Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

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

July 23, 2023

AI Summary

5 min read

Noah Weiss, Slack's Chief Product Officer, draws from his experience at Slack, Foursquare, and Google to outline traits of strong product managers, strategies for working with opinionated founders, Slack's internal processes for building delightful products, and lessons on AI integration and growth recovery.

Traits of Great Product Managers

Weiss lists 10 key traits from his blog post, emphasizing execution, impact, and facilitation over dictatorship. Early-career PMs should prioritize impeccable execution (creating an "I've got this" aura), focusing on customer and business impact, and data fluency (from quant metrics to user insights). Senior leaders need to facilitate fast, high-quality decisions across teams, live in the future by working backwards from visions, and write scalably to influence orgs. Other traits include amplifying teams, optimizing learning pace via bolder bets, and combining data fluency with product taste honed through immersion and iteration.

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What you'll learn

1 `* (04:48) **Parenting Advice from Paternity Leave**`
2 `* (07:23) **Foursquare Lessons and Pivot to B2B**`
3 `* (11:34) **Working with Opinionated Founders**`
4 `* (16:54) **Slack's Core Product Principles**`
5 `* (19:32) **AI Lessons from 15 Years (Google, Foursquare, Slack)**`
6 `* (27:00) **Complaint Storms and Customer Love Sprints**`
7 `* (35:03) **Competition and Innovation Bets**`

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

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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.

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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-10-traits-of-great-pms-how-ai

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Where to find Noah Weiss:

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/noah_weiss