The Product Podcast

Slack's VP of Product & GM Jaime DeLanghe Reveals How to Monetize AI Product Features! | E231

• Product School • Episode 231

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In this episode, we're thrilled to have Jamie DeLanghe, VP of Product at Slack, who shares her inspiring journey from working in customer support at Etsy to a successful career in product management. Jamie provides valuable insights into mastering product management without a technical background, emphasizing the role of curiosity and self-education.
 
We delve into the integration of Slack, the evolving use of workplace communication tools, and strategies for aligning growth incentives in B2B SaaS. Jamie also discusses Slack's approach to enhancing user experience through AI, flexible pricing strategies, and the strategic expansion of Slack's product features to cater to both small teams and large enterprises.
 
This episode is packed with actionable advice and real-world examples for anyone interested in product management and career growth.

Key Takeaways
Successful product management requires fostering a collaborative environment. Managing a diverse team, including product managers, localization, and learning teams, emphasizes the importance of structure and resource allocation to support core features, AI development, and growth.

Be flexible with pricing strategies to meet the needs of different user segments. Balance between seat-based and usage-based pricing, and ensure fair billing practices to build trust and satisfaction among users.

Leverage AI to improve user experience and productivity. Prioritize the development of features that help users manage information effectively, and consider the cost and value of AI integrations when developing pricing strategies.

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Credits:

Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guest: Jaime DeLanghe

Carlos (00:00) - Host
Welcome to the show, Jaime.

Jaime DeLanghe (00:21.993) - Guest
Thanks, Carlos, I'm excited to be here.

Carlos (00:24.366) - Host

Jamie, what's your most common emoji on Slack?

Jaime DeLanghe (00:27.701) - Guest
I've done this a few times. I think almost always it ends up being something that promotes other people's work. So there's one we have that's just like a hand, like this. It's like, like I just say like, yes, this. Or pluses, lots of pluses. I tend to be a big cheerleader for other folks.

Carlos (00:51.151) - Host

You know, we added some custom emojis in our internal Slack with people's faces, and that's such a good way to celebrate them.

Jaime DeLanghe (00:56.437) - Guest
yeah. Absolutely. I love those.

Carlos (01:01.998) - Host

One of the things that I notice, and I'm an emoji user too, is that some of the people in the junkie generation, they just don't think it's cool. And they're trying to express themselves with stickers, voice notes, or other forms of communication. So curious to see if you have noticed any of those trends.

Jaime DeLanghe (01:12.217) - Guest
Yeah

Jaime DeLanghe (01:17.013) - Guest
Yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely the normal emoji, like the set that kind of ships with your phone. People don't think that's cool. Like, it's very it's very millennial to give a thumbs up. But I think the ability to create custom emoji inside of Slack helps people feel like it can still be relevant. We still see tons and tons of emoji coming up, not just for fun, but also for real business use cases, which is cool. It ends up being a really powerful tool for communication.

Carlos (01:55.918) - Host

So it actually helped me be more thankful in general. I remember when I was exchanging emails with people, I would feel bad if I had to send an email copying everybody to say, thank you, or you're welcome. And now just making it so easy to correspond without bothering other people, I think it's just making us more polite.

Jaime DeLanghe (02:06.357) - Guest
Absolutely. Yeah.

Jaime DeLanghe (02:15.573) - Guest
Yeah, I think that's the same thing too when you're also like, you can be like, yes, like this is a great idea. Like I want to plus this. Like it is like, I remember, you know, early in my career we would have everyone at email chains and everyone would just reply being like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Your whole inbox would just be like people being, yeah. And you'd be like, God, I have to kill this. But with emoji, it just kind of like all piles up and everybody can see it and feel good about it. So yeah, definitely.

Carlos (02:19.821) - Host
Yes.

Carlos (02:42.447) - Host
So I see that you started as an English major and your first role at Etsy was in customer support. So how do you navigate that transition into product management without a traditional technical background or MBA?

Jaime DeLanghe (02:50.613) - Guest
Yes. Yeah, so I ended up in customer support because

It was just very hard to find jobs in 2010, 2008 to 2010. And customer support was better than a barista job in terms of health insurance and like stability. So I took the job in customer support at Etsy because I wanted to be around creative people. And I've always been a very inquisitive person. And I'm also kind of a control freak. So when I was at Etsy and customer support and I was getting all these emails about how the product wasn't working or the site would be down, or people wanted to be able to just shut down their account without having to talk to me. Those problems really frustrated me. And I became really curious about how the whole rest of the company worked. I didn't like it that there was an outage and I didn't understand how the internet really worked. So I became really good friends with a lot of software engineers, I think is part of it. And they helped me get enough of the basics to point me in the right direction so I ended up taking like a CS50 class, like Harvard had a class online at the time to learn the basics of computer science. I had like a Python for Dummies book and like taught myself some Python. I learned how like the internet worked like with everything from like like learning like what Akamai was because Akamai would sometimes go down back then. Also we would be like, no, what are we doing?

What are we gonna do? So I needed to know what Akamai was. But first I started I think with more of a technical background because I was just surrounded by engineers. It was really easy. And then I found this perso n that was a product manager. And I remember he was like, what is it that you do? And he explained what he did to me. And I was like, that's the job I want. I want that job. So I kind of had that brewing in the back of my head. And I just started to be the person who would take a complaint, like a customer complaint or maybe a complaint we even had on the customer support side. And I would pull that into a set of things that the engineers could do, product requirements. And I would hand it off I was still doing all of that at the same time that I was doing my normal job. So a lot of it involved, to be really honest, like actually working like 14 hour days to try to like get all my work done and then do all of the stuff that I also thought was really fun. But I was, you know, my early 20s, so that was easy. Fine. Fine for me. And then once I started to kind of get into product, not officially having the title, but doing a lot of the work, I also realized there was a lot of other stuff I needed to learn. I needed to learn about marketing, and I needed to learn about business, and I wanted to do experimentation, because we were at Etsy. It's a very experiment -driven place, so I needed to learn about statistics. And I just listened to a lot of audiobooks about everything from design to stats to how Google started to learn as much as I could about everything that I didn't know anything about and then I leaned on the things that I didn't know. So when I transitioned into product management, I was actually working in policy at the time. And my first projects were supporting the policy operations team. So it was transaction dispute systems. It was pages to help people understand what handmade was. So I leaned on the expertise that I did have, even though I didn't know anything about product management. I did know a lot about this whole part of the business that needed product support.

Yeah, that's kind of it in a nutshell.

Carlos (06:50.288) - Host
I like that takeaway for me, like leveraging what you have, even if it's not officially a product management title and using it to your advantage to show value to, in this case, the product team. I noticed another interesting transition in your career. You spent around seven years in Etsy and then you moved into Slack. Etsy's an e -commerce marketplace, I would say, right? Well, Slack seems more like a B2B SaaS communications platform. So how were you able to transition some of that product management expertise to a very different type of product.

Jaime DeLanghe (06:55.381) - Guest
Yeah.

Jaime DeLanghe (07:21.205) - Guest
Yeah, for sure.

My initial role at Slack was in search and machine learning. And most of the product work that I did at Etsy was also in search and machine learning. So for me, I was like, OK, I got this. I got search and machine learning. I'm going to take that, and I'm going to do it in a totally different domain. Because I didn't want to keep working on e -commerce. I was like, I could go to another marketplace or a D2C. I know how to sell stuff, but I don't really want to do that right now. I wanted to learn a bunch more that was really the link for me was like, I know how to build search products. I know how to build machine learning products and everything else is totally brand new. It ended up actually being much more challenging than I anticipated because the data environment inside of a B2B company is so different than the data environment inside of a B2C company. The fundamental difference is, you know, when you're shopping on Etsy or Amazon or, you know, browsing on Google, Google and Amazon and Etsy, they own your data basically. Like that's kind of the agreement Slack, the customer owns the data. So we couldn't look at things like what are the top queries very easily, whereas at Etsy, I could just pull that down. If people were having trouble finding stuff in search at Etsy, I could open up a tool and see exactly what people are doing step by step. What did they search for and what results came back and use that to debug. At Slack, I didn't have any of that. So It was much more challenging than I anticipated it being. But you also have the opportunity to have a much richer relationship with your customers because somebody is paying you. And when they're paying you a subscription, they have a vested interest in what you're building. So I found that to be super rewarding, being able to actually chat with a customer, sometimes even in a Slack channel, to better understand what they needed have also found that in a two -sided marketplace, a lot of the conversations we would have would be like, are the sellers our customers? Are the buyers our customers? Who are we actually doing this for? And I think at the end of the day, we resolved that we're trying to get sellers more sales. That's mostly what we're trying to do. But sometimes it could feel like you were adversarial with your users. Sometimes you make a change and a seller didn't really like it. For instance, at Slack, I've felt the vast majority of the time that our interests are always aligned with our users. Our users might have very different opinions and then you have a whole other problem, which is, you know, some people really like something, some people really hate something, that happens all the time. But we're always trying to move in the same direction as our users. And something about that has been, it's just very good for me, I think, as a product manager.

Carlos (10:29.617) - Host
And you were at Slack before and after Salesforce acquisition. And you know, in product, it's always an important decision we have to make between buying versus building. And Salesforce chose to buy for around $28 billion. So what do you think was the rationale to do that versus trying to build their own platform?

Jaime DeLanghe (10:46.837) - Guest
Yeah.

So I don't know if you know, but Salesforce has tried to build a lot of chat tools in the past. Chatter exists and is used by people on a regular basis. Salesforce also purchased Quip early before they purchased Slack. I think the thesis behind that was sort of similar. It's a tool that everyone uses, a collaboration layer, and it could get more people using the system of record data that is inside of Salesforce. I think when Salesforce looked at Slack and was like, this is actually, not only is it like a chat tool that has a really strong footprint across sort of the top of the Fortune 500, it's got a lot of traction, but it's also a platform. Salesforce is a platform company, first and foremost, and I think they saw a lot of affinity in our platform. They saw an opportunity for a different kind of experience for every user inside of a company to get access to the insights and data that are happening inside of Salesforce. So that, I think, is sort of like, well, we could expand not only just be for the sales team or not only be for the service team, but we could be for the whole company. We could be the engagement layer for how the whole company accesses all of the data that they need to get their job done can update data, get data back out. I think that was really sort of the benefit that the Salesforce side saw. And on our side, we are very excited to have a massive set of customers who are already using Salesforce who we think could really benefit from Slack who might not be using it fully yet or might not have picked it up at all. So I think it kind of comes down to like Slack is really really good at user experience and the sort of product lead motion and Salesforce is really good at getting software into companies like they're super, super good at that. So ideally, you know, it's a match made in heaven and Salesforce helps get Slack the good product into more hands and that gets more people access to all of the other stuff that is already happening inside of their their Salesforce instance.

Carlos (13:12.562) - Host
I mean, Salesforce has the playbook. They've been doing it with other companies and they are literally the platform of platforms because in a way I could, I also think of Slack as a platform in itself. So what was the most challenging part for you as you had to navigate this integration and make sure that there's actually value for everybody involved?

Jaime DeLanghe (13:18.325) - Guest
Exactly.

Jaime DeLanghe (13:33.301) - Guest
Yeah, so I think there have been multiple phases of the integration and the place that we're at right now is really, I kind of think about it as more of like the final stages of Slack becoming a part of Salesforce. There's a lot more connectivity. We talk a lot more about how to make Salesforce, the experience of using Salesforce inside of Slack feel a lot more native. I think we started off with like a very platform approach and then we've gotten to a place where we want to make our platform better. But we also want to make sure that the Salesforce experiences are just absolutely stellar. I think a lot of the challenges have been one small company, big company. It's just like Slack was, you know, 3000 people -ish, something like that when we were acquired. It happened during COVID. So that was also like, you know, we didn't actually have a ton of face -to -face time with people. So it was really easy to kind of think about ourselves as like a little island inside of this like massive 70 ,000, 80 ,000 person company. And now there's a lot more, I have a lot more touch points with them. So there's a lot more contact with the rest of the Salesforce organization. There's a lot more going into the office. And I think that helps you see the other side of the company as like real people who are also good at their jobs. And I think, I think early on it was, it was a lot more you guys do your thing and we'll do our thing and like maybe we'll talk to you someday. But now we're, I think what one of the things that I really enjoy about my current role leading the self -service organization is that this is a totally different motion for Salesforce. They're really good at sales led. They have, they started off, you know, product led, but not for very long. Parker, our CEO, will even say like that didn't last very long. We were very quickly moved to sales.

Jaime DeLanghe (15:32.391) - Guest
So it's a new motion for a lot of people inside of Salesforce and a lot of what I do on a daily basis is educating people about how a PLG motion works, how a product led business is different than a sales led business in terms of things like predictability and scale. So I think both the sort of the challenge and the opportunity is always figuring out how to have productive conversations where we can get the best out of both sides instead of kind of like digging in our heels on the thing that we're really good at. I think when we can actually have a conversation about what do you bring to the table and what do we bring to the table and how can we do that together, we end up with really awesome outcomes. But it's not always the first place people start, I think.

Carlos (16:27.09) - Host
Exactly. And I, as you said, Slack has been famous for having a really strong product -led growth motion. While Salesforce has been very famous for having a very strong top -down sales led motion. And you are the GM for self -serve. It's not just the VP of product. So are you responsible for like the P &L on self -serve?

Jaime DeLanghe (16:48.341) - Guest
So I'm not responsible for the, I'm responsible for the number. I'm not responsible for like the cost of every piece of the business. So I don't, you know, I don't manage every single person. So I don't have the full headcount budget. I also am not fully responsible for the marketing budget, but I am responsible for making sure all those teams work together and I'm responsible for hitting our number every month and every quarter. And so a lot of what I've taken on with the GM title is a lot, it's very similar to IC product responsibility, I would say, which is, I did a stint as a very senior IC right before taking this over. So it's something I have a lot of experience with, but I'm really responsible for creating this virtual organization across marketing, operations, design, product, engineering. And even I also manage our help and localization and translation teams. So that whole set of people who drives the self -service business, I'm responsible for making sure that they all know what we're doing. We're all aligned to the same strategy that we can, with that strategy ladder up to hit our number and if we don't hit our number that we have a plan to get the number later in the year or to very much justify why that's not happening. Which I think is very different at least from the way that other product leaders operate inside of Slack.

Carlos (18:22.768) - Host
So when you say you're responsible for hitting the number, you're talking about revenue?

Jaime DeLanghe (18:26.485) - Guest
Yeah, exactly.

Carlos (18:27.92) - Host
Love that. So here is the challenge that I see sometimes with companies that have different motions, like bottoms up and top down. Your response, how do you go about collaborating with the sales team to ensure that ultimately there is a big number that is for everybody and that there are points where it's important for you to either go for the close or transition that opportunity to a human on the sales team.

Jaime DeLanghe (18:55.061) - Guest
Yeah.

So this is very top of mind for us all of the time right now because we have a very wonderful SMB sales team at Slack who are just, they're crushing their numbers all the time. They're doing great. But they're very energized set of people who really want to go after the SMB market. And there's a lot of overlap, right? We could have a lot of channel conflict. So one of the things that we've done is actually set up a Slack channel where we have work streams where we're all trying to win is one thinking about it as one company You know, where do we get more efficiency on the product led side and where is it better to actually transition? People over to invoice and we try to set up incentives so that people get you know benefit from actually growing accounts when they transition to invoice rather than just moving money from one bucket to another and Another thing is I our number is largely based on growth. So I'm not targeted on the total size of the business. I'm targeted on how much new business I'm bringing in. And that means that I can take some of my business and I can hand it over to the sales team and they can turn it into new business, but it doesn't show up as a loss in my number on the numbers I'm gold against. So that helps a fair amount. And then a lot of it is also just sharing learnings and sharing approach. Having really good personal relationships with the sales leaders helps because then they don't, you actually like have information flowing pretty frequently. And you know, they're not, if they see something, they're surprised by maybe an offer that we're fielding out in the market or someone on their team comes up against a challenge where they like the, the problem is always if you could get a better deal on self -service, it's going to disincentivize somebody from wanting to go with their sales person. Sales really doesn't like that. And then on our side, we don't want sales going too far, too low sort of, into the market to lower opportunities where we think it would be more efficient for product -led growth to go. We try to set up rules of the road and then do look back. So like, how did that work? Were those rules good this quarter? Did we lose out on some deals? Do we feel like the deal size shrank too much? And we're just beginning that process. But I think having just the mentality that we're really one team, not two teams, helps a lot.

Carlos (21:29.649) - Host
I agree. I think that's the key. And I believe that even in my current company, in aligning those incentives, so there is a number that everybody as a team cares about, and then we can break it down into specific leading indicators, if you will. So in your case, in addition to revenue, what are other leading indicators that can help you ensure predictability?

Jaime DeLanghe (21:39.381) - Guest
Exactly.

Jaime DeLanghe (21:50.645) - Guest
Yeah, so we have a full funnel breakdown that we report on every week that goes from basically people going to the website, people clicking on Create a Team, people creating a team and adding a person, people buying. We have an activation metric in there. We don't measure that so much on a weekly basis. We look at it on a more experimental basis, which is a leading indicator for propensity to pay. We see how many people are paying, what is the amount of money we're getting per team, so that price per seat times the number of seats, right? And then we also, that'll get us to our new business number. And then we look at once you've actually created a team, how are you growing? So are we adding more seats? Are we losing seats? So we look at both the seat growth and we have a number called net paid seats that we look at pretty regularly. And then for things like AI, we're also selling that in the self -serve way or people upgrading plans. So we look at that as well and have targets for those numbers. And we're always trying to add more steps in. We always want to have what are the leading indicators for churn because it's easier to keep you from churning than it is to get you back after you've churned or what's the leading indicator that you're going to accept the trial. But sometimes it can be easy to have too many numbers and then you don't know where to focus. So we try to think about all those things as inputs that are helpful more on an experimental basis than on like obsessively tracking week to week basis.

Carlos (23:39.984) - Host
Totally, and I see that with marketing all the time with the attribution model. It's just so hard, even impossible to get the attribution model 100 % accurate that sometimes you have to play some bets and reverse engineer where some of the winning patterns and how you can get more people to follow that specific pattern.

Jaime DeLanghe (23:48.245) - Guest
Yeah.

Jaime DeLanghe (23:55.573) - Guest
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Carlos (23:57.52) - Host
In your case, Facebook was famous for having that aha moment where you had to invite 10 friends. Airbnb was famous for getting, I think it was nine reviews on a property that would showcase that that property would get a lot of traction. Do you have any specific aha moments at Slack?

Jaime DeLanghe (24:03.701) - Guest
Yep.

Jaime DeLanghe (24:14.837) - Guest
So funny, we've been spending so much time on our aha moments because the product has changed a lot in the past few years. So, you know, I think when I started at Slack almost seven years ago, it was very much a chat tool. Like chat tools, some people got the platform, but it was almost entirely messaging for most people. And a lot of our activation metrics over time have really centered around messaging. So we know, like absolutely know that you have to have people talking in Slack for it to be valuable. If you can't get a conversation going, you're not gonna sort of like tip over into actually being successful. So that's why we have that created team with one joiner as like our first like initial activation metric but that's what the aha moment.

Then we have had so many other aha moments that we've looked at that were all really centered around how many people are talking and how frequently are they talking. That's been helpful, but I think a lot of that, the challenge I was having with that number is that it doesn't actually speak to the fullness and the richness of the product, particularly the fullness and the richness of the paid product, which includes things like huddles and canvases, and we just launched lists, and we've got Workflow Builder, and there's so much more value.

If we just point you to chatting, there's not really that much need to pay for the product. If all you want to do is have real -time conversations with your friends, it's not worth it. So I wanted to showcase the paid value a lot more. So we've actually shifted to a new metric that helps showcase the paid value. So we're looking at not only are you talking, because you still have to have the conversation going, but can we have three people using a product activity feature in the team in the first 28 days, something like to get you activating on the paid product earlier. And that's a pretty big strategic shift for our team away from only thinking about messaging and messaging activity. And then maybe someday you'll bump into a paid feature and you'll run a trial and then you'll want to out we really want to try to get people to shift how they're thinking about Slack early on in the journey instead of thinking about that as like, you know, a very sophisticated usage of Slack.

Carlos (26:41.04) - Host
I like what you mentioned about the expansion of your product or your platform, right? From just a chatting tool to what you have. You know, recently you launched a project management tool and you have HADLs, LIST, Canvas. So, but at the same time in your own marketplace or ecosystem, you have third party players that offer those features. So I'm curious to know more about how do you coexist with those type of players?

Jaime DeLanghe (26:45.653) - Guest
Yeah.

Jaime DeLanghe (27:05.365) - Guest
Yeah, I think we've like, over time, we've really held on to this belief that people should use the best tools that work for them. So, everyone, no one's gonna have the exact same set of software and so Slack needs to be an open platform and the value that Slack brings is that we sort of take all of that software that you're using, those over a thousand apps, and pull it into one place and that can be the place where you live all day, right? So you live inside of Slack, maybe you get notifications, you can take simple actions, you don't have to switch between all of your different software all the time.

We've had a lot of success with the strategy for tech and dev teams. So, you know, if you know how Slack apps work and you can build your own Slack app or you can leverage, you know, the Slack apps for the things like PagerDuty that like really speak to your needs as like a developer, you're getting a lot of value out of Slack. But for non -tech and dev teams, a lot of the metaphors, the UX metaphors, UI metaphors that we have had in the platform, just really confusing to people. They don't know how to work with a chat bot, or app home is super confusing. Why does that look like a person, but it has UI behind it? And so as we thought about bringing in things like Canvas and lists, a lot of it is just to make the stuff that's happening inside of Slack, that engagement layer for all of your other software, much more understandable. It's really hard to think about. If you say, when I was when I was working in search we would talk about the

Jaime DeLanghe (28:47.733) - Guest
Slack is the searchable log of all knowledge and conversation inside of your company, which is true. There's a ton of data in there, but it's not always consumable, especially if it's just scroll back inside of a channel. So Canvas makes a ton of sense because you can pull stuff out of a channel and now you have a very lightweight way of like understanding what's important. Canvas isn't going to do every single thing that a Google Doc does. It's not trying to be a document. It's not going to do every single thing that, you know, even like a Wiki like Atlassian product is going to do. So that's not its job. It's not trying to specialize in being the best Wiki ever. It's trying to specialize in being the place that you can find information that's important to you about the project that you're working on. Similarly with LIS, like, you know, we're not trying to be an Excel spreadsheet. We just want to make sure that it's easy to keep track of the stuff that you're talking about in your channel and to keep track of the tasks that are happening inside of your other software. So one of the, I think, the benefits that we bring to all of these products and where we think about investing is, you know, what? what things really benefit from temporality, so their current and engagement. Those things, like we've got the eyeballs, we've got you in Slack, you're already checking Slack all the time. Can we add a little bit more richness to our functionality to make it easier to just understand what's happening or communicate with the other people on your team? And then we think about how do we connect all those things? So, you know, Canvas should work with third party tools. Lists, we want to have list integrations that work with all of the other systems of record that you might be using. So it's not going to replace every single job, but let's say you're an SMB.

Jaime DeLanghe (30:35.669) - Guest
You're a tiny company, you have a very limited software budget, and you're trying to decide, can I just use Slack or do I need to use a Wiki product and use a project management product? You could probably just use Slack. You probably don't need to also buy a video conferencing software for your eight person team. You could use Slack. But if you're a massive enterprise, we're not gonna fit every single one of your needs for video conferencing with huddles. That's not what we're trying to do.

So I think we try to focus on that engagement of a small team first and foremost, and making sure that they have robust tools for communication, robust tools for getting work done, and that it can plug in with a lot of other tools that specialize in some of those jobs to be done.

Carlos (31:23.314) - Host
This strategy reminds me of the things I've seen Amazon or OpenAI do. Even Apple, they have a marketplace. They see what's selling and what's working and eventually they decide to build some of those features or products themselves while still allowing third -party vendors to offer theirs. I think it makes, in your case, makes a lot of sense for those SMBs and companies that are starting from scratch because they need a lot of these things and probably a simple version.

Jaime DeLanghe (31:33.557) - Guest
Yeah.

Carlos (31:52.786) - Host
But now thinking about those large enterprises that already have other type of technology, how do you go about integrating with some of your products and making sure that you can eventually gain some share in their product stack?

Jaime DeLanghe (32:07.541) - Guest
Yeah, yeah so I think the biggest, the two biggest sort of benefits we have in terms of gaining share are, like I was saying, the eyeballs. So we've got people already checking this thing pretty regularly. And the second thing is customization, and specifically customization at the end user level. So I don't know how much you view Slack Workflow Builder, but we're making it better all of the time. And our target on Workflow Builder is not low code, no code people on the IT team. The manager of us little we call them little t teams sometimes but it's the manager of like a little squad who's like you know everybody everybody knows you have to use Jira right like I always used to say on my teams like the fact that everybody hates Jira is a feature and not a bug because then you don't end up with arguments like somebody really likes Asana and somebody really likes Trello and somebody just found this new thing that we got to use this week everybody hates Jira it's the great equalizer it's the worst to use but it does everything you need from like a sort of background, like big company, like our Slack's usage is like so sophisticated, I have no idea what's going on in there most of the time. But everyone who uses Jira also probably has to maintain a spreadsheet somewhere, right? Like because not everyone is checking Jira because go back to the eyeballs thing. So I think when we think about customization at the end user level, it's how can I have my list, how that works super well with Jira, and then have it work with workflows in my Slack channel that actually reflect how my team works. So maybe that's I have a feedback channel, right?

Jaime DeLanghe (33:52.021) - Guest
Where I just launched a feature internally and I'm trying to get feedback on product market fit. We're dog fooding it. You know, we're drinking our own wine. I want to know what are the main issues people are running into. And then I want to be able to bop a button and have that create a ticket in JIRA. But I want it to show up in my list and I want that list to have a link to a message. And now I've got a whole, like I've got a whole workflow here where no one ever has to go to JIRA. JIRA is still the system of record and it's going to update all of the widgets that it needs to update so everybody stays on track with the whole project overall. And we have that right burn down and all those other advanced features that Jira has. But we're staying inside of Slack for the rest of the team that needs to sort of collaborate around that data. And I think that's true for almost every one of those like big SaaS investments is there's a subset of people who need to work deeply in that tool. And then there's everybody else who needs to collaborate around the stuff that's in that tool and no one wants to go there. So we can do a good job of sort of pulling off that top layer and then allowing you to build workflows and customizations that help people interact with it in the right way.