The mission of the Slack Growth team is to ensure that every company can successfully adopt and scale Slack. We act on this mission in the following ways:

  • We use experimentation as a tool for learning and humility, not decision-making
  • We focus on value creation over value extraction from our users
  • We engineer our systems for performance, as gains have a direct and meaningful impact on the user experience (especially on mobile)

On March 13th, we hosted our first Growth Meetup at Slack’s San Francisco headquarters to showcase how we think about growth, how we work cross-functionally, and how we maintain our customer-centric focus. We presented these topics:

1. 8 Lessons for Growth Teams by Fareed Mosavat, Director of Product
Fareed offered cautionary tales on how not to grow your business. How you shouldn’t become reliant on the performance enhancing drugs of Growth, such as excessive push notifications, emails, or promotions. Because once you start taking them, you can never quit.

2. Experimentation in Monetization by Kat Vellos, Senior Product Designer
Kat walked through three experiments we ran at Slack (a full redesign of the plans page, adding plans to the team menu, and redesign of the invite modal). We were surprised, and so was our audience; Kat described how running experiments is an exercise of humility, and how we’re always open to being surprised by our users.

3. Streamlining Mobile Sign-in by Chase Rutherford-Jenkins, Staff Backend Engineer & Sam Wolfand, Android Engineer
It’s possible to focus on Growth without building quick and hacky solutions. Chase and Sam talked about how we own our core systems end-to-end, how we’ve improved performance by orders of magnitude, and how we’ve improved security for a better login experience for our users on mobile.

4. Balancing Big Bets with Experimentation by Carla Gonzales, Staff Product Designer
Carla talked about how we create value for our customers and build a product worth paying for. She discussed how we approach acting on our big bets optimally so that we’re able to measure, learn, and iterate.

If you are interested in attending future Slack Growth events, you can give us your email address here and we’ll let you know about the next one. We will not use this information for any purposes other than sending information on future Growth events.

Speakers: Kat Vellos & Carla Gonzales | Photo by Zach Jiroun