![]() I wish we’d talked about our feelings more! Being at a high growth startup is incredibly stressful, and while we talked all day long about the right thing to do for the users, the product, and the business, we didn’t talk that much about the impacts on each individual of all that stress. What do you wish you knew/did/learned as Slack scaled from going from just one PM to a large scale organization? ![]() UX is responsible for the user experience, so their loyalty is ultimately to the user. Often you can satisfy both of course, but I think it’s useful to have that tension – UX pulling for the user, PM pulling for the business. PM’s are ultimately responsible for the success of the product, so their loyalty is ultimately to the business. I’m biased since I come from the UX world, but I love the overlap between PM and UX! To me, many of the skills are the same, the most important difference is the attitude. How do you feel about roles with the mix of PM/UX, and what do you think is a good balance between the two? I got introduced through that friend (and another who was already working at Slack) and I was on my way. I had a friend who had talked to Slack about the role but didn’t end up being interested. Stewart the CEO had had bad experiences working with PM’s at Yahoo and was understandably nervous about hiring the right person. Can you talk about how you got the opportunity to become the first PM of Slack? It taught me from the beginning that Product Management is all about earning your team’s trust. They already knew me, knew I knew the customers and products inside out, so they gave me a shot. The PM left, and the team was left with two options: recruit an experienced PM from elsewhere, or give me a shot at my first PM role. I was working with the Dreamweaver team back in 2006 at Macromedia. I got into product management from user research. Can you tell us more about your background and how you got into product? He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Human-Computer Interaction, Computer Science, and Cognitive Science and a Master’s in Human-Computer Interaction. He is the co-founder of YesGraph and was PM & M&A lead at Adobe for a long time. He’s been in tech product management for 10+ years, currently working as an executive coach. Kenneth was Slack‘s first product manager.
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