Lenny's Podcast

The 10 traits of great PMs, AI, and Slack’s approach to product | Noah Weiss (Slack, Google)

Noah Weiss is Chief Product Officer at Slack, where he leads all aspects of the product organization, including the self-service SMB business, the team that launched huddles and clips, and the search and machine-learning teams. Prior to Slack, Noah served as SVP of Product at Foursquare. He started his career at Google, leading the structured data search team and working on display ads. In today’s episode, we discuss: • The top 10 traits of great PMs • How “complaint storms” helped Slack teams foster empathy • How Slack’s product team is approaching AI • “Comprehension desirability” and other key factors leading to Slack’s success • Why you should be customer-aware but not customer-obsessed • Important areas of growth for both new PMs and senior PMs Curious to learn more about Slack? You can try Slack Pro and get 50% off using this link. — Brought to you by Sidebar—Catalyze your career with a Personal Board of Directors | Superhuman—The fastest email experience ever made | Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security. Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-10-traits-of-great-pms-how-ai Where to find Noah Weiss: • Twitter: https://twitter.com/noah_weiss • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noahw/ Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Noah’s background (04:22) Advice for new parents (07:23) Lessons learned from Foursquare (11:33) Working with strongly opinionated founders (14:14) Thinking of involvement on a U-shaped curve (16:53) Principles at Slack (19:32) Implementing ML, AI, and LLMs (25:11) How Slack structures AI teams (26:59) Complaint storms (30:01) Slack’s approach to prioritization (32:26) How delight is baked into the DNA of Slack (34:41) How Slack thinks about competition (38:04) Building a culture that takes big bets (41:40) Rituals at Slack (44:51) How Slack revived their self-serve business (52:01) Slack’s early success (58:08) Slack’s pilot programs for testing new features (1:02:03) Noah’s famous blog post: “The 10 Traits of Great Product Managers” (1:10:15) Book recommendations to improve your writing (1:12:30) Managing up and data fluency (1:14:54) The most important skills to improve as an early-career PM and as a senior PM (1:17:16) Lightning round Referenced: • Emily Oster: https://emilyoster.net/ • Dennis Crowley: https://denniscrowley.com/ • Stewart Butterfield on Twitter: https://twitter.com/stewart • Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability: https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Make-Think-Revisited-Usability/dp/0321965515 • Gustav Söderström on Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/lessons-from-scaling-spotify-the-science-of-product-taking-risky-bets-and-how-ai-is-already-impacting-the-future-of-music-gustav-soderstrom-co-president-cpo-and-cto-at-spotify/ • Seth Godin: https://seths.blog/ • Noah’s blog post on the 10 traits of great PMs: https://medium.com/@noah_weiss/10-traits-of-great-pms-a7776cd3d9cd • Five Dangerous Myths about Product Management: https://medium.com/@noah_weiss/five-dangerous-myths-about-product-management-d1d852ed02a2 • Paul Graham: http://paulgraham.com/ • Ben Horowitz on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bhorowitz • On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft: https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Memoir-Craft-Stephen-King/dp/1982159375 • On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction: https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-Classic-Guide-Nonfiction/dp/0060891548 • Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t: And Other Tough-Love Truths to Make You a Better Writer: https://www.amazon.com/Nobody-Wants-Read-Your-Tough-Love/dp/1936891492 • Several Short Sentences About Writing: https://www.amazon.com/Several-Short-Sentences-About-Writing/dp/0307279413 • Paige Costello on Twitter: https://twitter.com/paigenow • Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs: https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Selection-Inside-Apples-Process/dp/1250194466 • The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail: https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Technologies-Management-Innovation/dp/1633691780 • Radical Candor: https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Candor-Revised-Kim-Scott/dp/1250258405 • Leadership: In Turbulent Times: https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Turbulent-Doris-Kearns-Goodwin/dp/1476795924 • Succession on HBO: https://www.hbo.com/succession • The Bear on Hulu: https://www.hulu.com/series/the-bear-05eb6a8e-90ed-4947-8c0b-e6536cbddd5f • Nanit: https://www.nanit.com/ • Snoo: https://www.happiestbaby.com/products/snoo-smart-bassinet • Uppababy: https://uppababy.com/ Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com. Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

Noah WeissguestLenny Rachitskyhost

Jul 22, 20231h 25mWatch on YouTube ↗

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Slack CPO reveals product secrets, AI strategy, and PM success traits

Slack CPO Noah Weiss joins Lenny Rachitsky to unpack how Slack builds products, from the 10 traits of great PMs to working with strong founder-CEOs and structuring zero-to-one bets. He explains Slack’s evolving AI strategy, how they incubate new capabilities like Huddles and Clips, and the balance between central ML teams and distributed product ownership. Noah shares internal practices like complaint storms, customer love sprints, and pilot programs that keep Slack user-obsessed as it scales and competes with Microsoft Teams and Discord. He also recounts how Slack’s self-serve growth plateaued in 2019, how they diagnosed the problem, and the levers that re-accelerated growth.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Great PMs optimize for impact, not activity or ownership.

Noah argues the core of PM success is consistently driving meaningful customer and business outcomes—using execution, data fluency, and product taste as inputs—not just shipping features or “being the decision-maker.”

Facilitate decisions; don’t try to be the ‘mini-CEO’.

He pushes back on the ‘PM as CEO’ myth and instead frames the job as amplifying the team: orchestrating pace and quality of decisions, unblocking others, and creating momentum rather than dictating what to build.

Live in the future and work backwards from a vivid vision.

Borrowing from Amazon- and Paul Graham–style thinking, Noah emphasizes carving out time to deeply imagine the ideal future product experience, then stepping back from incrementalism to define bold, longer-term bets.

Use structured rituals to see your product with fresh eyes.

Slack runs ‘complaint storms’ on competitors’ and then their own UX to surface friction, align on product taste, and seed roadmaps; they also do ‘customer love sprints’ to quickly ship small, high-delight improvements.

Build AI experiences where UI promises match data quality and reliability.

From Google’s Knowledge Graph to Slack’s LLM experiments, Noah stresses that AI UIs must reflect uncertainty, avoid overconfident hallucinations, and embed feedback loops so real usage continuously improves models.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

We’re customer-obsessed but competitor-aware.

— Noah Weiss

Take bigger, bolder bets. Teams can get lost crawling up the nearest hill, not realizing there’s a whole beautiful mountain range behind it.

— Noah Weiss

Your job as a PM is to facilitate the pace and quality of decision-making, not to be the person who makes all the decisions.

— Noah Weiss

We had a slide in 2014 that said, ‘Then do magic AI stuff on top’—and only now does that finally feel possible.

— Noah Weiss

Impact solves all PM problems. If your team is consistently building things people love and changing the business trajectory, everything else is just an input.

— Noah Weiss

Ten core traits and skills of great product managersWorking effectively with strong product-minded founders (e.g., Stewart Butterfield, Dennis Crowley)Slack’s approach to AI, ML, and knowledge retrieval inside SlackInternal product rituals: complaint storms, customer love sprints, pilots, and user research practicesRe-accelerating Slack’s self-serve growth after a plateau and redefining North Star metricsCompeting and coexisting with products like HipChat, Discord, and Microsoft TeamsBuilding and protecting space for zero-to-one innovation inside a large company

High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.

Get more out of YouTube videos.

High quality summaries for YouTube videos. Accurate transcripts to search & find moments. Powered by ChatGPT & Claude AI.