The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google)

Listen to this episode from Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career on Spotify. 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. — 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. — Find the transcript and references 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) Noah’s advice on new parenthood (07:23) Lessons learned from leading product at Foursquare (11:33) Advice for 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 in meaningful ways (25:11) How Slack structures AI teams (26:59) Complaint storms and how they help foster empathy (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 unlocked new levers of growth and revived their self-serve business (52:01) Slack’s early success and the factors that made them successful  (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 the importance of 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 — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected]. — Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.