Keep pulling the thread on Stewart Butterfield.
In a 2014 interview with MIT Technology Review, Slack founder Stewart Butterfield described the then-newly-launched product as a "giant piece of shit" to instill a culture of perpetual improvement.
Stewart Butterfield and Slack's CTO Cal Henderson, who have worked together for 23 years since Flickr, are discussing what new company they want to start next.
Stewart Butterfield uses a concept called "utility curves," an S-curve model plotting effort vs. value, to determine whether a feature requires more investment to become useful or has already hit diminishing returns.
Stewart Butterfield argues that for new or complex products, the primary user challenge is "comprehension" (understanding the product's purpose and next steps), not "friction."
Stewart Butterfield coined the term "hyper-realistic work-like activities" to describe tasks in large organizations that mimic real work (meetings, presentations) but create no actual value.
Stewart Butterfield believes it is a leader's responsibility to ensure there is a sufficient supply of "known valuable work to do" to prevent employees from defaulting to valueless, work-like activities.
At Slack, Stewart Butterfield made the entire company chant the mantra: "In the long run, the measure of our success will be the amount of value that we create for customers."
Slack's initial SLA offered a 100x credit for any downtime, a policy which resulted in an estimated $8 million in lost future revenue after a major outage occurred post-IPO.
Stewart Butterfield believes product leaders should never be satisfied and must see "almost limitless opportunities to improve" in their products.
Stewart Butterfield advocates for the product design principle "Don't Make Me Think," arguing that forcing users to make decisions they don't understand is metabolically costly and makes them feel stupid.
The decision to pivot a startup should be made only after exhausting all "non-ridiculous long shot" ideas and requires a "coldly rational" assessment of expected value, separate from the emotional difficulty of admitting failure.
Stewart Butterfield describes the "owner's delusion" as the failure of product creators to see their product from the perspective of a new, low-intent user, leading to confusing and ineffective user experiences.