Noah Weiss

Ensure the user interface's confidence level matches the actual accuracy of the underlying AI data to maintain user trust.

"One of the big ones, was that the promise of the UI has to match the quality of the underlying data, which is to say... I think this is actually one of the failings of the various LMs right now is the..."

Organize AI development by having a central infrastructure/ML team supporting multiple ad-hoc prototyping teams focused on specific customer problems.

"What we want to do is actually spin up a couple different teams that are focused on prototyping, using that common infrastructure but in specific directions that are all a little bit different. We've..."

Writing is the primary scalable tool for senior leaders to influence product direction and organizational principles beyond direct meetings.

"I actually think especially as you get to more senior positions, writing is the only scalable way of having influence on a larger, larger product org... It's the antidote to that to scale your ability..."

Establish core product principles (like 'Be a great host' and 'Don't make me think') to guide design decisions and maintain craft at scale.

"For us, we've got five, four principles. They've largely stayed the same... The first is be a great host, which is all about that level of craft, the relentlessly saving people's steps... There's a fa..."

Align with product-minded founders by codifying their intuition into shared principles that the whole team can use as a common language.

"The first is, I think as much as possible... is getting to the point where you have alignment on the principles for what it means to build a great product of that company. Not just about if the intuit..."

Manage executive involvement using a 'U-curve'—high involvement at the start for strategy and at the end for quality/polish, with autonomy in the middle.

"I think when to involve the founder CEO in a project is really important. The short version I think that works the best is almost like a U-curve where the X-axis is time and the Y-axis is level of inv..."

The PM's role is to facilitate the decision-making process, not to be the sole decision-maker or arbitrary tiebreaker.

"Your job as to facilitate the pace and quality of decision making. That is very different than you are the person who makes all the decisions. In fact, I think one of the things that PM struggled with..."

Identify a 'Successful Team' metric (e.g., 5 people active for most of a week) that serves as a leading indicator for long-term retention and upgrades.

"We did a lot of quantitative research and data science and wound up coming up with this new metric we call successful teams... what we found was that if you could get five people using Slack, the majo..."

Treat the product roadmap as a diversified portfolio, balancing incremental improvements, new capabilities, and high-risk 'boulder bets.'

"I think the way that we think about, or us to think about our roadmap for any feature team at Slack is that it's a portfolio and it's meant to be a portfolio that's diversified a couple different ways..."

Prioritize high-fidelity prototyping in code over static design mocks to better understand how the software actually feels.

"We stopped spending so many cycles on design explorations of static mocks or walkthroughs and said, 'How quickly can we get into prototyping the path in real software, even if it's messy and you throw..."

Increase team engagement with user research by having cross-functional teams live-react to usability sessions in a shared chat thread.

"What we wound up doing, especially in the pandemic when we first went remote, is now you can dial into usability sessions and to make it really attractive for the team, what we would do is have people..."

Use 'Customer Love Sprints' to tackle low-effort, high-delight polish items that often get crowded out by major feature work.

"What we'll wind up doing often is have a team do a two-week customer love sprint, almost like a hackathon, but with that burndown list of what we think is the lowest effort, highest impact changes tha..."