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

The most important feature by far for any product is actually speed. (instrumental music)

Noah, I am so excited for this. I've really been looking forward to this one. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Thanks so much for having me here. I've been a long time listener, excited to finally join.

Well, that is very, very kind of you. Now I wanted to kind of chronologically unpick your career before we dive in, and start as your career starting as PM at Google. What is the single biggest product lesson you took from the three to four years or two to three years at Google, and how did that impact your mindset?

Yeah, I mean, Google is definitely where kind of I started my career in product and it was the formative part of my kind of journey there. And I think the thing that struck me the most, because back then I worked on a feature team within search, but you kind of saw how the executives viewed product strategy. In that room they used to have this model, they called it the 70/20/10 model. And it's actually a pretty fascinating way of thinking about just a product roadmap and the distribution within it. So 70% of the product teams were focused on what are things that are known valuable things for our customers that are in some ways more incremental. 20% were new product areas that had already kind of taken off, but they were trying to further refine and incubate. So, you know, after Gmail took off, how do you scale it to a billion users? And then 10% were the far out bets, the self-driving cars, the, you know, Android before Android existed, the building a web browser. And I think the thing that stuck out to me was the combination of deliberate approach to what the portfolio looked like and the constant kind of Larry and Suriya refrain of whatever your ideas you bring to them, what would 10X a bigger scale look like? So I, I think that caused a level of ambition for product thinking at Google that it's kind of hard to afford at min- early stage startups, but I think is aspirational to bring to every company.

Can I ask, do you do the 70/20/10 at Slack?

You know, it's funny. I feel like it almost became so well known for Google that it would feel a little bit cargo culting to bring it exactly, but we do talk a lot about kind of the portfolio and diversification within different product areas. So, you know, we might ask of team, "When you think about the breakdown of your roadmap for the next two quarters, where, where is it allocated? How much of this is maintenance, performance and quality? How much of this is refining and kind of customer delight? And how much of this is you're incubating new ideas, you're trying out new levers?" So we don't call it 70/20/10, but it's definitely part of how we look at the structure of products and roadmaps and try... And every team is different too. You know, even at Google, I would say that was at the corporate level. But take a team like AdWords, their allocation didn't look like 70/20/10. They might look like 95/5. So I, I think it, it's a interesting framework, but I don't think it is something that is like a perfect ratio to apply in every context.