Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Merci Grace (ex-Head of Growth at Slack) on PLG, interviewing, storytelling, building a diverse team, hiring salespeople, building a growth team, and much more

July 11, 2022

AI Summary

5 min read

Merci Grace, former Head of Growth at Slack, shares her approaches to product-led growth (PLG), team building, hiring, and scaling growth functions, drawing from her time leading Slack's growth efforts.

Growth Team Structure

Grace describes building Slack's growth team by starting small with generalists who owned end-to-end experiments, then specializing into loops like acquisition, activation, and retention. She emphasizes cross-functional pods over siloed roles, with engineers, PMs, and analysts collaborating closely. Tradeoffs include balancing experimentation speed against rigorous testing, avoiding over-indexing on one metric like activation at the expense of revenue.

PLG Principles and Execution

For PLG at Slack, Grace focused on self-serve onboarding that minimized friction, using data to identify drop-off points and iterate quickly. Key mechanisms included viral loops via sharing features and freemium models that converted through usage signals. She notes challenges like coordinating with sales for enterprise upsells and stresses measuring cohort retention over aggregate metrics to catch issues early.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **🎙️ Introduction: No Guest Featured**
2 (02:15) **Recent Market Volatility**
3 (08:30) **Fed Policy Expectations**
4 (15:45) **Tech Sector Deep Dive**
5 (24:20) **Global Economic Updates**
6 (32:10) **Crypto Market Movements**
7 (40:05) **Listener Q&A**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Merci Grace has been a founder, an investor (at Lightspeed Ventures), head of product and growth (at Slack), and is now a founder again (Panobi). She’s also one of the co-founders of Women in Product, and Fast Company named her one of the Most Creative People in 2017.

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Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible:

• Dovetail: https://dovetailapp.com/lenny

• Mixpanel: https://mixpanel.com/startups

• Whimsical: https://whimsical.com/lenny

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In this episode, we cover:

[3:41] Merci’s path to Head of Product and Growth at Slack

[4:42] What Merci learned from being a VC that helps her be a better founder

[6:50] How to tell a compelling story

[9:43] What most people don’t know about Slack

[10:27] Why Slack hasn’t created a consumer/social product

[15:14] How Slack innovated the PLG motion

[17:14] Slack’s early growth strategy

[19:57] Slack’s activation point

[22:10] Why it’s important to find connectors within a company

[26:40] Lessons from optimizing Slack’s onboarding flow

[32:12] Most common mistakes in going PLG

[35:56] Signs you can go PLG

[38:10] PLG vs. bottom-up

[40:23] Importance of day-zero value in your tool

[42:17] When to bring in your first salesperson

[44:47] How to hire amazing people

[50:21] Storytelling and Slack’s culture

[51:04] How and when to build a growth team

[52:08] How to build a more diverse team

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Where to find Merci:

• Panobi: https://panobi.com/

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/merci/

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/merci

• Website: https://mercigrace.co/

• Women in Product: https://www.womenpm.org/

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