which one is Daily's Havens and which one is Standard Time. And we have what? I could keep going like this for a while. This is an app that's used by at least hundreds and millions of people, presumably every single Google employee, it's bananas how bad it is. There's so many, like there's all these clever things you could do, like you know me, I'm on the West Coast, first option should be the East Coast and vice versa. But it definitely shouldn't be that every time zone is presented with equal value. I don't give a couple hundred times zones. I grew up in Canada, there's a Newfoundland has its own time zone, which is offset by half an hour. The population of Newfoundland is about half a million people. Not that many people got it. Is it Newfoundland maybe a million people in all of history? So I'm like a million and a half out of eight billion people.
And there's Newfoundland, you know, like the same with China time, which is like 25% of the world's population in this country. Anyway, and those a little bit longer than I intended to go on this example, but it is, it's crazy because no one's gonna switch to Gmail or to G Suite, Google Calendar from Outlook Exchange because the time zone picker is good. So maybe in some sense it doesn't matter. But at the same time, there's a real value in delighting customers and there's an emotional connection to the form or don't form. And in some cases, that could be really positive, like they would recommend it. And when they switch companies, or decide to start their own company, they're gonna choose to use this product or advocate for it because of that emotional connection. And vice versa, they'll also be like, hate this thing that drives me. Banana is really like we should stop using it or advocate for the alternative.
这段话的大意翻译如下:
“你知道,还有纽芬兰(Newfoundland),就像和中国时间一样,在这个国家有相当于全球25%的人口。无论如何,这个例子比我计划中要说的内容多了一些,但令人感到疯狂的是,没有人会因为时区选择器很好用而从 Outlook Exchange 切换到 Gmail 或 G Suite、Google Calendar。所以从某种意义上说,这可能不重要。但同时,令客户满意有真正的价值,这会形成一种情感连接。在某些情况下,这种情感连接可能非常正面,例如,他们会推荐这个产品。而当他们跳槽或决定创业时,也会因为这种情感连接选择使用这个产品或为之辩护。同样地,如果有情感上的反感,他们可能会非常讨厌这个产品,认为我们应该停止使用它或者倡导使用替代品。”
And I think people just don't appreciate or come back to those things all for enough. There's this category of really essential parts of the app. Again, like a count creation, sign up, forgot password, things like that. But for most organizations, very infrequently get a lot of love and an iteration and improvement, despite the fact that the quality bar has gone up across the board and continue to lay us up. Let's go down that rabbit hole a little bit more around delight and craft. Slack was famous for being one of the early, let's say a consumerized B2B SaaS products, Slack leaned into delight and experience and craft and a great experience. And you just as a product leader, I'd say, are known as very taste forward, very craft oriented leader, which is pretty rare. And I think continues to be rare.
So there's a few things I wanna talk about here. One is a taste. I heard of a talk you get of a really unique, you give a talk on taste and you have a really unique perspective on just what taste is, what product taste looks like. Can you share that? There is a lot of, you're going back to the utility curves again, people who are obsessed with this one little thing and keep on adding more detail improvements beyond the point where it makes much of a difference. But I guess a couple of things about taste. So one is, can you learn to develop it? I think so because the word literally comes from experiencing food and putting stuff in your mouth and can people become better chefs with training? Yes, absolutely. Undoubtedly, some people have a natural advantage or born with this ability to make discernments that are difficult for other people to make.
And so like that. But you can definitely practice and you can definitely get better. The second thing I'd say is, you can create a real advantage for yourself, for your product, for your company, by leaning into it because most people don't have good taste and don't invest. And so you probably familiar with, again, Jeff Bezos line, your margin is my opportunity. And pretty obvious, he meant by that. I would tell the story at Slack over and over again and actually made it part of the new hire welcome. So I'm going, I'm in Vancouver at our Vancouver office and I'm going for a walk with Brandon Velostok who's at the time creative director for product development. I think that was his title. And we're in the Yale town neighborhood in Vancouver.
So there's like really narrow sidewalks because it used to be a warehouse district and now it's like fancy restaurants and nail salons and cheeks and stuff. And as it doesn't Vancouver, it starts to rain. We don't have umbrellas. We're walking back to the office and most people have umbrellas and we're kind of on these narrow sidewalks with people coming towards us with umbrellas. And we noticed how few people would move their umbrella out of the way. And of course, the other person, their umbrella, the Pokebits are exactly at I level for people walking towards them. And we would get forced off the sidewalk or having to duck down or whatever.
And it became a game like we were guessing. Is this person going to tell their umbrella out of the way so we can pass or not? And something like one third of the people would do it. And we had this conversation about it where it's like, okay, I can think of three reasons why people wouldn't do it. What is, they have very few avenues in their life to exercise power and this is one of them. And they're just like, want to get out there and dominate people and cause suffering.
So, you shouldn't describe to Malice that which can be described to ignorance. So that's probably, you know, probably is the explanation for a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of people. But the other two explanations aren't that great either. One is that they see it's happening. They see they're pushing other people off the sidewalk or poking them in the eye or whatever. And they're just like, fuck, that's too bad. I wish there was something I could do about that. But I can't think of anything. And the last reason is they just don't notice at all. Like they're just oblivious to their impact on other people and they're, they're so in their head.
And I can't really think of any other explanations for it besides that. And so we would say, it's like, like, tilting your umbrella is our opportunity. That's not a great rephrase of your margin as my opportunity, but your failure to really be considerate and exercise courtesy and really be empathic about other people's experience is an advantage you can create a critical advantage. And I think that there's many reasons why thought was successful at the moment it was successful.
And I think we had a bunch of really wonderful tailwinds and all of that stuff. But it wouldn't have grown the way it did with how those little conveniences which caused people to form an emotional connection because a lot of our growth came from, you know, start up A, use a slack and then someone leaves, start up A for start up B. And start up B doesn't use slack yet. And they would be like, oh my God, you guys, we really get this is so good. We got to try it. And the spread was driven by that cross-pollination and people really genuinely advocated for it.
That is an amazing metaphor. I love that one moment became like a value of product craftsmanship. That's like, tell your umbrella, it was a very common saying, bend on a company's leg and stuff like that. Is there an example? I imagine there are many, but from the time of building slack, especially in the early days where you chose to go big on craftsmanship and experience and delight versus speed where you thought, looking back, that was a really great idea and it worth really gorgeous success.
Here's a bunch of little examples. So someone else came up with this idea and I'm trying to remember who it was. Maybe Andretora's, maybe Ben Brown, something like that. We were like, why do you ask people for email address and password if their ownership of the email address was the thing that allowed them to create the account in the first place? Why don't we just ask them for their email address and then send them a link?
And so when Slack's first version of the mobile app came out, we're like typing your password on your phone if you have any minimal threshold of password hygiene is a terrible experience, say your capital H, lowercase Q, sex, correct period. So let's just have them enter the email address, we'll send them a link, the link will automatically open the app and authenticate them. And so there's one, a little example. Well, so you guys invented the magic link experience.
Well, I had seen that idea somewhere else, like someone else a blog post about it or something like that, but we were the first ones to my knowledge that really kind of scaled that and made it a standard. There is another one which we really puzzle about in the very early days where people have a long history of using messaging apps from like AOL instant messenger to SMS to WhatsApp where their expectation is, they get a notification for every message that's received.
And in the case of Slack, they doesn't make as much sense because you're a member of many channels and the messages may not be for you. And so that's why we have that at-tacking people and we certainly didn't invent that, I was Twitter, but what we realized was people were signing up for Slack and it's like one engineer on this team inside of this larger organization inside this larger company and they would pull in the person next to them and they would say let's try it out and then they would send a message and then, well, personally, I didn't get a notification. This is bullshit.
So we reluctantly decided that we had to send notifications for every single message as the default for new accounts. But once you had, I don't remember with the threshold to where to have it, I think once you had received 10 messages, we would pop up this little thing that says, hey, you have our default settings for notifications. We'd all want Slack to be noisy for you. Would you like to switch to our recommended settings and then they would just click link and it would have what should be the default, which is you only get a notification if it's a DM or someone tags you.
But we realized it was worth that investment to get people over the hump. On much more, well, here's one more simple one and then one could have more complex one. People would just like the, a camera if it's called urgent or important, the flag in Outlook that, like, you know, set the priority of a message for the recipients, always got abused inside of every company. As soon as someone does it, like everyone's like, okay, I'm gonna do that too for my message and so all of your messages have the little flag and it's becoming useless.
We have at everyone, which causes the notification to be sent to every member of the channel when the message is sent and people would start, you know, look, someone would find this feature inside of a organization. They would at everyone, everyone would get a notification and then the next person to send a message was like, well, my thing's more important than Bob saying, I'm gonna also at everyone. And it became really obnoxious if people complain about it, but it was said, I don't know, I guess tragedy of the comments is not quite exactly the same thing, but it was a real dynamic that happened over and over again.
So we came up with what was called the shout-e-ruster and internally we said, don't be a cock. But we didn't obviously say that publicly. When you at everyone, a little rooster would pop up and it would have like, you sound waves coming out of it's an how thing being early obnoxious and say, hey, this is gonna cause a notification for 147 people in eight different time zones. Are you sure you want to send this message with that at everyone? And of course that worked amazingly and it dropped off and again, it was really trying to shape people's behavior so that they used, we want us not to be very flexible, but we knew that there was ways to use it that would be annoying and difficult for everyone and so trying to shape the communication culture inside the organization to take best advantage on it.
Now, features still exist. I see that restore all of it or not. I don't see it all. Well, actually I do at channel because I've run a big slack. So I see that restore in the self and that survived. Yeah, yeah, that survived and good. Because it was a trivially easy thing to comment and made a really big difference, but also taught people how the product worked because people probably didn't know that at everyone or at channel, right? Well, didn't think about the cost at least. I mean, yes.
Yeah. Here's one more. So we decided we were gonna do, do not disturb as a future. And we had this, but conanjum, but we're trying to take into account all the different uses of slack, because the time we'd be in for what to this. Like 2017, there was, you know, tens of thousands of paying customers, the organizations, hundreds of the high millions of users, maybe hundreds of thousands of organizations that don't remember how many.
And everyone had set up stuff the way that they liked it, including things like ops alerts, go into channels for on-call engineers, for some of the biggest systems and apps in the world. And so we couldn't just like deploy it right away. We realized that some of the decision makers, the owners of the organizations, we're gonna have really strong opinions about this. We also realized that some of the end users can have strong opinions, and we wanted to figure out a way to kind of balance the concerns and give people appropriate means of control.
So we came up with this really elaborate system for the rollout, which was, we told everyone, I'm sorry, every slack administrator that this was coming weeks before it came, and we told them that we were gonna set a default for their organization, which I believe was either 7 PM to 7 AM in their local time zone, or 8 AM to 8 PM in a camera, which was, but also that they could override that default. And also that the individual end users could override that system owner default. And finally, that the system owner could, if they changed the default again, would override all of the end users' preferences, and then the end users could override them again.
And it wasn't to create this dynamic where people were at war, but so that you could change a policy and that people could still customize and stuff like that. But this was a much longer and more convoluted process, but it allowed the millions of people who were using Slack to get the feature without creating a bunch of conflict and without people turning it off automatically. And I think critically, with setting a bunch of defaults, because if we didn't set the default, most people wouldn't turn it on at all. You look, if we didn't default you to do not disturb from the APM to 8AM. You probably, if you're the average person, it wouldn't ever do it yourself.
So that's another elaborate example where I think that investment made sense, because it was a critical feature for a lot of people. And if we hadn't done it that way, I think it would have caused a lot of complaints and conflict and stuff like that. Those are amazing examples. I very much appreciate that you and I disturb feature when you guys launched that. I still remember that coming out. I'm sure a lot of people are very thankful for that.
Something else I heard that you often espouse, which is counterintuitive to a lot of people, is about friction, friction in the product experience. That friction is actually often a good thing. It's a feature not a bug a lot of times. If you use it well, talk about your experience there. Yeah, well, so yes. And there's also another issue around friction, which is it became like a mantra or just like a kind of an assumption that you should always be trying to remove friction.
And in some cases, that's true. We would talk about it slack. It was hard to market. It was hard to explain what it was if you had never used to before. You could say a messaging app for businesses or whatever. But a critical disadvantage to slack doing out of home advertising, putting up a billboard, versus beer or cars is no one needs to be explained why they would want a car or beer. But everyone would have to be explained when they want to slack. And so the problem there is comprehension.
And this will come up an enormous amount. So now imagine you want to get tickets to the Taylor Swift concert in San Francisco. And you go to the ticket master website. If you think about both your comprehension, it's perfect to this case. And that translates into the specificity of your intent. And the degree of your intent is also kind of maxed out. So I really want to get these tickets. And I know exactly what they are. They're Taylor Swift tickets for this day at this venue. And so in that scenario, it doesn't really matter if ticket master's website is slow.
这件事会经常发生。想象一下你想要去旧金山观看 Taylor Swift 的演唱会,于是你访问了 Ticketmaster 的网站。在这种情况下,你的理解能力完全能胜任任务,因为你的意图非常明确。你非常想要得到这些门票,并且你对门票的信息非常了解:Taylor Swift 的演唱会门票、具体日期和地点。所以在这种情况下,即使 Ticketmaster 的网站速度很慢,也无所谓。
It doesn't really matter if the payments page here is out. Like you're going to persist and get through it. So obviously, they're better to reduce friction. But in some sense, it doesn't. It's not a huge amount of value in doing that. For most creators of products, there are a handful of cases where that really is true for you as well. And they include things like user registration, authentication, check out flows for e-commerce. I am significantly more likely to buy something if there's Apple Pay or Shop Pay or something like that.
I'm significantly less likely to carry through the purchase of something if I have to manually enter all of the fields of my address when at the time rather than having one of those address pickers, it's crazy. But the issue is my intent isn't always 100% and the specificity of my intent isn't always 100%. So if your thing is direct to consumer t-shirts and you acquire customers through Instagram ads, all of them know what t-shirts are. This looks like a good t-shirt to me. But I'm rarely 100% intent. I might have a very specific intent, but it intends like 70%. So if your amount of friction is above that, I'm not going to do it.
But now people coming to Slack.com, they had some friend had mentioned Slack and kind of talked their ear off at some point months ago, and then they saw a news article, and then they saw someone's tweet. And then they saw an ad on a website, they were really thinking, and they finally said, OK, I'm going to go to this website. So their intent is like at the absolute minimum threshold. Like it's just, it was before that last event happened, they were below and now they're above. But they're just above the specificity of their intent. Like I need to get Taylor Swift concerts for this date of this venue is also very low, because they're like, it's a work thing, I'm not sure. It's a spreadsheet or like a calendar or do you look exactly what it is. So they were coming in at 0.1% over these critical thresholds.
What was the challenge? It wasn't friction, right? Because it's not like they worked aiming for something, and they knew what they were aiming for, and they were just trying to get themselves to that point. What we had to worry about was creating comprehension, and in two senses. What is this thing? And what am I supposed to do next? And that creation of comprehension, in the sense of explaining stuff, that creation of comprehension, in the sense of the design of the UI, of the screen, of the page, or whatever, and the visual hierarchy, and the affordances that are there, and the indication of things to interact with, and which thing should be the next thing to do, and all of that.
That becomes really critical. And I think very, very few people recognize that. They're like, I want to get people who come to my web page to decide how poor it was quickly as possible. But if they don't know what they're signing up for, and they don't know what it's going to do after, he's going to spam them, they don't know what they're going to have to pay on the next step, or what, then they're just going to back out. And this was like a lifelong battle, because the remove friction kind of orientation is so deep in people. Again, it really makes a difference in, in those cases, where people do have an intent, and they do know what they're trying to do, it is a poor approach when the challenge is really comprehension.
And I think the secret is, most 70%, 80%, or whatever, of a prior design, is in that comprehension step, because people, if they do ever open the Preferences tab and look at all the options, rarely have an idea. And if you can't teach them, or make it possible for them to discover what the capabilities are, then they're not going to take advantage of them, and they're not going to get as much on it. And I think that the trick is, for most of the unique parts of any application, most of the specific things that you're at, your product, your software does, are areas where the challenge is going to be comprehension, instead of friction.
It really could be anything. Shopify, the purpose of the service for its end users, is generally going to be kind to clear. But most people, most first-time store openers, don't know that they can get reports. Or if they know that they can get reports, they don't know what kinds of reports. And if they know what kinds of reports they can get, they don't know how they can tweak them, what the timing should be, and which things that are more important to display, and I could go on and on and on. And people just don't recognize that.
So I want to see if this is still true. I'm just going to open my iPhone and a clock app. And they had the most, the craziest description for alarms. OK, still, it's a little bit different. People can look at their own phone. So I have, it says alarms. And I says sleep and a vertical bar wake up and says no alarm and a button that says change. And then if you hit it, it says sleep is off. In order to automatically turn on sleep features and add your schedule, you need to turn sleep on. So obviously, sleep was a good name for this thing.
If you already had a way of getting people to understand it, if you don't, it's like ungrammatical and incomprehensible. And why would you ever do it? And I got a guess. It's been like this for years, 90 plus percent, and maybe 98% of people just do what I do, which is that you just create a, like, I want the alarm on and I'm going to set the time for it. And I don't know what turning sleep on does. But it's just like the lack of comprehension prevents people from getting the value. And I'm sure that there's a bunch of value behind turning sleep on whatever that means.
And people spend a lot of time on those features and that integrates with biometrics in your watch. Who knows? Again, I still don't know because turning sleep on is like, what does that do? And what is it going to cost me and what impact it's going to have? Those examples are just, to me, all over the place. And the reason I don't use most software where there was a natural choice point or the reason I don't use most features where there was a choice point for me is because I didn't understand what they were going to do. And I don't give a shit. And if there is one mantra that I would use to replace that, it's don't make me think. And I don't know if you remember that book. Absolutely. Yeah. And honestly, it's been many more than 10 years since I read it. So I don't know if you remember all the examples in the book.
But as a mantra, that was like up there with utility curves because for two reasons. One is it's just like, it's expensive to make a decision. You literally burn glucose. Like there's a metabolic action. There's like ATP created in the mitochondria in your neurons and like a bunch of stuff is happening. And people do get decision fatigue. And there is like, you know, cognitive cost of all these things. But also there's an emotional aspect, which is if you, if your software kind of stops me a second and asks me to make a decision, and I don't really understand it, you make me feel stupid. Right? I don't understand this. Some people are, you know, me, maybe their orientation is okay, but the software is stupid.
But I think most people are like, oh, I'm dumb. And if you ever talk to him who aren't especially technologically savvy, you know, like the canonical example is like people who are under 50 talking to their parents about using some piece of software and what they're supposed to do, the parents always always feel stupid. Like they're the ones that are wrong. And so if you're causing people to think in the best case, it's like unnecessary use of their biological resources. And in the worst case, you've like now made them feel like emotionally bad, and they're gonna associate that with a product forever. And these are things are just kind of rolling one into the other.
Keep going with one last thing, because they just kind of come together, which is along with reduced friction, it's like reduce the number of clicks or taps, it takes for someone to accomplish something, which is almost always exactly the road that like it's, the easiest way, like you could make any action in your app a single click or tap by just exposing every single possibility on one screen that scrolls for thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of pages. And obviously that's terrible. So why do people think that a little bit of that is good? And here's an example, the open menu, there's 14 things that people might wanna do. Level one is group them into like items and put a vertical, sorry, horizontal divider between them.
So at least people can kind of chunk and see what there is. Step two is present the two or three most common things or the five most common things wherever, and then have some form of other, and then you go to a sub menu that has more items. And the decision of like how to tune that becomes incredibly important, I'm gonna pick on Google again, just because it is, I feel like a Donald Trump here, but I mean interrupt myself again with a story. It's, and that's some, some conference or event and our my road was, and this is probably eight years ago, and it's, we're in the bar after the sessions ended of the thing and John Callison from Stripe is there. And Sundar CEO of Google is there, and John, he's our Patrick goes up to Sundar, and they can talk about anything, right?
Like, yeah, Stripe wasn't the he-muff, it was now, at that point, but it's still like a significant company was up and humming, and what does Patrick wanna talk to Sundar about? It's in the Gmail at the dragging of people, like when you reply all to a message, you often wanna change the two recipient to the CCA, and move someone from CCA to two, or something like that, and just how physically, like the degree of dexterity that's required to do that inside of the Gmail is very high, it still hasn't been fixed, but it really struck me that like Patrick could have asked for anything, I could have been at any time, he could have been a partnership, it was like, it was so irritating to him that it worked like this, it couldn't click it over it.
So anyway, back to bashing on Google, who in many respects do an incredible job, and there's all kinds of amazing stuff they do in blah, but that the Gmail actions on an individual email are broken into two very long menu items that are different, and one of them doesn't exist on either menu, there's an unlabeled icon is the only way to do it, and that's to mark something as unread once it's read. I have no idea why some of the actions are in one menu and some of the actions are in another menu, I think it's because some of them have to do with that individual email, some of them have to do with the whole thread, but it doesn't seem very consistent.
Every possible thing is listed there in one place, and so it becomes incredibly difficult to use, because sometimes you have to tap and, tap with me and you read all of the options and say, okay, I've used the process of delimination and it's not here, so it must be there. The Uber doesn't work like this anymore, but when I first brought this up to people inside of Slack, there was a moment when the Uber app, when you opened it, it was just, where would you like to go and other? And other was everything, like change your payment method, say, you're location, anything you'd be doing Uber. And that was perfect, because almost all the time, people just wanted to choose where they wanted to go.
Sometimes you wanted to change where your pickup was because you weren't there yet or whatever. And that was just like, what could be simpler than, I'm gonna tell you where I wanna go or I'm gonna choose something else. I really tried to push people to what is the thing that people, or what is the two things, or maybe three things that people could want to do here, and then put everything behind other. And then if it takes them eight clicks for taps to do something, but every single one is trivial easy, that's great. If it, you know, you would use that to two clicks or taps, but every part of it is this fraught decision where I'm opening all of the menus and trying to figure out like which thing is the right thing.
And like the more comparing three things to each other is this difficult, four things, it's kind of like geometrically more expensive to compare 15 different options all to the other to see if this is the one that you might want. That, you know, just becomes impossibly expensive. So to me, those are all really connected. And if people could get over the idea of reducing friction as a number of goal or reducing the number of plexio taps and do something and instead focus on, how can I make this simple?
How do I prevent people from having to think in order to use my software? How can I make this trivial easy? One last example, because this was really influential for me. So I was going back and forth in Vancouver and South Africa. So let's go at the time when we were talking about all this inside of Slack. And it was behind a teenager in line to board the plane. And it was like, you know, we're on the jet wave. It took a long time. And I was watching her use Snapchat and it was insane.
Like she was tapping at least four times a second, sometimes like six or seven times a second. It was like dismissing stories and do stuff. But there was a fluidity to it because everything was like at dead, the draw on a seed is again, I want to see the next story from this person to a person who is a different person. Like instead, she, in order to get, she came up, she answered some one's thing, she took her selfie every self. And everything was just like, she was tapping four times a second for six minutes. I mean, probably there were some breaks in there.
And that was like the highest and best use of Snapchat for a 15 year old girl in 2016 or whatever that was. And imagine if the goal was to try to make her cap less, like how much of an impediment it would have been to the experience that both her and Snapchat wanted to create. It's so fun to listen to this. And the examples you gave of, it gives us a lot of insight into the way your mind works of just constantly unsatisfied with the way other products work with your products. And I think that's core, like Patrick, is a good example of Stripe.
I feel like that's a recurring theme with very successful product leaders, just constantly unsatisfied and unhappy with how things work. Yeah. I love just even the way you summarize this, just like a really good reframing of instead of obsessing with reducing friction and reducing steps, instead think, how do I reduce the amount of thinking the user has to do? I've never heard of it described as like, you have to think about the ATP and glucose being used to actually think in your goal is to reduce that versus let's just reduce friction, reduce clicks.
Yeah, I think in my more cynical examples, I would say to people like, stop, stop what you're doing for a second, close your eyes, take a couple deep breaths, and then pretend that you're an actual human being and open their eyes again and then look at this thing and see can you figure out what it's supposed to do or say or what your, what action you're in, it's supposed to take or what the impact will be if you take that action. There's a whole nother related cycle, but before I get into it cause I know that I'm for both, I wanna wrap up your last example of people being unsatisfied.
So here's the quote that I was trying to find. This is 2014. So like those of the year that Slack actually launched officially in February and this is now like near the end of the year. I was interviewed by MIT Technology Review and asked if we were working to improve Slack. I said, oh God, yeah. I try to instill this into the rest of the team, but certainly I feel like what we have right now is just a giant piece of shit. Like it's just terrible and we should be humiliated that we offer this to the public. Not everyone finds that motivational though.
So I came into the office the next day and people had printed out on like 40 pieces of eight and a half by 11 paper, that quote, and like, and paste it on the wall. But to me that was like, you should be embarrassed by it. Like it should be a perpetual desire to produce therapy like this is great and you could be proud of individual pieces of work. But in the aggregate, if you can't see almost limitless opportunities to improve, then you shouldn't be designing the product where you shouldn't be in charge of the company. You know, almost nothing.
Again, you could reduce it down to a tiny feature. Is anywhere close to perfect? And if A, that's acknowledged freely inside the organization. And B, people think about like continually improving as the goal and that could be like six sigmatoiota, Kaizen, that kind of side of thing. Or it could be that story that I can't remember. I started Bridgewater, tells about Mike. Right all you. Yeah, right all you know, in his book talks about Michael Jordan learning to ski.
Every time he messed up, he wanted to ski as art or to tell him exactly what he was doing wrong. Because to him, every one of those was like a gem that he could collect and he could actually become a good skier and what he wanted to do was become a good skier. That requires a lot of trust inside the organization. But if you can get to the point where like, hey, we're trying to find improvements, we're trying to be critical because you're trying to make this as great as it can possibly be. Not always, not with every person, but most of the time with most people, you can get them to the point where that like really direct criticism is actually motivational.
It is like, you know, people are grateful to have like the feedback whether that's coming from their peers inside the company or from end users of the product. Because you realize, oh yeah, that is bad. And we should fix it. This episode is brought to you by Lovable. Not only are they the fastest growing company in history, I use it regularly and I could not recommend it more highly. If you've ever had an idea for an app, but didn't know where to start, lovable is for you.
Lovable lets you build working apps and websites by simply chatting with AI. Then you can customize it at automations and deploy it to a live domain. It's perfect for marketers, spinning up tools, product managers prototyping new ideas, and founders launching their next business. Unlike no-co tools, Lovable isn't about static pages. It builds full apps with real functionality and it's fast. We used to take weeks, months or years. You can now do over a weekend. So if you've been sitting on an idea, now is the time to bring it to life. Get started for free at lovable.dev.
That's lovable.dev. This makes me think about, let's call it a rant that you have about how it takes a lot of work to make anything work at all. The default state is not working. You just share which you share there. Yeah. I mean, so this is a lot to do with. And maybe this is more recent. It shows up in politics a lot for me. But by the way, if anyone listening to this can help me find this tweet store from somewhere between 2016 and 2020, I don't have a precise idea.
And it was this guy's thread about how hard it was to get a stop sign setup. And I believe it was in response to someone claiming that Bitcoin is going to replace US dollars. Something about crypto. And his point was like, here's what happened when we tried to get a stop sign put up on a residential street in my neighborhood. And the literal years it took and the numbered agencies that were involved like the engineering department, traffic planners, the H.A. way.
I don't remember all of the organizations because I did that I could search better and find this again because it was truly a masterpiece of how difficult it is to get a stop sign put up in most places. The message that I hear from most politicians and unfortunately this works really well is, things should be good, but they're not because someone is doing something bad which is preventing the goodness. So billionaires are making things enough portable or immigrants are taking your jobs or lazy, free loaders are sucking off a government teeth and causing us all have to pay more taxes or something like that.
The reality is like almost nothing works. It's actually another cost in this case. John has a great encapsulation of this and I'm sure you're familiar with it like that it ends with the world is a museum of passion projects because for anything to get done at all requires like not just the resources and effort required to instantiate that thing in the real world, but all of the politicking and the sociology and the convincing and there's a book called Why Nothing Works recently which is like it's not an I'm sorry to the author they're out there listening but just, it's not like an amazingly written book I found it like a little bit repetitive but the content was really incredible just explaining why it's so hard and how there's this progressive increase in the number of vetoes that are available for any kind of course of action and how difficult it is and this tears up in permitting for new construction and stuff like that but also shows up obviously inside of organizations and the challenge is that people A, I think this is evolutionary biological, it's hard for us to understand the world except by and throughout the war facing it and so it like if it didn't rain this year, it's because a God is mad and probably because we didn't sacrifice enough goats or something last year.
It's hard for people to challenge just that while weather is incredibly complex and chaotic in ecosystems and climatology but the same thing with the world, if I am struggling to pay all of my bells and be able to afford a little bit of luxury in the sense of a complication or a present for my kids or whatever, it's gotta be somebody's fault like you're has to be a decision that's made somewhere and the reality is everything is so complicated everything is so multivariate. It's not satisfying, it's a terrible political message.
It's much easier to say that there is like, oh, we understand why things are bad in the way that you're concerned about and it turns out that it's someone's decision and because of them, it's bad and so if we got rid of them or you know, we're able to overcome their decision, overturn it and institute our own thing then films would be good for you. And this really, to me, shows up inside of those organizations as well.
You know, I'll pause there. I know kind of along those lines, you're a big believer in something called Parkinson's Law. Yeah, so the original of that is, I think it's in 1956, it's an article in the Economist by Parkinson. And the Maxim is work expands to fill the time available for its complication. And the way that it shows that this is a little bit subtle. So like one of the things I found since I don't have a job is there's much less time pressure and that max and like if you want something to give it to a busy person, the inverse is also true that like if you're not that busy, wow, basic things take a really long time.
And so Parkinson actually starts off with his example of like, you know, writing and posting a letter and I don't remember who he used for the first example, but someone who's like, you know, incredibly busy and has all these things they have to respond to. And then another case like a retired woman who has all the time in the world that takes her a long time to write the letter, takes her a long time to put it in the envelope and then you go to the post office and post it.
But the real meat of it is for me later, when he talks about the size of the organization. He uses a bunch of examples. This is again 1950s, so he's British. Sorry, he's looking at the Royal Navy and specifically he's looking at a chart that shows the relationship between the number of capital ships in the Navy, the number of sailors and the number of administrators. And very familiar graph for people looking at like any part of government, any part like the relationship between the number of administrators at a university and the number of students and faculty teaching faculty where it's like, okay, the number of ships goes like this and the number of sailors is like right along with it and the number of administrators goes like this.
And the reason this ties into the work expands to fill the time available for its completion is people hire and the train and here's the kind of sad truth for anyone running a company is there are exceptions, there's like certain types of engineers that are accepting to this, but the overwhelming majority of people you hire want to hire more people who report to that. And it's not because they're evil and it's not because they're stupid, in fact they're smart because everyone knows that the number of people who report to you correlates with like your career trajectory, your amount of money that you're paid, the amount of authority you have inside the organization and on and on and on.
So we would hire 27-doral product managers and Slack who immediately want to hire someone. It's like, what the hell, what would that person do? And they articulate it this way, but essentially it's like, well, that person would do the product management and then I would do strategy. It's really, I think the essential thing to understand about this is it's not because people are evil and it's not because they're stupid and it's to me very related to the everything is complex.
And if you, maybe this is my butterfly's life and thought about this before, but I tweeted this a very, very long time ago, like if you, everything is simple, if you have no idea what you're talking about. So the other side of that is like, if something seems simple, probably you don't understand. And you know, there's an exception to that, but for anything that involves a large organization or a lot of human beings, if the problem seems simple, you don't get it.
So every budget process, no head of engineering, no head of sales, no CFO, no GC, is ever gonna come back and say like, oh, I've actually think like next year we can just hire fewer people or we're gonna keep it for more, we're gonna like shrink through a Trish End because we don't need any more people to do what we're doing. Because they're evil, not because they're stupid, but it's almost overpowering impulse inside the organization that often leads to disastrous results.
And so there's a, I'll give one example from Slack's history. And I, you know, I have tried in the past to disguise this example so that no one feels bad about it, but fortunately the specifics are so important to the example that it's not disguised as how, I'll just re-enimate that if people involved aren't stupid or evil.
And one example that's from the outside. So the example inside of Slack was, we introduced threads, which is the ability to reply to a message inside of a channel. And let's say you, Lenny, post a message, I Stuart replied to it, you will automatically get a notification. And now Sarah, later on, replies to the same message, both you and I, as people who have posted that thread will receive a notification that there's been war activity.
当然,这段话的中文翻译如下:
还有一个来自外部的例子。Slack 内部的例子是,我们引入了线程功能,也就是在一个频道内回复某条消息的功能。比如说,Lenny 你发布了一条消息,我 Stuart 回复了这条消息,你会自动收到通知。然后如果 Sarah 之后也回复了同一条消息,那么作为在该线程中发过消息的人,你和我都会收到一个通知,告知有新的活动。
And so what? So every single time anyone replies to it. So when the future first was released or like when we did the final product review before it was released, the input box was pre-populated with the person before you in the thread. And I was using the feature and I would like put the insertion right there, select all the lead and then start writing my message. And it's even if I wanted to add someone specifically, I almost never wanted to start my sentence with, because it just made it hard to reference what they were saying before.
So I said, get rid of this because, I think most people won't use it or if they did want to add someone, they're not going to want to do it to begin the sentence. And by the way, you're teaching them to use the product prompt because it's important that everyone understand that every previous poster in this thread will automatically receive a notification unless they've eithered it. So we released it six months goes by. And suddenly the hat thing comes back. And so I messaged someone on the team. I said, hey, there's been a regression at this super weird. That would happen, but like the hat thing came back. And they said, oh no, this is some purpose. We did a bunch of research. And it's like, what? And I went through this. And it was, if I recall correctly, it wasn't even like P95 certainty on this analysis. But it was something like, when we do this, threads are 2.17 messages long versus 2.14 messages long on average. For when we don't do it.
And so first of all, why is a longer thread better? Maybe a shorter thread is better. And like if it be fewer messages that people have to go back and forth. Also, that's such a tiny difference. Also, again, I don't remember the actual statistical analysis. I'm not going to claim that it was incorrect. I appreciate this was outside the bounds. It's certainly that they can have. But the real thing was, oh my god. So you guys put flags into the product. You A, B tested it. You did the instrumentation. You created tables in the data based on whatever we were using to record all of that. You wrote queries to pull that. You created charts based on that data. You had meetings to discuss it. And just like kind of unpacking all of the things that would have had to happen for this to come back.
And it's like thousands of person hours kind of at a minimum, because any feature change at that scale of the decision is involving a dozen people, engineering, QA, analytics, teams, product managers, user research and stuff. Like the problem with that, so I think it was a matter of the idea. But the problem with that was the difference that you could possibly achieve between having this feature and not having this feature is like this much, whatever units you want. The cost of doing the analysis was this much. So it's guaranteed to be a loser. There's just no world in which anyone could imagine putting that at previous respondent in the thread at the beginning of the message, could possibly make that much of a difference to the quality of Slack and how much utility it provides to people and all that.
But you know that to put the feature flags in, to ship new versions of the product, to put the instrumentation in, to have it all the API calls to record every action that people take to do all the analytics, to create the dashboard, to put that, paste the screenshot of that into a Google Slides presentation, to send the invitations to the meeting, to schedule the meeting, because someone could make it, to have everyone sit down and look at the things, like you know, guaranteed loser. And I know that Farid told you to ask me about this, hyper-illistic work like activities. And so here's my grand theory. Hyper-illistic work like activities, is goes along with this other concept, called known valuable work to do.
And when I say known, I mean both you know what it is, and you know that it's valuable. And that problem with almost every organization, at the very beginning, you have an enormous amount of work that you know what to do, and you know that it's gonna be valuable. So like starting a business, open a bank account, because like there's almost infinite gender or value of opening a bank account, you have to do it. It's very simple to do. And so at the very beginning of any startup, they're like, I'm like creating a user's table and I'm like doing salty passwords, and like you're doing all the things that are kind of absolutely necessary, and everyone knows exactly what they are. And so like everyone's going to work in the morning, they're like right on, and like I have 10 things to do, and every single one of them is like somebody I know how to do, and it's like definitely going to be valuable.
Time goes on, and the relationship between the supply of work to do, and the demand for doing work just starts to change. More and more people get hired. Every part of manager wants to hire a junior part of manager, every new person, the first person you bring on the risk and compliance team is like, oh my god, there's so many risks and things we have to be compliant with. We better hire more people on my team to do more risk and compliance work, which probably to some degree is right, but we're going to have more and more of those people and they're going to call meetings with each other.
And now suddenly you have all these people with work to do, and you've done all the easy obvious stuff, and now your questions are like, God, should we do FedRAMP high and make a Gov Slack version, which is going to require us to have a wholly separate physical infrastructure for the hardware that runs the software, and also a whole different operations team, which has only US citizens on it. What is the possible number of dollars that we could make during this and how much complexity is in the B when we want to do updates to the software, because we got being two totally separate independent systems. And it just gets out of whack.
And so people end up like if you hire 17 product marketers, you're going to have 17 product marketers worth of demand for work to do. And if you don't have sufficient supply of product marketing work to do, they're just going to do other stuff. Again, very important, not because they're stupid, not because they're evil, but because they're like, I'm a product marketer, and I want to be recognized for my work, and my spouse has criticized me because they take like, I should have already got promoted in the last cycle, and I really got to demonstrate some wins here, and whatever it is.
And so people are like calling meetings with their colleagues to preview the deck that they're going to show and the big waiting to get feedback on whether they should like improve some of the slides. And that hyper realistic work like activity is superficially identical to work. Like we are sitting in a conference room, and there's something being projected up there, and we're all talking about it. And that's exactly what work is, hopefully not all of work for everyone inside of your company, but that's exactly what we do when we're working, but this is actually a fake minute work.
And it's so subtle that I'll do it. Our board members will do it. Every exact one will do it. And the further you are from having all of the context and all of the information, and the decision making authority and stuff like that, the easier it is to get trapped in this stuff, and people will just perform enormous amounts of hyper realistic work like activities, and have no idea that that's what they're doing. And the result of that, I guess, is that if you are a leader, if you're a manager, director, an executive, the CEO, it's on you to ensure that there is sufficient supply of known valuable work to do.
And there almost always is, but it's creating the clarity around that, creating the alignment, making sure that everyone understands it, that's what they're supposed to be doing, and then obviously doing it. Amazing. I could listen to Stuart Rand's all day. Hyper realistic work like activities. We eat a Columbus. And the. Unfortunately, it doesn't make a good acronym. It's pretty ugly. It's okay. I'm gonna keep it trying.
And just to close the loop on that, the solution is the leader recognizing this is happening and stopping it, telling people, why are we spending time on this thing that is not gonna get us anywhere? Yeah. And that, what you just said probably isn't the best way, because that sounds like you're, you're chiding them and they're dumb. It's actually your responsibility to make sure that there's sufficient clarity around what the priorities are.
And, you know, explicitly say no to things up front, and stuff like that. Rather than words you say, you guys are much the audience wasting your time on this thing that doesn't matter. Whose fault is it? It's an ender's fault. It's the VP of whatever's fault. It's the CX, whatever. It's the C. Ultimately, it's like, it's the leader of the organization that has the responsibility to make sure that there is sufficient known valuable work to do.
And that's actually harder than it might appear. Okay. Before we run out of time, I wanna touch on two other topics. One is when people think of Sturd Butterfield, I think a lot of people think of, we don't sell saddles here. Your legendary medium posts that is just sad and I was become a historic piece of literature in the, in the annals of product building and startups. I haven't heard people ask you much about this recently.
So let me just ask a couple questions. What is just, what was the, what was the reason you put that out? Why, what was the backstory on writing that memo? Why was it necessary? Well, it really was an internal memo and there's a bit of a digression. One of the crappy things about Slack is, if all your corporate communication is an email, depending on exactly how it works and what system you use, you probably walk away with an archive of everything you said at company X.
If it's Slack, once you're turned off, you lose access to all that history. And so it's kind of like, oh man, if I had only exported all of my messages before I left, I would have all this stuff. But that was, it was absolutely verbatim. I did not change the word of what I said inside the company. What I think we were still eight people, maybe, you know, I had most 10, but I think it was eight people. It was before Slack launched even. Yeah, it was before Slack launched. It was like when we were doing a privatea and the point of it was to like to start to instill those ideas as early as possible and really create this alignment inside of that small team so that it could process that survive as we grew and scaled. And yeah, that was the idea.
And the just, just for people that aren't super familiar with it, but willing to it is just, it's not enough just to build a great product. You just as much have to put effort into communicating what this does for them, the problem that's is solving for them, the outcome, this is gonna achieve for them. Is that a good way to think about it? Yeah, and again, you know, comparing it to beer or cars, beer goes back to pre-civilization, cars were obviously not, but at some point you had to convince people that I would win a car instead of a horse. For your new AI based recruiting tool or your calendar app or whatever, there's some reason why people you think that people should use yours instead of the thing that they're using now, which might be like a wholesale one-for-one replacement or more often is like a change in the way that you're working that has a bunch of other adjacencies and you want to expand into these other categories, but you're not just responsible for creating the product, but also to sort of creating the market.
And creating, you know, this is book, Position, which is an absolute classic, it's very short, I would recommend everyone read it, where the point of it is, from my perspective, it's almost impossible to create a new idea in someone's head, it's much easier to take a couple of existing ideas and put them together. So it's much easier to say, it's like, jaws meet starwares, so it's Uber for pets or something like that, then to come up with like an actual new idea, but you have to do that, because you, like, if your thing is different in any significant way from the alternatives, you're not just creating the product, you're creating the market, they're really kind of one in the same. The reason I wanted to such on it is I think still people continue to not listen to this advice and continue to over invest in more features, more products, things like that.
Just the specific example of we don't sell saddles here, just to quickly communicate this to folks and correct me if I'm missing anything, is just instead of, hey, look at this amazing saddle we've bought, which you want to communicate us here, go horseback riding, look at this incredible experience you can have and they decide, oh, should I need a go buy saddle to do that? Yeah, and 100%, that aspect of it is not a bridge, it's not a bridge, I think that's something that marketers have done for a long time, truly in the Marcom and advertising, like if you want to sell Harley-Datedson's, there are people who are going to geek out on the engines and stuff like that and like the quality, the leather and stuff like that, but what you're selling is not the motorcycle, you're selling like the open road and freedom and the wind in your hair and if you're Louis Lehmann, you are obviously selling yoga pants, but you're also selling like health and aspiration and being the best version of yourself and a bunch of other stuff.
So selling that, oh my God, I forgot the classic version of it, you know, like there's the ship. That's howling this, the build of the screwdriver. Oh, oh yeah, the nail. Yeah, the nail, anyway. Yeah, what is that one? There's the one I think about is instead of trying to convince men to build a ship and still a yearning for the sea. Yes, exactly. That's the way that goes back in history. Okay, let me ask you about pivoting. You are potentially the king of pivots. You started two companies, both famously pivoted, both from video games, which is why I asked you about that at the beginning, into very successful companies. I imagine many people come to you for advice on pivoting. Let me just ask when folks come to you asking, should I stick with my idea? Should I pivot? What sort of advice do you find most helps them?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's partly an intuition because obviously the decision is about like have you exhausted the possibilities? And in the case where we are working on glitch, this game where we used IRC for internal communication and we added a bunch of IRC, which became the proto-slack. And I think Slack had an enormous advantage in the fact that we are working on this for several years without actually explicitly working on it and only doing the minimum number of features that were absolutely guaranteed to be successful in the sense that it was so irritating that we couldn't stand it anymore or such an obvious improvement that we couldn't help but take advantage of. We still had like $9 million left and everyone still liked the game and we were all happy working on it.
But I think by that point, I had exhausted every non-verdiculous, long shot idea to make it commercially successful. And so decided to abandon it. But the default advice for anyone in anything is persevere, is like, you know, kitten hanging off the branch and then posters as hanging in there. And I think there's an idea that you just like, and then there's so many stories of like, so and so started out going door to door and was rejected by everyone and then suddenly there was Nike or something like that. And then just if you stick out, stick it with that long enough, you'll eventually be successful.
I think you have to really be coldly rational and now some of this shows up in the book, thinking about some of it's in Annie Duke's second book, a title of which I'm forgetting right now but in some way, well, know it. Yeah, she actually uses it. And then it was the last second I forget. She actually uses Glitch and Slack as an example of like a smart fold basically. Like my expected value here has diminished to the point where this alternative looks more attractive and the reason I say you have to be coldly rational about it is because it's fucking humiliating, you know?
Like we, I convinced so many, and you have to get somebody to get a company out the way you have to go to investors, you have to go to early employees and say like you should leave her other job and come work for this because, you know, here's the incredible feature we're imagining. You have to go to the press and you have to make all these promises and you have users and you feel like committed things to the users and you can then send them to give up their time for this thing. And so it's, I think for a lot of people, it feels better to just keep doing it until it dies of suffocation due to lack of capital or something like that.
Then to admit like, okay, I was wrong, this didn't work. And it's, it's humiliating, it's painful, it's like it's wrenching, it hasn't bad impact, you know? Like when we shut down Glitch, there's a lot of people who loved it and would spend all of their free time and couldn't wait to get home from work to go play it more. And that was their community and the community just like disappeared all these people and all these identities have been created. And obviously people lost their jobs and people who had like moved their families to a different city in order to take this job. Now we're gonna have a job anymore. So Piff, that's something I take lightly and you shouldn't be home.
I think it's very different to be like, there's three of us and we started making this app and then we pivoted to a different app. That doesn't even really count. Yeah, like if you're six months into something, you're just, you're still messing around and trying to figure out what it is that you're building. That's not really a pivot. Obviously in this case, it worked out great and there's survivorship bias and that doesn't mean that everyone should pivot all the time. But I think it is trading the distance so that you can make an intellectual, rational decision about it rather than a much more decision is essential. I love all your piece of advice I've just exhausted.
Once you've exhausted all the ideas, that's a really good time to see what else is out there. Yeah, it's just all the good ideas. All the good ideas. All the realistic there. Yeah, the point you made about just kind of persevering, I just had Melanie Perkins, CEO of Canva in the podcast. They went through a hundred investors rejected her before somebody finally decided to invest and she just kept pushing. I think that's a slightly different example, because she believed in the concept of the product and the vision. I was just trying to figure out the right articulation to get investors.
Who and let me obviously be very, very happy. Extremely happy. Oh geez. Okay, maybe a final topic depending on how time goes. I want to talk about generosity. I talked to a bunch of people, as I said, that have worked with you. The number one theme that came up again and again and again when I asked them about you and what they stuck most with them is just generosity. So I'm going to read a few examples that I heard from folks that are examples of your generosity over the years.
So one person shared that he needed a little money before Christmas and you said, Stuart literally walked me out of the building, went to the cash machine, handed me $500, told me to go home to my family. Other folks shared that when you talked about glitch, just recently when you had to lay people off, that you cried real tears when you were laying people off and then you spent an incredible amount of time helping them find new jobs and extending their severance pay and just taking it extremely, extremely seriously, much more than I think most people feel like CEOs do.
So when I'll share that you paid 100% of employees' health insurance to give them just fewer things to think about, when you went in public, you did a, you basically created the best possible situation for employees, no lock up, direct listing. Also with the structure of the Slack deal, people said that acquisition is very employee friendly. There's also just a bunch of, that's the employees. There's also just the way you thought about customers, a few examples, you gave free credits to businesses who were struggling to pay the bills during COVID, you released this fair billing, which I think was very innovative at the time where you didn't charge, you stopped charging people for seats they weren't using, even though they signed the deal to charge for the seats.
A lot of times just you slipped release schedules because you just wanted to make features better and better for people. And I'll end with this quote, Stuart is a leader who takes the responsibility he feels for his employees personally and to which he extends the most generous circumstances he could muster, that feels worth celebrating. So first of all, I just want to celebrate you. I think it's really rare and inspiring to meet a leader like that. Clearly you've had a lot of impact on a lot of people.
I don't know exactly the question I want to ask, but I guess was this, is this like an, in what part is this intentional? Just like this is how we win. I'm going to be very generous and help people because I know this will help long term. How much is this just a name? That's just the way you are as a person. I think a lot of it is just the way I am as a person and I had wonderful parents who raised me right.
But I think there's also, there is a little bit of a lesson there and I'm just going to assume people's familiarity with the prisoners to lemma. The acts of generosity to me are a way of demonstrating that I am going to cooperate as we iterate in this game. And if you do that, then people will also cooperate and you both benefit. Whereas if you never really know if the other person is going to de facto the first opportunity, then your best bet is to de facto. And so there's a game theoretic aspect, usually in games that are much, much, much more complicated than the prisoners to lemma.
I think another thing, one thing I didn't touch on before but Tani was important enough that had more than one company all hands, I made everyone in the company like repeat this as a chant. It was in the long run, the measure of our success will be the amount of value that we create for customers. And I wanted to be super clear and explicit about that because it should be, if anything you're doing feels like a little bit shady, a little bit cheating, a little bit like maximizing in the wrong moment or taking advantage of a customer or anything like that, we definitely shouldn't do it because to me it was just like, I mean, I think it's literally true, but it's also like, and an ethical way to run a business.
And it's not just that the ethics are good, it's like there's advantages for you. Like you're able to attract a better class of employee. Like if all your employees are ethical, then it's gonna be a better place for everyone to work and you're gonna be happy, and you're gonna have fewer internal problems and all that stuff. But I think it really is true that there's no, especially in the long run, you can't like destroy value for your customers and expect to be successful. You have to actually make their lives better, and you can put effort into like, point you in out to them and demonstrating that you have created this value and stuff like that. But there's no substitute for actually having created it.
And I think that is incredibly important and that implies a real generosity, whether that's in negotiating terms with an enterprise deal or that's like policy decisions sometimes. I'll say one time that had blew up in our face was our SLA was like for any downtime, you get a hundred times your money back. Which was like, because for Microsoft it was like, if we're down for two minutes, it's like pennies, it doesn't really make any difference. If we're down for like 10 hours or something like that, then we have bigger problems than paying back people.
Okay, fast forward, we now have hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and we've gone public and like shortly after we go public, we have one of the biggest outages we ever had. I don't remember how long it was, but it was like many hours. But by the time we got that scale, a hundred times the money back for like the third of a day that we were down was like eight million dollars or something like that, which had to be, it didn't cost us any money because we just gave it to people before we were credits, but it meant that a bunch of revenue that we had already anticipated for the next quarter wasn't going to show up because people's credits were going to offset what they would have otherwise pay us.
And so we definitely changed the terms of service after that because being a public company is a little bit different. But in every other respect, I think that we're all really important decisions that were helpful in us becoming successful. Was that policy, it was automatic, like you didn't even have to claim it, it was just automatically get this credit. And then the default is you don't have to pay if you let us know. This was we will automatically like proactively, preemptively without any input from you, apply this credit to your account and just like send you a message that would happen. And by the way, we will do it on the aggregate for downtime, even if the issue didn't affect you as a customer.
Oh wow, who generous, you found the edge. Yeah, that was the way you might want to be. What was that mantra again that you had the company chant? I think this is a really nice way to end it. In the long run, the measure of our success would be the amount of value we create for customers. Incredible. I'm just trying to picture the entire team. It's like, I'm just saying. I'm just wondering if you felt very like, Chenjil Hong or like Stalin or something like that.
Well, on that note, most people don't know this about you, but your actual name when you were born is not Stuart. It was Dharma. Yeah. And this all makes sense as you learn that. Yeah. It's like, my name is Dharma Jammy Butterfell. So they parents named me and when I was 12, I changed it because I just like, they wanted to be normal. And for some reason, I thought Stuart was a normal name. And by the way, you'll notice this now that I said it. Any character except for Stuart Little, the mouse, anytime you see a character in a movie, a novel, TV show, whatever, there's only the loser Stuart and the asshole Stuart. It's like, it's obviously in the collective consciousness, a terrible name and I shouldn't have chosen it. And I regret it.
By the time I realized that Dharma and Greg had already come out, I would have seemed like I was like, you know, bandwagon jumping and people thought it was a girl, same for now in India. It's obviously only a boy's name. I'm going to add just one last little tidbit because I thought about this for earlier on. And I think it helps tie things together. It's true. And it's called the owner's solution. And this is based on something that I post on Twitter. The person who came up with the name later deleted their account.
And so I have no idea who it was, I've true to credit for this. But what I had posted was, and this is a long time ago, when restaurant websites got better and it doesn't really matter because Google local was taken over everything. But this is like, let's say 10 years ago, there's five things you could possibly want when you go to a restaurant to website. And is their street address, their phone number, the menu, that hours of operation, oh my God, I forgot to get into the fifth thing. Oh, and make any reservation.
How did it get reservation? And again, this problem has like, to some extent taken care of, it's all for release to brood. But what you would get was like the super slow loading photo, the Ken Burns effect as in class. And like, and then like fading in and then some music starts playing. And then if they show you the phone number, it's not a clickable, and it turns out, not even text that you can copy, because it's yes, it's an image. And they don't have the hours, they don't put the address or whatever. And it's just like, oh my God, what?
For sure, whoever made this website for the restaurant owner and the restaurant owner themselves have definitely been in the position where they went to somebody else's restaurant website because they wanted to get the address or that opening hours of the phone number or whatever. So why does it end up like this? And what should we call this? And whoever replied to the tweet, she said, you should call the owner's delusion. And I said, oh my God, that's perfect. And I think that is incredibly powerful and what ends up with the result, like Apple naming whatever that feature is called sleep, which is like, it's too hard to understand what that can possibly mean.
And that's why people anticipate the fact that when they get to their website for the first time, their intent is absolutely the minimum number of micropoints above the threshold required from their actually take that action. You're like, all right, like, welcome to my website. And there's a bunch of like BS and there's a bunch of stuff that doesn't make any sense and the buttons are inspeedable and it's unclear what to do next because I think that my thing is so important.
And I don't recognize that you are at work and you were late this morning and you have to go to the bathroom and you're just like a regular human being who has like stuff going on and you're concerned that your kids are fuck up and they can't even trouble at school, it's like that. They're not like subjects who paid money to go to your play and are sitting in the audience and waiting for that curtain to go out. They're like people who are going to bounce in a fraction of a second.
And so everyone should always be conscious of the other solution. I love that. What's the solution? Is it have other people like adding to be feedback? Is it? Yeah, and like recognize it. And unfortunately it's one of those things like Murphy's Law, like even you go wrong when you like even when you take into a cab Murphy's Law. It's fine. But if you don't name it and recognize it and discuss it and like train yourself to think in that way that you have to take a breath, pretend you're a regular person and then look at this again and see if it makes sense. Then I love that. You're screwed.
I love that you threw this in here. I have a billion other questions. I'm gonna ask you in part two when we do this someday. Stuart, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much for being here. Yeah, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it. Same, same here. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'spodcast.com. See you in the next episode.