Platform Strategy at Slack: Reducing friction, modularity, and low-code
An interview with the VP of Product aiming to grow adoption 10x
Frequently, strategies are about finding avenues for growth. We often think about that as directly impacting the core company metrics.
But when developing platforms that allow integrations to the core product, the strategy is more complex: we enable entry points that enable 3rd party developers to solve “edge but valuable” use cases adopted by users who *only then* increase the core product metrics.
In this conversation with Frank Harris, VP of Platform Product at Slack, we discussed how they formulated a strategy in this complex landscape and the nuances and challenges of the growth journey.
Listen now on Apple, Spotify, Google, and YouTube, and read on for my takeaways and highlights of the episode.
My takeaways from this episode
The starting point for the new strategy was asking a big question: how can we grow 10x the platform's adoption? They thought about the big blocks preventing growth and how to address them.
We discussed the success criteria and how Frank suggests not overcomplicating it: Users and Frequency for integrations drive most decisions in their case.
Going back to strategy and 10x growth, Frank mentioned their 3 pillars: (1) reduce the burden of creating an integration, (2) make every line of the integration more valuable, and (3) empower non-technical users to build integrations.
Interestingly, when discussing selection and priorities, one of the criteria is choosing the user segment that will help learn and iterate the product faster (in Slack’s platform, the case is the tech community). And they think about it more as a sequence rather than saying no to other user groups.
We explored again the challenge of platforms of having a very long cycle from “new features developed” until that is used in an integration, which needs to be adopted by users, and only then have an impact on metrics. They use a lot of leading indicators in terms of developer usage to quickly understand the potential impact of new developments.
As a platform team, they enable (and ask) other teams to build their features in a way that external parties can put out there and use to create integrations that adopt it. In this way, they prevent being a bottleneck and maximize the chances of constantly adding new capabilities to the platform.
We wrapped up talking about crafting the positioning and messaging. Frank remarked that for more technical products, the product team would have a higher responsibility in crafting it since their counterparts (sales, marketing) may not have the detailed understanding they would have in consumer products.
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