Building Products at Slack
This is the next part of an ongoing series about product culture. Make sure to check out the previous chapters on Airbnb and Stripe.
This morning Slack announced a set of new features intended to help teams stay connected in a post-pandemic world. Included in today’s launch is Slack Huddles, a lightweight, audio-first way to communicate inside a channel or direct message. Huddles addresses the need for fast, ambient, and informal discussions — spontaneous conversations that would happen in hallway encounters or at coworkers’ desks. These chats form the connective tissue of essential work, living somewhere between asynchronous messaging and synchronous meetings. It’s the stuff too urgent, trivial, or nuanced for a typed-out message, but not something that merits (or can wait for) a scheduled meeting. I encourage you to read Slack’s blog post to learn more about Huddles, video, voice, and screen-recording clips, and the other features1 included in today’s announcement.
For me, the launch was a perfect excuse to ask for a glimpse into Slack’s product culture. Slack’s VP of Product Noah Weiss and Senior Staff Product Designer Anna Niess were gracious enough to talk to me about Huddles and how product development works at the company. (Disclosure: I’m an investor in Slack through my time at GV and have worked with the company in various capacities since 2014.)
