There's something much deeper going on here, and I don't think Butterfield or the media understands it.
What I'm reading is that Slack underwent a critical period of user-focused product design. This is the story of a product development process, not a launch.
The other factor is hidden behind some of the headings: “When key users told us something wasn't working, we fixed it — immediately.” That's nice to say, but you don't just say that, you have to achieve it, and that's the hard part.
Both of these point to critical internal systems that are set up extremely well. Someone or several people inside Slack know the importance of systems even at their small size, maybe even learned from Deming and TQM, and it's clearly greatly amplified their ability to take all of the user input, product feedback, and vision and distill it into something that's actually cohesive. This probably also applies to their UX process, product design process, and feedback cycle, as revealed by the article. All of this has to be driven by a management style that enables it, understands the organizational psychology behind accomplishing a quality product, and leadership that knows the whole is important. It doesn't happen often.
What you're seeing is the surface analysis of a reverence for systemic quality and the culture, systems, and management style needed to sustain it. It's very clear because of the results. It's like seeing just the light spectra of a star and being able to determine its size and age and chemical makeup; the unmistakeable signature of the inner core.
This would simply not be possible without the ongoing product process that they've set up, and the article is just the tip of an iceberg that lies mostly beneath the surface, large and cumbersome and meticulously designed. Read between the lines and think about why all these efforts have been successful. Take that deeper analysis and learn from it.
I agree with most of what you've pointed out here. It seems that after you read, you realize that it's more of a story on execution and not the launch per se.
The way they were able to start small and rapidly iterate on what their customers needed 'now' is what kept users on the platform, and thus word began to travel amongst founders.
I don't know anything about Slack's design so maybe you are correct and there is some really special sauce powering their success.
HOWEVER - it does not strike me as remarkable that they are able to quickly iterate on a product that was only 7-9 months old (at the time of the anecdote) with (apparently) a relatively small group of internal and external stakeholders to be creating friction. It would be more remarkable if they had already lost the ability to iterate in such a short period of time.
I find it's closer to the norm that a company doesn't begin the product design process correctly, and shifts to a period of quality-impacting chaotic whitewater where the product is considered 'sellable' and it becomes more of a marketing and sales game to make the company successful.
Slack, at least during its rise to fame, had not yet hired a sales or marketing team. I think they have remarkable product focus, and it's a testament to how unbalanced business thinking generally is in the spectrum. I think the status quo is a little too far past "the product won't sell itself," and Slack is a good example of a company balanced more toward the quality side of the equation. To me, that's the core reason for their success so far, and it's surprising that more companies haven't dawned on this way of operating (well, not surprising when you consider mainstream American business ideas).
It does remain to be seen if they can keep up the solid quality as they grow. It requires an orchestration that is very deliberate and well intentioned, and if they came upon their initial strategy by luck, it won't last.
1. The Slack team didn't need to generate revenue at all for a solid year so they could ignore commercial considerations that would harm product development.
2. The Slack founders had the industry clout and interpersonal relationships to not just get beta users for their app, but to get the RIGHT beta users for their app, ones that would give valuable, relevant, on point feedback reflective of the concerns of a large valuable addressable audience.
This comment is so reductive, and the GP is so dismissive of Slack's accomplishment that it is actually making me angry. This is like all the kids in 2006 claiming they could build Basecamp in a weekend because it was a "simple" app.
What you're saying here is technically true, but these things are only 20% of the story. Most companies given these gifts (and let's face it #1 is pretty easy in today's fundraising environment) would not be able to create a product with the polish of Slack.
To paraphrase calinet6, it's not just the feedback, it's knowing what it means and using it to drive a cohesive UX vision. I've worked on some extremely talented teams, and I've created some great products, but let me tell you it's very very difficult to actually take a large amount of feedback and polish something so it works as well as Slack. It's difficult because if you pay attention to the wrong comments, or you come up with the wrong solution you end up off in the weeds with a product that can never regain its cohesion. Even if you have a strong visionary making all the calls, it becomes increasingly difficult for that one person to maintain the whole picture as the userbase and use cases grow. Even if you have all the right people and no poor decision makers, you still find things can get lost in the communication layers and you end up with a suboptimal product.
If you actually use Slack in anger with multiple teams and purposes and you pay attention to the UX, it is at a level of polish that is astounding. We've seen apps with this level of UX before, but they tend to me much simpler (eg. Instagram), there are also more complex apps with impressive aspects in their UX, but they reach anything approaching this level of cohesion (eg. Facebook). Slack is not just a story of good strategy and positioning, it's a story of phenomenal execution, and people who miss that are not going to take away the right lessons.
What I'm reading is that Slack underwent a critical period of user-focused product design. This is the story of a product development process, not a launch.
The other factor is hidden behind some of the headings: “When key users told us something wasn't working, we fixed it — immediately.” That's nice to say, but you don't just say that, you have to achieve it, and that's the hard part.
Both of these point to critical internal systems that are set up extremely well. Someone or several people inside Slack know the importance of systems even at their small size, maybe even learned from Deming and TQM, and it's clearly greatly amplified their ability to take all of the user input, product feedback, and vision and distill it into something that's actually cohesive. This probably also applies to their UX process, product design process, and feedback cycle, as revealed by the article. All of this has to be driven by a management style that enables it, understands the organizational psychology behind accomplishing a quality product, and leadership that knows the whole is important. It doesn't happen often.
What you're seeing is the surface analysis of a reverence for systemic quality and the culture, systems, and management style needed to sustain it. It's very clear because of the results. It's like seeing just the light spectra of a star and being able to determine its size and age and chemical makeup; the unmistakeable signature of the inner core.
This would simply not be possible without the ongoing product process that they've set up, and the article is just the tip of an iceberg that lies mostly beneath the surface, large and cumbersome and meticulously designed. Read between the lines and think about why all these efforts have been successful. Take that deeper analysis and learn from it.