We do not sell saddles, or motivation letter to the developers of Slack
Slack is a service for team communication, supports the creation of communication channels, file attachments, integration with third-party services and much more. The small chaotic review on Habré .
We all know that we built something quite useful: almost any team that switched to Slack will have an advantage. That is, we have something that people need.
However, most of them have no idea why they need Slack. And how can they know? They have never heard of him. And the disappearing small amount of them came up with something similar. They want something else (if they want anything at all). They are definitely not looking for Slack. Well, no one was looking for self-adhesive leaflets or GUIs before they were invented.
Our job is to make something useful, something that makes work easier, more enjoyable and efficient, and to understand what people want and then translate Slack values ​​into their language.
')
A decent part of all this is just marketing. But even the best slogans, advertisements, main pages of sites, PR-campaigns, etc. will fail if they are not supported by the experience of people who have found our site, have registered, tried our product and began to use it constantly.
Therefore, we all work to understand the needs of people and translate it into the language of Slack values. This is the sum of all our skills. We achieve this with convenient registration forms, fast loading pages, good emails, convenient and relevant search, useful loading screens and thoughtfully made and well-functioning functions of various kinds.
In recent years, much has been written about getting a product into the market (such a product utility, in which a sufficient percentage of users will regret parting with it after the test) - how well a product will be successful, if promoted enough, well evaluated, normal support and so P. Until you reach this combination, the product will not fly, no matter how much you kick it.
In the classic blog post by Mark Andreessen, he says that getting a product into the market is the only significant thing for startups, and offers to divide the life of a startup into two stages: before the product gets into the market, and after. When the product has hit, you can drive on the whole coil and invest in advertising a product that will definitely be sold. And up to this point, you need to do something completely different (briefly, we are testing, iterating, scaling, optimizing).
We are in the middle of the first stage. It seems that everything is going well, but still, at the first stage, it’s still very difficult to say how much more to go to the promised land (another 10% of the work needs to be done, or another 90%, etc.). Therefore, we must work carefully, and on the product, and on marketing:
- constantly working to give people what they want (they know about it or not)
- convey to them this idea (so that they know that they want it)
At best, a two-pronged approach will help us: the product and how people use it will tell us how best to present it. And the improvement of the ways of product presentation should push on the principles influencing decision making in product development.
We are in a position different from that which many start-up companies occupy: we do not flounder in a large, well-divided market (therefore we cannot simply say: “other similar chats are byaka; eat Slack”). Despite the presence of several competitors and the confusing history of similar products, we are entering a new market. This means that we cannot limit ourselves to product changes - we need to rule the market as well.
The best, and maybe the only measure of innovation - changes in human behavior. In general, innovation is the sum of all changes to the system, and not what leads to changes in behavior. No small innovation has led to global changes in how people spend their time. Big innovations have always led to such consequences.
For this rating system, Slack is a real big innovation. Not as bright as cars without a driver or implant chips. But companies that switch to it will undergo major changes in how communication takes place and how teamwork archives are maintained. In the way team members relate to each other, and, I hope, in work efficiency.
It is unlikely that we will be able to sell the “group chat system” - there is not a big market for such things, and indeed, “our fax works fine”.
We do not sell software - a set of all the possibilities with their specific implementation - because we do not find enough buyers. People buy software to solve a problem they already know about, or for a task they need to complete.
And if we sell “reducing the cost of communication” or “problem-free knowledge management” or “making decisions faster and better” or “all communication of your team with instant search and accessible from everywhere” or “75% less emails” or other results of switching to Slack , we will find much more buyers.
Therefore, we sell organizational changes. Software is just a part of the product we have made and supply (and the way to get our share).
We sell a decrease in information load, release from stress, a new possibility of sampling from huge archives, which are useless without it. The best companies, the best teams. Such a thing is not bad to buy, but for us it is better to sell.
Consider a hypothetical company selling saddles. They can sell the saddles, and then they will sell on the basis of basic things, such as quality leather or fashion accessories, a range of styles and sizes, reliability, low prices.
Or they can sell the opportunity to ride a horse. In this case, success will mean that they are increasing their market, along the way getting a great reason to talk about their saddles. This gives them the opportunity to position themselves as a leader and to conduct interesting advertising campaigns (for example, sponsor school programs to popularize horseback riding, preserve untouched nature, or create routes for skating). This allows you to think broadly and have the potential to grow.
Because the best way for a product to get into the market is to create your own market.
The idea is not new. There are many brands that sell more than just their product: Harley-Davidson sells motorcycle rides, but especially freedom and independence. Most luxury brands sell what allows you to be "better than you are" (richer, more beautiful, more attractive, etc.)
My favorite recent example is Lululemon (a company selling yoga accessories). When they started, there was not a particularly large market for yoga accessories. They sold everything like crazy: they helped people find yoga halls closer to home, held free classes, sponsored them, etc. As a result, they sold $ 1.4 billion worth of accessories in the last reporting year.
Returning to the saddles - imagine that they sell horseback riding 4,000 years ago.
Centralized internal communication systems will inevitably replace e-mail in 10-20 years, and we need to speed up this process and master it. We are at the beginning of change. We have the ability to identify the market and grow it. It would be crazy not to do this, because the best way to get into the market is to determine your market.
I recently read a medium book on marketing “ Who do you want your customers to become? ". 70 pages of the book could fit in 20, but not because the ideas were bad. On the contrary, the main ideas were smart, and in my opinion, very useful for us, for the next year of our work on Slack.
The basic idea: all products require something from customers. Do something in a certain way, think to yourself in some way. And this usually means that the client must change what he does and how he does it, and often what he thinks of himself.
We ask a lot from customers. We ask them to spend hours in new, unfamiliar programs, discard the years of experience gained in working with e-mail, to improve working communication methods (and throw out all the work processes built around emails). We ask you to abandon the generally accepted model of communication - this is an almost impossible task. Nearly.
In order for people to agree to this, we needed (1) to offer them a fairly large reward, and (2) to make the product almost perfect.
It is best to imagine this reward, thinking about how we want our clients to become:
- relaxed, efficient employees who feel confident, because any bit of information they need is just one step - search
- masters of the information flow, not slaves, buried under it
- calm, free from irritation, which appears from the inability to see the work of their team
- people who communicate more productively - each of their questions adds value to the team
This is what we should be able to offer them, and this is the purpose and meaning of our work. We need to let them know that they will find there, at the end of the rainbow, if they switch to Slack, and then we need to work hard to bring them there.
We make it awesome ( really, really fucking good ).
Why do we need to make the product almost perfect? If you really need something, you are ready to put up with flaws. If you do not know yet why you need a product, your tolerance will be much lower. Therefore, we need to create a beautiful, elegant, thoughtful software. Each pleasant feature of the product will move people further. Every unpleasant - stop them.
We need to find everything unpleasant and crush. We need to look at our work from the point of view of a potential client and see it objectively.
Is this place clear? Is it possible to predict what will happen if you click here or open this one? Is the product responsive enough to make it clear that your action worked? Is it fast enough? If I click on a link from an email, will it work?
It is always hard to improve your product - you miss something bad because you plan to fix it later. We are already familiar with our model and how to describe it. It is very difficult to objectively approach the product. But we must - and must do it every day, again and again, in order to grind off all the sharp corners, until the product shines like a lacquered wood.
Every one of you knows what “very well” is. Everyone sees when something is done poorly. We all complain about someone else's software, and we know how important first impressions are. That is how the rest will evaluate us.
Imagine that the boss made you understand Slack, but you are not interested in it, you did not have time to have breakfast, and you already need to finish the job as quickly as possible and dump it over the weekend. Thinking this way, you can imagine a look at our product, like a look at any random software that you do not really need and are not interested in. Look at him carefully, look for something that does not work. Be picky to be perfect.
There is no point in straining and not growing. We have to grow, even just to meet the needs of those people who are worthy of using Slack. To grow up is to be very good at business. This is convenient because there is no point in growing and not improving. Life is too short for mediocre affairs, and certainly too short to create any garbage.
We need a holistic approach - not just to figure out the task list for the week. We do not get points, just bringing another function to a working state, if we do not try to improve customer experience, or help them understand Slack, or help us understand them. No work is self-sufficient - they all serve a higher purpose.
Think about how the team serves people in the best restaurants. The hall itself, the atmosphere, the timing, serving dishes, attention to guests, anticipation of desires (and of course the food itself). You can not miss anything. It is a great honor to provide other services, and restaurants (both hotels and software companies) provide them with quality that is measured by attention to detail. This is for us the perfect model.
Make sure that all the pieces of the puzzle match - this is your job, no matter what your position and role. The pursuit of this goal should permeate everything that we do.
But Slack is a bit more complicated than a restaurant (in some things). He is new and not so familiar, so we do not have the opportunity to use something generally accepted and familiar. We need to look, listen and analyze. We need tools to collect customer behaviors and reactions. Then we need to take all this data, add our best instincts and constantly improve.
We are an outstanding software team. But now we also need to be a great customer team. Therefore, I first write “build a client base” and not “take market share”: we have a different task, and we will work together to understand, anticipate and better serve the people who trust us with their teamwork.
What is it for? And besides, why the heck still need to live, if you do not do what you can, at the limit of their capabilities?
And now let's do it.
Do what people need
We all know that we built something quite useful: almost any team that switched to Slack will have an advantage. That is, we have something that people need.
However, most of them have no idea why they need Slack. And how can they know? They have never heard of him. And the disappearing small amount of them came up with something similar. They want something else (if they want anything at all). They are definitely not looking for Slack. Well, no one was looking for self-adhesive leaflets or GUIs before they were invented.
Our job is to make something useful, something that makes work easier, more enjoyable and efficient, and to understand what people want and then translate Slack values ​​into their language.
')
A decent part of all this is just marketing. But even the best slogans, advertisements, main pages of sites, PR-campaigns, etc. will fail if they are not supported by the experience of people who have found our site, have registered, tried our product and began to use it constantly.
Therefore, we all work to understand the needs of people and translate it into the language of Slack values. This is the sum of all our skills. We achieve this with convenient registration forms, fast loading pages, good emails, convenient and relevant search, useful loading screens and thoughtfully made and well-functioning functions of various kinds.
Two-way marketing
In recent years, much has been written about getting a product into the market (such a product utility, in which a sufficient percentage of users will regret parting with it after the test) - how well a product will be successful, if promoted enough, well evaluated, normal support and so P. Until you reach this combination, the product will not fly, no matter how much you kick it.
In the classic blog post by Mark Andreessen, he says that getting a product into the market is the only significant thing for startups, and offers to divide the life of a startup into two stages: before the product gets into the market, and after. When the product has hit, you can drive on the whole coil and invest in advertising a product that will definitely be sold. And up to this point, you need to do something completely different (briefly, we are testing, iterating, scaling, optimizing).
We are in the middle of the first stage. It seems that everything is going well, but still, at the first stage, it’s still very difficult to say how much more to go to the promised land (another 10% of the work needs to be done, or another 90%, etc.). Therefore, we must work carefully, and on the product, and on marketing:
- constantly working to give people what they want (they know about it or not)
- convey to them this idea (so that they know that they want it)
At best, a two-pronged approach will help us: the product and how people use it will tell us how best to present it. And the improvement of the ways of product presentation should push on the principles influencing decision making in product development.
We are in a position different from that which many start-up companies occupy: we do not flounder in a large, well-divided market (therefore we cannot simply say: “other similar chats are byaka; eat Slack”). Despite the presence of several competitors and the confusing history of similar products, we are entering a new market. This means that we cannot limit ourselves to product changes - we need to rule the market as well.
Sell ​​innovation, not product
The best, and maybe the only measure of innovation - changes in human behavior. In general, innovation is the sum of all changes to the system, and not what leads to changes in behavior. No small innovation has led to global changes in how people spend their time. Big innovations have always led to such consequences.
For this rating system, Slack is a real big innovation. Not as bright as cars without a driver or implant chips. But companies that switch to it will undergo major changes in how communication takes place and how teamwork archives are maintained. In the way team members relate to each other, and, I hope, in work efficiency.
It is unlikely that we will be able to sell the “group chat system” - there is not a big market for such things, and indeed, “our fax works fine”.
Therefore, we must sell organizational changes.
We do not sell software - a set of all the possibilities with their specific implementation - because we do not find enough buyers. People buy software to solve a problem they already know about, or for a task they need to complete.
And if we sell “reducing the cost of communication” or “problem-free knowledge management” or “making decisions faster and better” or “all communication of your team with instant search and accessible from everywhere” or “75% less emails” or other results of switching to Slack , we will find much more buyers.
Therefore, we sell organizational changes. Software is just a part of the product we have made and supply (and the way to get our share).
We sell a decrease in information load, release from stress, a new possibility of sampling from huge archives, which are useless without it. The best companies, the best teams. Such a thing is not bad to buy, but for us it is better to sell.
Consider a hypothetical company selling saddles. They can sell the saddles, and then they will sell on the basis of basic things, such as quality leather or fashion accessories, a range of styles and sizes, reliability, low prices.
Or they can sell the opportunity to ride a horse. In this case, success will mean that they are increasing their market, along the way getting a great reason to talk about their saddles. This gives them the opportunity to position themselves as a leader and to conduct interesting advertising campaigns (for example, sponsor school programs to popularize horseback riding, preserve untouched nature, or create routes for skating). This allows you to think broadly and have the potential to grow.
Because the best way for a product to get into the market is to create your own market.
The idea is not new. There are many brands that sell more than just their product: Harley-Davidson sells motorcycle rides, but especially freedom and independence. Most luxury brands sell what allows you to be "better than you are" (richer, more beautiful, more attractive, etc.)
My favorite recent example is Lululemon (a company selling yoga accessories). When they started, there was not a particularly large market for yoga accessories. They sold everything like crazy: they helped people find yoga halls closer to home, held free classes, sponsored them, etc. As a result, they sold $ 1.4 billion worth of accessories in the last reporting year.
Returning to the saddles - imagine that they sell horseback riding 4,000 years ago.
Centralized internal communication systems will inevitably replace e-mail in 10-20 years, and we need to speed up this process and master it. We are at the beginning of change. We have the ability to identify the market and grow it. It would be crazy not to do this, because the best way to get into the market is to determine your market.
Who do we want to see our customers?
I recently read a medium book on marketing “ Who do you want your customers to become? ". 70 pages of the book could fit in 20, but not because the ideas were bad. On the contrary, the main ideas were smart, and in my opinion, very useful for us, for the next year of our work on Slack.
The basic idea: all products require something from customers. Do something in a certain way, think to yourself in some way. And this usually means that the client must change what he does and how he does it, and often what he thinks of himself.
We ask a lot from customers. We ask them to spend hours in new, unfamiliar programs, discard the years of experience gained in working with e-mail, to improve working communication methods (and throw out all the work processes built around emails). We ask you to abandon the generally accepted model of communication - this is an almost impossible task. Nearly.
In order for people to agree to this, we needed (1) to offer them a fairly large reward, and (2) to make the product almost perfect.
It is best to imagine this reward, thinking about how we want our clients to become:
- relaxed, efficient employees who feel confident, because any bit of information they need is just one step - search
- masters of the information flow, not slaves, buried under it
- calm, free from irritation, which appears from the inability to see the work of their team
- people who communicate more productively - each of their questions adds value to the team
This is what we should be able to offer them, and this is the purpose and meaning of our work. We need to let them know that they will find there, at the end of the rainbow, if they switch to Slack, and then we need to work hard to bring them there.
And how do we do it?
We make it awesome ( really, really fucking good ).
Why do we need to make the product almost perfect? If you really need something, you are ready to put up with flaws. If you do not know yet why you need a product, your tolerance will be much lower. Therefore, we need to create a beautiful, elegant, thoughtful software. Each pleasant feature of the product will move people further. Every unpleasant - stop them.
We need to find everything unpleasant and crush. We need to look at our work from the point of view of a potential client and see it objectively.
Is this place clear? Is it possible to predict what will happen if you click here or open this one? Is the product responsive enough to make it clear that your action worked? Is it fast enough? If I click on a link from an email, will it work?
None of the product development tasks are self-sufficient.
It is always hard to improve your product - you miss something bad because you plan to fix it later. We are already familiar with our model and how to describe it. It is very difficult to objectively approach the product. But we must - and must do it every day, again and again, in order to grind off all the sharp corners, until the product shines like a lacquered wood.
Every one of you knows what “very well” is. Everyone sees when something is done poorly. We all complain about someone else's software, and we know how important first impressions are. That is how the rest will evaluate us.
Imagine that the boss made you understand Slack, but you are not interested in it, you did not have time to have breakfast, and you already need to finish the job as quickly as possible and dump it over the weekend. Thinking this way, you can imagine a look at our product, like a look at any random software that you do not really need and are not interested in. Look at him carefully, look for something that does not work. Be picky to be perfect.
What is it for?
There is no point in straining and not growing. We have to grow, even just to meet the needs of those people who are worthy of using Slack. To grow up is to be very good at business. This is convenient because there is no point in growing and not improving. Life is too short for mediocre affairs, and certainly too short to create any garbage.
We need a holistic approach - not just to figure out the task list for the week. We do not get points, just bringing another function to a working state, if we do not try to improve customer experience, or help them understand Slack, or help us understand them. No work is self-sufficient - they all serve a higher purpose.
Think about how the team serves people in the best restaurants. The hall itself, the atmosphere, the timing, serving dishes, attention to guests, anticipation of desires (and of course the food itself). You can not miss anything. It is a great honor to provide other services, and restaurants (both hotels and software companies) provide them with quality that is measured by attention to detail. This is for us the perfect model.
Make sure that all the pieces of the puzzle match - this is your job, no matter what your position and role. The pursuit of this goal should permeate everything that we do.
But Slack is a bit more complicated than a restaurant (in some things). He is new and not so familiar, so we do not have the opportunity to use something generally accepted and familiar. We need to look, listen and analyze. We need tools to collect customer behaviors and reactions. Then we need to take all this data, add our best instincts and constantly improve.
We are an outstanding software team. But now we also need to be a great customer team. Therefore, I first write “build a client base” and not “take market share”: we have a different task, and we will work together to understand, anticipate and better serve the people who trust us with their teamwork.
What is it for? And besides, why the heck still need to live, if you do not do what you can, at the limit of their capabilities?
And now let's do it.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/237481/
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