Every product reaches a point where it becomes too complex to be useful in order to meet the needs of the business.

The biggest problem is that product teams are incentivised to add more features, not to improve the foundations of the product, so it’s impressive, at Slacks trajectory in 2020, that they were self-aware enough to identify and address things from the ground up.

We found ourselves shipping a kitchen drawer full of useful tools to our customers – knives and forks, spatulas and whisks, tongs and corkscrews, hell even a few citrus zesters and melon ballers – but everything was so jammed together that you couldn’t find what you were looking for. Look out for the mandolin in the back.

It was a mess. We were at a tipping point of product complexity. While we were preoccupied re-engineering our codebase into a scalable service and reorganizing our company into a public-ready business, our product had suffered. Inertia, complexity, and feature creep had caught up to us. Entropy was setting in.

Rethinking Slack

buildingslack.com

Rethinking Slack

buildingslack.com