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Key Takeaways from “CPO at Slack: Planning to Plans & the Importance of Speed”:
- Roadmaps Are Outdated in Uncertainty: Traditional feature roadmaps don’t work during times of ambiguity and rapid market changes, especially with the AI boom and economic uncertainty.
- Plan for Outcomes, Not Features: Product teams should shift from planning features to planning for customer and business outcomes—treating each plan as a hypothesis to be tested.
- Rapid Prototyping & Small Teams: Move swiftly by building small, nimble teams dedicated to experimentation. The smaller and more focused, the greater the speed—sometimes even starting with just a designer and an engineer.
- Empowering Through Product Principles:
- Product principles supersede roadmaps by guiding decentralized, day-to-day decisions in design, engineering, and customer support.
- These principles multiply speed because everyone can make “good product decisions” without constant meetings.
- Slack’s Five Product Principles:
- Don’t Make Me Think: Prioritize user comprehension and intuitive UX, even if it means more clicks or words.
- Be a Great Host: Exceed user expectations, offer delightful experiences (like AI explanations that clarify technical terms instantly).
- Prototype the Path: Start with rapid prototypes, test hypotheses quickly, be ready to throw away code, and climb iterative “hills” rather than aiming for Everest from the start.
- Seek the Steepest Part of the Utility Curve: Invest effort up to the inflection point that triggers dramatic behavior change—don’t stop too early or over-invest past diminishing returns.
- Take Bigger, Bolder Bets: Go for transformative changes where there’s a 10x improvement possible, even if most of the portfolio uses proven patterns.
- Culture of Experimentation & Accountability: Frequent live testing, direct feedback from internal and external users, and willingness to “move fast and break cheese” (disrupt comfort for meaningful gains).
- Prototyping Over Documentation: No document or design tool will provide as much real user feedback as putting prototypes quickly into people’s hands.
- Decision-Making at Every Level: Empower all functions—beyond PMs—to interpret and act on product principles, helping scale speed and quality across the whole org.
These insights present a clear model for adapting Product Management practices to today’s volatile, AI-driven environment: outcome focus, swift experiments, empowered teams, and a robust backbone of product principles.