The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process | Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google)

**Noah Weiss** (0:00)
We have this mental metaphor that we talk a lot about, getting to the next hill. The actual wording is take bigger, bolder bets.
I think teams can often get lost crawling up that hill, not realizing that there's a huge, incredibly beautiful range behind it. We've over time created kind of new teams from scratch that YouTube made in a new area before the areas mature. So we did that with a lot of these kind of native audio visual products like huddles and clips early in the pandemic because our customers were demanding from us. And I think in the AI space, we're trying to hear from customers, what do you wish Slack could do and have these new superpowers? And let's incubate a couple teams, a prototype, give them space to run and pilot and then get something to launch that's amazing, blows people away. That's kind of the formula that we've seen.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:44)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Noah Weiss. Noah is Chief Product Officer at Slack, where he spent the last seven years. Prior to that, he was Head of Product at Foursquare, which is near and dear to my heart, as you'll hear at the top of this episode. Prior to that, he was a PM at Google and at Faw Creek Software. And in our conversation, we cover the 10 traits of great product managers, how to work effectively with strongly opinionated and product-minded founders, what Noah has learned about working effectively with AI in your product over his last 15 years at Google and Foursquare and now at Slack. We talk about a process called Complaint Storms that helps Slack build better product, plus what he's learned from Slack's self-service business, Plateauing, back in 2019 and how they turned it around and what they took away from that experience. Also, how he thinks about competition with Microsoft Teams and with Discord. Also a bunch of new data advice, which I found very helpful. This was such a great in-depth conversation about all things product and leadership, and I'm really excited for you to hear this episode. With that, I bring you Noah Weiss after a short word from our sponsors.
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