You are the product manager for Slack. How would you unlock more pathways for product-led growth?

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You are the product manager for Slack. How would you unlock more pathways for product-led growth?

Asked at Slack in the past year

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Ujjwald · Answer 1 · 2024-06-09T12:14:25+0000

Step 1 - Describe the product

Slack is a messaging app in which you can send messages in various channels. This can be a 1-1 messaging as well as group messages. There are 2 primary business scenarios for Slack.

Their B2C offering where you can sign up with a magic link and then get access to the channel. This has limits on the message history and you have to pay to see older messages.
Their B2B offering where your company onboards your employees. This is the primary source revenue for Slack.

Slack is commonly used in conjunction with the G-Suite as their communication tool and was acquired by Salesforce.

Step 2 - Scope the problem

I have a couple of clarifying questions. Is there any specific part of the app that we are looking it. Between B2B and B2C, I would assume that B2B will be the focus because that is the primary revenue driver and on average the average CAC will be lower because you are onboarding all the employees of the company.

Also, I assume growth here means acquiring new users across various channels in mobile and web.

Step 3 - List and prioritize pain points

Journey	Pain Points	Severity
Reach Office	Too many items, and no prioritized list of items	S (There is a place in slack where you can send yourself messages on what you need to do that day/next day)
Read some emails and respond/save them for later	Get overwhelmed with the number of emails	NA (This is something that gmail can solve for)
	Forget to respond to those emails which I made a mental note to respond to	NA
	For certain emails, need to look for people with certain groups	S (We could look at ways to get those notes/notifications into Slack but it is not that big of a pain point)
Check slack messages and respond/make notes	Too many unread messages which are not prioritized	M (This is kind of solved with the Important mark and other such prioritized messages)
	See some messages but keep forgetting (especially in between mobile at home and web at the office)	L (This is a pain point especially when we read something on the mobile and then have to remember that when we reach office on the web because other messages come in the meantime)
	Need to look at people from certain groups, especially when the key ones are OOO.	L (Looking at substitutes especially when others are OOO)
Meetings	Need to be there in every meeting and there are many conflicts	M (This is a pain point but we can send someone else to represent the team or get the meeting rescheduled)
	I miss the meetings because I am unavailable or OOO but there are action items assigned to me	L (This is a pain point especially when people forget to tell you the action items or some of the essence is lost in transit. That emotion in the meeting with the context is hard to replicate)
	Forget to complete the action items before the next meeting	L (Every meeting starts with a recap of the previous meeting or some pre-requisites)

From the above, we have the following pain points.

Slack Messaging
1. See some messages but keep forgetting (especially in between mobile at home and web at the office)
2. Need to look at people from certain groups, especially when the key ones are OOO.
Slack Meetings
1. I miss the meetings because I am unavailable or OOO but there are action items assigned to me
2. Forget to complete the action items before the next meeting

Step 4 - List and prioritize solutions

Pain Point	Solution	Priority	Engineering Complexity
See some messages but keep forgetting	Have a special tag to see later, which you can also invoke by long pressing	L(This will help people categorize messages and because they have taken an action it will be important to them)	M (Need to be able to add a tag to a message and then create one channel per tag)
	Reminders on messages (Can act like a snooze button or all the reminders can be triggered at EOD to tell them that these messages are pending a reply)	M (Can end up snoozing too many messages and might end up hampering the experience)	M (Small change to snooze after a predetermined time when requested)
	For message windows/channels you haven't replied or muted, you can send a reminder that you haven't replied yet. This can be colour coded in the channel pane itself to separate these from the other chats	M (You may ignore the messages and these may end up like another channel)	L (The colour change for each channel and different channels having different colours may be an issue to implement)
Need to look at people from certain groups, especially when the key ones are OOO.	Automatically create a group with the backup when the OOO person is pinged	M (The person who is probably on vacation will be disturbed with unnecessary pings)	S (Not much of an effort as it is just another group creation)
	Directly message the person who is the backup of the OOO candidate	L (This may help stop the additional step of looking at if there is an OOO set up, etc.)	S (Not much of an effort)
	If there is no OOO message but people are not getting a reply and are pinging someone else, redirect the query to that other person. This will lead to privacy concerns, however.	S (This may lead to privacy concerns so deprioritizing this )	L (will need a model that will study the adding patterns into groups and then come up with recommendations)
I miss the meetings because I am unavailable or OOO but there are action items assigned to me	Have an AI avatar attend the meeting when you are OOO or not available	M (You can be present and it will announce that it is an AI avatar and will behave like the actual person. A transcript will be sent to the original person for verification if this response is good)	L (This will be a huge effort to implement but is worth pursuing in the long run)
	Have a transcript of the meeting automatically shared with all the attendees	M (Just emailing the transcript may not help much)	S (Not much of an effort as there are voice to text features available)
	Email everyone who have action items assigned and email a link of the transcript so that everyone can understand the context of the action items if they don't already have one.	L (This will be very useful)	L (Whenever the name is mentioned along with an action item, make a note and send to the concerned people. This will involve training the model, hence will take some time)
Forget to complete the action items before the next meeting	If this is a follow up meeting, remind people of the action items from the previous meeting and let them know that it would be good to get those items done.	M (When the meeting is set up, people usually know what is expected)	M (You need the previous meetings data and the action items)

From the above, we can look at the following solutions.

Email everyone who have action items assigned and email a link of the transcript so that everyone can understand the context of the action items if they don't already have one.
Have a special tag to see later, which you can also invoke by long pressing
Directly message the person who is the backup of the OOO candidate

In the long term, it will be good to invest in the AI use case for the replica avatar where the replica can attend the meeting and make notes.

Step 5 - Risks

One risk is that there will be questions about data, especially because we are recording and sharing the action items, so will any models be trained on this data. These kind of questions will come up.

Step 6 - Metrics

Number of tags created
Number of new users onboarded
Number of users who read the action items thread
Number of users who still see the OOO notifications

Step 7 - Summarize

We wanted to improve the customer base of Slack, and we chose the B2B segment to go with. We identified 2 main pain points.

Slack Messaging
1. See some messages but keep forgetting (especially in between mobile at home and web at the office)
2. Need to look at people from certain groups, especially when the key ones are OOO.
Slack Meetings
1. I miss the meetings because I am unavailable or OOO but there are action items assigned to me
2. Forget to complete the action items before the next meeting

From these pain points, we identified the following solutions.

Email everyone who have action items assigned and email a link of the transcript so that everyone can understand the context of the action items if they don't already have one.
Have a special tag to see later, which you can also invoke by long pressing
Directly message the person who is the backup of the OOO candidate

There is a risk, especially with regards to data privacy.