打造人们喜爱产品的心智模型(Mental models) 特邀 Stewart Butterfield
Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield
Stewart Butterfield: This is 2014. That was the year that Slack actually launched. I was interviewed by MIT Technology Review and asked if we were working to improve Slack. I said, “I feel like what we have right now is just a giant piece of shit. It’s just terrible and we should be humiliated that we offer this to the public.”
To me that was like, “You should be embarrassed.” If you can’t see almost limitless opportunities to improve, then you shouldn’t be designing the product.
On Startup Pivots
Lenny Rachitsky: Slack was famous for being one of the early, consumerized B2B SaaS products.
Stewart Butterfield: At more than one company all hands, I made everyone in the company repeat this as a chant. In the long run, the measure of our success will be the amount of value that we create for customers, and you can put effort into demonstrating that you have created this value and stuff like that, but there’s no substitute for actually having created it.
Intro & Guest Background
Lenny Rachitsky: Something else I heard that you often espouse is friction in a product experience is actually often a good thing?
Recent Updates & New Insights
Stewart Butterfield: It became an assumption that it should always be trying to remove friction when the challenge is really comprehension. If your software stops me and asks me to make a decision and I don’t really understand it, you make me feel stupid. If people could get over the idea of reducing friction as a number of goal or reducing the number of clicks or taps to do something, and instead focus on how can I make this simple? How do I prevent people from having to think in order to use my software?
Utility Curves & Product Value
Lenny Rachitsky: You started two companies, both famously pivoted. I imagine many people come to you for advice on pivoting.
Raising Standards & Continuous Investment
Stewart Butterfield: The decision is about have you exhausted the possibilities? Creating the distance so that you can make an intellectual rational decision about it rather than an emotional decision is essential. And the reason I say you have to be coldly rational about it is because it’s fucking humiliating.
Taste & Competitive Advantage
Lenny Rachitsky: Today, my guest is Stewart Butterfield, a founder and product legend who rarely does podcasts. Stewart founded Flickr and then Slack, which he sold to Salesforce in one of the biggest acquisitions in tech history at the time. There is so much product and leadership wisdom locked away in his head. I feel like our conversation just scratched the surface. We chat about utility curves, something he calls the owner’s delusion, a hilarious pattern he sees at companies he calls hyperrealistic work-like activities, what he’s learned about product and craft and taste and Parkinson’s law, why you need to obsess with not making your users think, the backstory on his legendary we don’t sell saddles here memo, and so much more. A huge thank you to Noah Weiss, Chris Cordell, Ali Rael, and Johnny Rogers for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation. This is a really special one and I really hope to have Stewart back to delve even deeper.
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Stewart, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
The Tilted Umbrella Metaphor
Stewart Butterfield: Thank you for having me. I’m excited.
Magic Links & Experience Trade-offs
Lenny Rachitsky: I’m even more excited. I’m so honored to have you here. I never told you this, but you’ve been towards the very top of my wish list of guests I have on this podcast ever since I started this podcast a few years ago, so I’m very excited that we’re finally making this happen. I have so many questions for you. My first question is just what the heck are you up to these days? I feel like ever since you left Slack, we haven’t heard much from Stewart. I’m curious what you’re up to you hopefully or just chilling.
The Complex Do Not Disturb Rollout
Stewart Butterfield: I’m mostly just chilling. I left Salesforce two and a half years ago and I have a two and a half year old, so she was actually born three days after my last day, so a lot of time with family and it’s an enormous privilege to be able to spend time with young kids while they’re young. No new company to announce or anything like that. I do get a lot of emails and texts. Basically every three to six weeks there’s this cycle because Cal Henderson who’s the CTO of Slack and who also, we worked together on Flickr, so have worked together now for 23 years, have been talking about what we want to do next if there is something.
But honestly, the big challenge has been I think these things are destroying the world and what we’re good at is making software. So you find some way to make software that helped people use their phones less often, then that would be a big winner, but haven’t come up with anything good. A lot of philanthropic work, nothing to announce there yet, but there’s some cool projects that I’m working on, and a lot of just personal creative art projects and supporting other artists and stuff like that.
Friction as a Feature
Lenny Rachitsky: To prep for this chat, I talked to so many people that have worked with you over the years to try to figure out what you taught them about building product, building teams, building companies that most stuck with them, that most helped them build amazing products. The first is a concept called utility curves. This came up a bunch across so many people that have worked with you. Talk about what is a utility curve, how you use that to build better products.
Stewart Butterfield: This is pretty easy because it’s a very familiar S-curve where you have, it’s flat and it starts arcing up and then there’s a really steep part and then it levels off again. And on the horizontal axis, you can think of cost or effort and on the vertical axis, it’s value or convenience. It depends exactly what you’re talking about, but the idea is the first bit of effort you put into something doesn’t result in a huge amount of value. And then there’s some magic threshold where it produces an enormous amount of value and then continued investment doesn’t really pay off. The most basic example I can think of is let’s say you’re making a hammer, and on that bottom axis, it’s now quality, and if the hammer has a handle that breaks with any impact, then is totally useless. And if you make it a little bit stronger, it’s still pretty useless and it’s like junk, junk, junk, junk, junk. Okay, good, great. Then it doesn’t matter anymore.
If you’re making an app, okay, this app’s going to have users and so let’s make a user’s table and a database, and so far you have generated no value. The reason I felt like this was so important is because we would talk about a feature, and usually features are thought of as a binary. You either have this feature or you don’t. The argument I guess was have we just not invested enough in this or have we got all the value or convenience or quality or whatever that we could get out of this? And we had pointed diminishing returns and it just doesn’t matter.
I think in many cases, people will add a feature, it’s not good enough and so people don’t use it or appreciate it, but now you’ve added some complexity to the app and then people give up or take it back or they try something in testing and they don’t get the results they want, and so they decide that this a thing is worth doing. We would try to really investigate and decide whether we were on the first shallow part of the curve, the second shallow part of the curve, or we’re just coming up to it. So I think it’s a lot easier to understand the value of this when you’re talking about a specific app and a specific feature, but I think it was ultimately helpful in getting people to understand whether something was worth it or not.
Cognitive & Emotional Decision Costs
Lenny Rachitsky: So just to mirror back what I’m hearing, there’s this, if you visualize this curve at the bottom, it’s like I don’t even know what this is. And then up the curve is like, okay, I sort of get it. And then at the top is, okay, I can’t live without this now that I understand what this is for, it feels like it’s a really a different way of thinking about getting to the aha moment for someone where they see, okay, saved items, I get it, I need to use this constantly. It feels like this works both for a specific feature and also just for Slack, getting people to even understand here’s what Slack can do for you. And then now I can’t live without Slack. And essentially this is a lens you use to figure out where to spend product resources because if you don’t get up that curve to I get it and I can’t live without it, nothing else matters. Is that the framework?
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah, and I think then you layer on another concept like the, Bezos used the term divine discontent. The line actually moves because once people are familiar with a piece of software or the way a feature is implemented or something like that, their standards go up, and so there’s this competition. And again, this axis can be, utility is the best general term for it, but it could be quality, convenience, speed, it could be any number of things, but as you improve your search capability or as you improve your login experience or your forget password experience or your checkout experience or whatever everyone else is as well. And so there’s this continued investment and when forget about thinking about a new feature, you’re looking at how the product works overall and usually things get implemented once, and then if they’re lucky, they get improved upon periodically. Most things get improved upon very infrequently and some things get improved upon never.
I want to give an example at the absolute extreme because I actually don’t know how long this has been, but I try not to criticize other people’s software so much because I’m very familiar with the trade-offs and prioritization and how hard it can be and blah, blah, blah, blah. But okay, so most people have the Gmail Calendar app on their phone. I travel a fair bit. I’m mostly in the Eastern Time Zone, sometimes in Mountain Time, sometimes in Pacific, sometimes in English time, and sometimes in Japan, Central Europe. There’s maybe 10 time zones, 12 time zones that I would ever choose. When you hit the option to set the time zone on an event in Google Calendar, on the iOS app, it presents all the time zones in the world in alphabetical order. And I mean, there’s probably worse orderings, but there’s no value in that.
And even when you start searching, it still presents them in alphabetical order by country with that turn. So if I’m in California and I’m trying to set the appointment for next week when I’m back in New York and I type in E-A-S-T and I get a bunch of garbage, okay, Eastern, and then the first one is Eastern Australia, New South Wales, and then Eastern Australia, Queensland, and then Eastern Australia, Daylight Savings and Eastern Australia standard time. And then you’re like, “Well, fuck, I can’t remember which one is Daylight Savings and which one is standard time?” I could keep going like this for a while. This is an app that’s used by at least hundreds of millions of people, presumably every single Google employee. It’s bananas how bad it is. There’s so many, there’s all these clever things you could do. Like you know me, I’m on the West Coast, first option should be the East Coast and vice versa. But it definitely shouldn’t be that every time zone is presented with equal value. I don’t a couple hundred time zones. I grew up in Canada. Newfoundland has its own time zone, which is offset by half an hour. The population of Newfoundland has about half a million people. Not that many people go to visit Newfoundland, maybe a million people in all of history so like a million and a half out of 8 billion people. And there’s Newfoundland, the same with China time, which is like 25% of the world’s population in this.
Anyway, that was a little bit longer than I intended to go on this example, but it’s crazy because no one’s going to switch to Gmail or to G Suite, Google Calendar from Outlook Exchange because the time zone picker is good, so maybe in some sense it doesn’t matter, but at the same time there’s a real value in delighting customers and there’s an emotional connection that they form or don’t form. And in some cases that could be really positive like they would recommend it. And when they switch companies or decide to start their own company, they’re going to choose to use this product or advocate for it because of that emotional connection and vice versa.
They’ll also be like, “I hate this thing that drives me bananas. I really think we should stop using it,” or advocate for the alternative. And I think people just don’t appreciate or come back to those things often enough. And then there’s this category of really essential parts of the app again like account creation, sign up, forgot password, things like that, that for most organizations very infrequently get a lot of love and iteration and improvement despite the fact that the quality bar has gone up across the board and continually goes up.
Reducing Clicks & Cognitive Load
Lenny Rachitsky: Let’s go down that rabbit hole a little bit more around delight and craft. Slack was famous for being one of the early, let’s say consumerized B2B SaaS products. Slack leaned into delight and experience and craft and a great experience. And you just as a product leader, I’d say are known as very taste forward, very craft oriented leader, which is pretty rare and I think continues to be rare. So there’s a few things I want to talk about here. One is taste. I heard at a talk, you gave a talk on taste and you have a really unique perspective on just what taste is, what product taste looks like. Can you share that?
Stewart Butterfield: There is a lot of you going back to the utility curves again, people who are obsessed with this one little thing and keep on adding more and more detailed improvements beyond the point where it makes much of a difference. But I guess a couple of things about taste. So one is can you learn to develop it? I think so because the word literally comes from experiencing food and putting stuff in your mouth. And can people become better chefs with training? Yes, absolutely. Undoubtedly, some people have a natural advantage and are born with this ability to make discernments that are difficult for other people to make and stuff like that. But you can definitely practice and you can definitely get better. The second thing I’d say is you can create a real advantage for yourself, for your product, for your company by leaning into it because most people don’t have good taste and don’t invest. You’re probably familiar with, again, Jeff Bezos line, your margin is my opportunity and pretty obvious what he meant by that.
I would tell the story at Slack over and over again. It actually made it part of the new hire welcome. I’m in Vancouver at our Vancouver office and I’m going for a walk with Brandon Velestuk who’s our, at the time creative director for product development, I think that was his title. And we’re in the Yaletown neighborhood in Vancouver so there’s really narrow sidewalks because it used to be a warehouse district and now it’s fancy restaurants and nail salons and boutiques and stuff. And as it does in Vancouver, it starts to rain. We don’t have umbrellas. We’re walking back to the office and most people have umbrellas and we’re on these narrow sidewalks with people coming towards us with umbrellas. We noticed how few people would move their umbrella out of the way. And of course, the other person, their umbrella, the pokey bits are exactly at eye level for people walking towards them. We would get forced off the sidewalk or having to duck down or whatever.
It became a game like we were guessing is this person going to tilt their umbrella out of the way so we can pass or not? And something like one-third of the people would do it. And we had this conversation about it where it’s like, okay, I can think of three reasons why people wouldn’t do it. One is they have very few avenues in their life to exercise power and this is one of them. And they’re just, want to get out there and dominate people and cause suffering. Shouldn’t ascribe to malice that which can be ascribed to ignorance so that probably is the explanation for a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of people.
But the other two explanations aren’t that great either. One is that they see it’s happening, they see they’re pushing other people off the sidewalk or poking them in the eye or whatever, and they’re just like, “Fuck, that’s too bad. I wish there was something I could do about that, but I can’t think of anything.” And the last reason is they just don’t notice it all. They’re just oblivious to their impact on other people. And they’re so in their head, and I can’t really think of any other explanations for it besides that.
And so we would say it’s not like tilting your umbrella is our opportunity. That’s not a great rephrase of your margin is my opportunity, but your failure to really be consider it exercise this courtesy and really be empathic about other people’s experience is an advantage that you can create a critical advantage. I think that there’s many reasons why Slack was successful at the moment. It was successful and we think we had a bunch of really wonderful tailwinds and all of that stuff, but it wouldn’t have grown the way it did without those little conveniences which caused people to form an emotional connection because a lot of our growth came from startup A uses Slack, and then someone leaves startup A for startup B, and startup B doesn’t use Slack yet. And they would be like, “Oh my God, you guys, you really, this is so good. We got to try it.” And the spread was driven by that and people really genuinely advocating for it.
Designing Extremely Smooth Interactions
Lenny Rachitsky: That is an amazing metaphor. I love that one moment became a value of product craftsmanship at Slack.
Stewart Butterfield: Tilt your umbrella was a very common saying on company swag and stuff like that.
A Product Leader’s Dissatisfaction & Rebuilding
Lenny Rachitsky: Is there an example, I imagine there are many, but from the time of building Slack, especially in the early days where you chose to go big on craftsmanship and experience and delight versus speed where you thought looking back that was a really great idea and worth really core just to success.
Facing Flaws & Using Criticism as Fuel
Stewart Butterfield: Here’s a bunch of little examples. Someone else came up with this idea, and I’m trying to remember who it was, but let’s see, maybe Andrea Torres, maybe Ben Brown, something like that who was like, “Why did we ask people for email address and password if their ownership of the email address was the thing that allowed them to create the account in the first place? Why don’t we just ask them for their email address and then send them a link?”
And so when Slack’s first version of the mobile app came out, we’re like, “Typing your password on your phone if you have any minimal threshold of password hygiene is a terrible experience.” Capital H, lowercase Q, six, caret, period. So let’s just have them enter the email address. We’ll send them a link. The link will automatically open the app and authenticate them. And so there’s one, a little example.
Default Failure States & Real-World Complexity
Lenny Rachitsky: Wow. So you guys invented the magic link experience.
Stewart Butterfield: Someone else invented. I want to be clear that I had seen that idea somewhere else, someone else, a blog post about it or something like that. But we were the first ones, to my knowledge, that really scaled that and made it a standard. There is another one which we really puzzled about in the very early days where people have a long history of using messaging apps from AOL Instant Messenger to SMS to WhatsApp, where their expectation is they get a notification for every message that’s received. And in the case of Slack, that doesn’t make as much sense because you’re a member of many channels and the messages may not be for you, and so that’s why we have the @ tagging people. And we certainly didn’t invent that, that was Twitter.
But what we realized was people were signing up for Slack, and it’s one engineer on this team inside of this larger organization, inside this larger company, and they would pull in the person next to them and they would say, “Let’s try it out.”
And then they would send a message and then one person would be like, “I didn’t get a notification. This is bullshit.”
We reluctantly decided that we had to send notifications for every single message as the default for new accounts. But once you had, I don’t remember what the threshold would happen, I think it’s once you had received 10 messages, we would pop up this little thing that says, “Hey, you have our default settings for notifications. We don’t want Slack to be noisy for you. Would you like to switch to our-”
Stewart Butterfield: … For notifications. We don’t want Slack to be noisy for you. Would you like to switch to our recommended settings? And then they would just click a link and it would have what should be the default, which is, you only get a notification if it’s a DM or someone tags you. But we realized it was worth that investment to get people over the hump. I’ll give one more simple one and then one kind of more complex. One, people would just like the, I can’t remember if it’s called urgent or important, but the flag in Outlook, set the priority of a message for the recipients always got abused inside of every company. As soon as someone does it, everyone’s like, “Okay, I’m going to do that too for my message.”
And so all of your messages have the little flag and it becomes useless. We have @everyone, which causes a notification to be sent to every member of the channel when the message is sent and people would start, someone would find this feature inside of a organization. They would @everyone, everyone would get a notification and then the next person to send a message who was like, ” Well, my thing’s more important than Bob’s thing. I’m going to also @everyone.” And it became really obnoxious and people would complain about it, but it was, I don’t know, I guess tragedy of the commons. It’s not quite exactly the same thing, but it was this real dynamic that happened over and over again.
So we came up with what was called the shouty rooster, and internally we said, “Don’t be a cock.” But we didn’t obviously say that publicly when you @everyone, a little rooster would pop up and it would have you sound waves coming out of its mouth and being really obnoxious and say, “Hey, this is going to cause a notification for 147 people in eight different time zones. Are you sure you want to send this message with the @everyone?” And of course, that worked amazingly and it dropped off. And again, it was really trying to shape people’s behavior so that they used, one is not to be very flexible, but we knew that there was ways to use it that would be annoying and difficult for everyone. And so try to shape the communication culture inside the organization to take best advantage on it.
Parkinson’s Law & Organizational Bloat
Lenny Rachitsky: That feature still exists. I see that rooster all the, no, I don’t see it all, well, actually I do @channel, because I run a big Slack, so I see that rooster, that survived.
Slack Case Study: Rolling Back Threads
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah. Yeah, that survived and good because it was a trivially easy thing to implement and made a really big difference. But it also taught people how the product worked, because people probably didn’t know that @everyone or @channel… Didn’t think about the cost, at least.
”We Don’t Make Saddles Here”
Lenny Rachitsky: Genius.
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah. Here’s one more. So we decided we were going to Do Not Disturb as a feature. And we had this, not conundrum, but you’re trying to take into account all the different uses of Slack because by the time we implemented this, 2017, there was tens of thousands of paying customers, the organizations, hundreds of probably millions of users, maybe hundreds of thousands of organizations. I don’t remember how many. And everyone had set up stuff the way that they liked it, including things like ops alerts going into channels for on-call engineers for some of the biggest systems and apps in the world. And so we couldn’t just deploy it right away. We realized that some of the decision-makers, the owners of the organizations were going to have really strong opinions about this. We also realized that some of the end users are going to have strong opinions, and we wanted to figure out a way to balance the concerns and give people appropriate means of control.
So we came up with this really elaborate system for the rollout, which was, we told everyone, I’m sorry, every Slack administrator that this was coming weeks before it came. And we told them that we were going to set a default for their organization, which I believe was either 7:00 P.M. to 7:00 A.M. in their local time zone, or 8: 00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M., I can’t remember which it was, but also that they could override that default, and also that the individual end users could override that system owner default. And finally, that the system owner could, if they changed the default again, would override all of the end user’s preferences and then the end users could override them again. And it wasn’t to create this dynamic where people were at war, but so that you could change a policy and then people could still customize and stuff like that.
But this was a much longer and more convoluted process, but it allowed the millions of people who were using Slack to get the feature without creating a bunch of conflict and without people turning it off automatically. And I think critically, with setting a bunch of defaults, because if we didn’t set the default, most people wouldn’t turn it on at all. If we didn’t default you to Do Not Disturb from 8:00 P.M. to 8:00 A.M. you probably, if you’re the average person, wouldn’t ever do it yourself. So that’s another elaborate example where I think that investment made sense because it was a critical feature for a lot of people. And if we hadn’t done it that way, I think it would’ve caused a lot of complaints and conflict and stuff like that.
Executing the Pivot
Lenny Rachitsky: Those are amazing examples. I very much appreciate that Do Not Disturb feature when you guys launched that. I still remember that coming out. I’m sure a lot of people are very thankful for that.
The Importance of Generosity
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah.
Creating Value for Customers
Lenny Rachitsky: Something else I heard that you often espouse, which is counterintuitive to a lot of people is about friction, friction in the product experience. That friction is actually often a good thing. It’s a feature, not a bug a lot of times if you use it well. Talk about your experience there.
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah. So yes, and there’s also another issue around friction, which is it became like a mantra or just kind of an assumption that you should always be trying to remove friction. And in some cases that’s true. We would talk about it in Slack. It was hard to market. It was hard to explain what it was if you had never used it before. You could say a messaging app for businesses or whatever, but a critical disadvantage to Slack doing out-of-home advertising, putting up a billboard versus beer or cars is, no one needs to be explained why they would want a car or beer, but everyone will have to explain one day why they want Slack. And so the problem there is comprehension, and this will come up an enormous amount. So now imagine you want to get tickets to the Taylor Swift concert in San Francisco and you go to the Ticketmaster website.
If you think about both your comprehension, it’s perfect to this case. And that translates into the specificity of your intent and the degree of your intent is also kind of maxed out. So look, I really want to get these tickets. I know exactly what they are. They’re Taylor Swift tickets for this date at this venue. And so in that scenario, it doesn’t really matter if Ticketmaster’s website is slow, it doesn’t really matter if the payments page errors out, you’re going to persist and get through it. So obviously they’re better to reduce friction, but in some sense there’s not a huge amount of value in doing that. For most creators of products, there are a handful of cases where that really is true for you as well. And they include things like user registration, authentication, checkout flows for e-commerce. I am significantly more likely to buy something if there’s Apple Pay or Shop Pay or something like that.
I’m significantly less likely to carry through the purchase of something if I have to manually enter all of the fields of my address one at a time rather than having one of those address pickers. It’s crazy, but the issue is my intent isn’t always 100%, and the specificity of my intent isn’t always 100%. So if your thing is direct to consumer T-shirts and you acquire customers through Instagram ads, all of them know what T-shirts are. It’s like, “This looks like a good T-shirt to me.” But I’m rarely 100% intent. I might have a very specific intent, but my intent’s like 70%. So if you’re, the amount of friction is above that, I’m not going to do it. But now, okay, people coming to Slack.com, some friend had mentioned Slack and talked their ear off at some point months ago, and then they saw a news article and then they saw someone’s tweet and then they saw an ad on about the website they were visiting and they finally said, “Okay, I’m going to go to this website.”
So their intent is at the absolute minimum threshold, it was before that last event happened, they were below and now they’re above, but they’re just above. The specificity of their intent like, “I need to get Taylor Swift concerts for this date at this venue.” Is also very low, because they’re like, “It’s a work thing. I’m not sure it’s a spreadsheet or a calendar or exactly what it is.” So they were coming in at 0.1% over these critical thresholds. What was the challenge? It wasn’t friction, because it’s not like they were aiming for something and they knew what they were aiming for and they were just trying to get themselves to that point.
What we had to worry about was creating comprehension and in two senses, what is this thing? And what am I supposed to do next? And that creation of comprehension in the sense of explaining stuff, that creation of comprehension in the sense of the design of the UI, of the screen, of the page or whatever, and the visual hierarchy and the affordances that are there and the indication of things to interact with and which thing should be the next thing to do and all that stuff, that becomes really critical.
And I think very, very few people recognize that. They’re like, “I want to get people who come to my webpage to the sign up form as quickly as possible.” But if they don’t know what they’re signing up for and they don’t know what it’s going to do after, is it going to spam them? They don’t know, “Am I going to have to pay on the next step or what?” Then they’re just going to back out. And this was a lifelong battle because the remove friction orientation is so deep in people. Again, it really makes a difference in those cases where people do have an intent and they do know what they’re trying to do is a poor approach when the challenge is really comprehension, and I think the secret is most, 70%, 80% or whatever of a product design is in that comprehension step because people, if they do ever open the preferences tab and look at all the options, rarely have an idea.
And if you can’t teach them or make it possible for them to discover what the capabilities are, then they’re not going to take advantage of them and they’re not going to get as much out of it. And I think that the trick is for most of the unique parts of any application, most of the specific things that your app, your product, your software does are areas where the challenge is going to be comprehension inside of friction. It really could be anything Shopify, the purpose of the service for its end users is generally going to be kind to clear. But most people, most first-time store openers don’t know that they can get reports or if they know that they can get reports, they don’t know what kinds of reports. And if they know what kinds of reports they can get, they don’t know how they can tweak them and what the timing should be and which things that are more important to display.
And I could go on and on and on and on, and people just don’t recognize that. So I want to see if this is still true. I’m just going to open my phone and clock app. And they had the craziest description for alarms. It’s a little bit different, but people can look at their own phone. So I have, it says alarms and it says sleep and a vertical bar, wake up and says, no alarm, and a button that says change. And then if you hit it, it says sleep is off. In order to automatically turn on sleep features and edit your schedule, you need to turn sleep on. So obviously sleep was a good name for this thing if you already had a way of getting people to understand it. If you don’t, it’s ungrammatical and incomprehensible and why would you ever do it? And I got to guess, it’s been like this for years, 90 plus percent and maybe 98% of people just do what I do, which is that you just create, “I want the alarm on and I’m going to set the time for it.”
And I don’t know what turning sleep on does, but it’s just the lack of comprehension prevents people from getting the value. And I’m sure that there’s a bunch of value behind turning sleep on, whatever that means and people spend a lot of time on those features and it integrates with biometrics and your watch or who knows. Again, I still don’t know because turning sleep on is like, what does that do? And what is it going to cost me? And what impact it’s going to have? Those examples are just to me all over the place. And the reason I don’t use most software where there was an actual choice point or the reason I don’t use most features where there was a choice point for me is because I didn’t understand what they were going to do and I don’t give a shit. And if there is one mantra that I would use to replace that it’s, Don’t Make Me Think, I don’t know if you remember that book.
The Origin of the Name
Lenny Rachitsky: Absolutely.
The Owner’s Delusion
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah. And honestly, it’s been many more than 10 years since I read it, so I don’t even remember all of the examples in the book, but as a mantra that was up there with utility curves because for two reasons. One is it’s just like it’s expensive to make a decision. You literally burn glucose. There’s a metabolic action. There’s ATP created in the mitochondria and your neurons and a bunch of stuff is happening and people do get decision fatigue and there is cognitive cost of all these things. But also there’s an emotional aspect, which is, if your software stops me a second and asks me to make a decision and I don’t really understand it, you make me feel stupid. I’m like, “I don’t understand this.”
Some people, maybe their orientation is, “Okay, the software is stupid.” But I think most people are like, “Oh, I’m dumb.” And if you ever talk to people who aren’t especially technologically savvy, the canonical example is people who are under 50 talking to their parents about using some piece of software and what they’re supposed to do, the parents always feel stupid like they’re the ones that are wrong. And so if you’re causing people to think, in the best case, it’s unnecessary use of their biological resources, and in the worst case you’ve now made them feel bad, emotionally bad, and they’re going to associate that with the product forever. And these are things that are just kind of rolling one into the other.
So I’m going to keep going with one last thing, because they just kind of come together, which is along with reduced friction, it’s like reduce the number of clicks or taps it takes for someone to accomplish something which is almost always exactly the wrong thing. It’s the easiest way you could make any action in your app, a single click or tap by just exposing every single possibility on one screen that scrolls for thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of pages. And obviously that’s terrible. So why do people think that a little bit of that is good? And here’s an example. You open a menu, there’s 14 things that people might want to do.
Level one is group them into like items and put a vertical, sorry, horizontal divider between them so at least people can kind of chunk and see what there is. Step two is present the two or three most common things or the five most common things, whatever and then have some form of other and then you go to a sub menu that has more items and the decision of how to tune that becomes incredibly important. I’m going to pick on Google again just because it is, I feel like I’m Donald Trump here, but I’m going to interrupt myself again with a story. It’s-
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, let’s do it.
Stewart Butterfield: At some conference or event, I don’t remember what it was, and this is probably eight years ago and we’re in the bar after the sessions ended at this thing. John Collison from Stripe is there and Sundar, CEO of Google is there. And John, sorry, Patrick goes up to Sundar and they can talk about anything. Stripe wasn’t the behemoth, it was now at that point, but it was still a significant company, was up and coming. And what does Patrick want to talk to the Sundar about? It’s in the Gmail app, the dragging of people. When you reply all to a message, you often want to change the two recipient to CC and move someone from CC to two or something like that. And just how physically the degree of dexterity that’s required to do that inside of the Gmail app is very high.
It still hasn’t been fixed, but it really struck me that Patrick could have asked for anything. It could have been any talk, it could have been a partnership. It was so irritating to him that it worked like this, he couldn’t quite get over it. So anyway, back to bashing on Google, who in many respects do an incredible job and there’s all kinds of amazing stuff they do on blah, blah, blah, but the Gmail actions on an individual email are broken into two very long menu items that are different. And one of them doesn’t exist on either menu. There is an unlabeled icon is the only way to do it, and that’s to mark something as unread once it’s read. I have no idea why some of the actions are in one menu and some of the actions are in another menu. I think it’s because some of them have to do with an individual email and some of them have to do with the whole thread, but it doesn’t seem very consistent.
Every possible thing is listed there in one place. And so it becomes incredibly difficult to use because sometimes you have to tap in both menus, read all of the options, and say, “Okay, I’ve used the process of elimination and it’s not here, so it must be there.” Uber doesn’t work like this anymore, but when I first brought this up to people inside of Slack, there was a moment when the Uber app, when you opened it was just, “Where would you like to go?” And other. And other was everything like change your payment method, set your location, anything you could do in Uber. And that was perfect because almost all the time people just wanted to choose where they wanted to go. Sometimes you wanted to change where your pickup was because you weren’t there yet or whatever. And that was just like, what could be simpler than, “I’m going to tell you where I want to go or I’m going to achieve something else.”?
I really tried to push people to what is the thing that people, or what is the two things or what is maybe three things that people could want to do here and then put everything behind other. And then if it takes them eight clicks or taps to do something, but every single one is trivially easy, that’s great. If you reduce that to two clicks or taps, but every part of it is this fraught decision where I’m opening all of the menus and trying to figure out which thing is the right thing, and the more, comparing three things to each other is this difficult four things, it’s kind of geometrically more expensive to compare 15 different options all to the other to see if this is the one that you might want. That just becomes impossibly expensive. So to me, those are all really connected. And if people could get over the idea of reducing friction as the [inaudible 00:43:42] or reducing the number of clicks or taps to do something and instead focus on how can I make this simple? How do I prevent people from having to think in order to use my software? How can I make this trivially easy? One last example, because this was really influential for me. So I was going back and forth in Vancouver in San Francisco at the time when we were talking about all this inside of Slack, and I was behind a teenager in line aboard the plane and it was like, we’re on the jet way. It took a long time. And I was watching her use Snapchat and it was insane.
She was tapping at least four times a second, sometimes six or seven times a second. It was like dismissing stories and doing stuff. But there was a fluidity to it because everything was like, do I want to see this again? Do I want to see the next story from this person? Do I want to switch to a different person? Instead, a notification came up, she answered someone’s thing, she took a selfie of herself and everything was just like… So she was tapping four times a second for six minutes. I mean, probably there was some breaks in there. And that was the highest and best use of Snapchat for a 15 year old girl in 2016 or whenever that was. And imagine if the goal was to try to make her tap less, how much of an impediment it would’ve been to the experience that both her and Snapchat wanted to create?
Lenny Rachitsky: It’s so fun to listen to this and the examples you gave of, it gives us a lot of insight into the way your mind works of just constantly unsatisfied with the way other products work with your product. And I think that’s core. Patrick is a good example of Stripe. I feel like that’s a recurring theme with very successful product leaders is just constantly unsatisfied and unhappy with how things work.
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love just even the way you summarize this, just a really good reframing of, instead of obsessing with reducing friction and reducing steps, instead think, how do I reduce the amount of thinking the user has to do? I’ve never heard of it described as, you have to think about the ATP and glucose being used to actually think, and your goal is to reduce that versus let’s just reduce friction, reduce clicks.
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah. I think in my more cynical examples, I would say to people, ” Stop what you’re doing for a second, close-”
Stop what you’re doing for a second. Close your eyes, take a couple of deep breaths, and then pretend that you’re an actual human being. And open their eyes again, and then look at this thing and see, can you figure out what it’s supposed to do or say. Or what action you’re supposed to take or what the impact will be if you take that action. There’s a whole nother related cycle. But before I get into it, I know that I am verbose. I want to wrap up your last example of people being unsatisfied.
So here’s the quote that I was trying to find. This is 2014, so like that was the year that Slack actually launched officially in February. And this is now near the end of the year. I was interviewed by MIT Technology Review and asked if we were working to improve Slack. I said, “Oh God, yeah. I try to instill this into the rest of the team, but certainly I feel like what we have right now is just a giant piece of shit. It’s just terrible and we should be humiliated that we offer this to the public. Not everyone finds that motivational though.”
So I came into the office the next day and people had printed out on like 40 pieces of 8.5 by 11 paper that quote, and pasted it up on the wall. But to me that was like, you should be embarrassed by it. It should be a perpetual desire to improve. You should probably be like, “Oh, this is great,” and you could be proud of individual pieces of work. But in the aggregate, if you can’t see almost limitless opportunities to improve, then you shouldn’t be designing the product, or you shouldn’t be in charge of the company, or you shouldn’t almost nothing.
Again, you could reduce it down to a tiny feature is anywhere close to perfect. And if A, that’s acknowledged freely inside the organization. And B, people think about continually improving as the goal. And that could be like Six Sigma Toyota, Kaizen, that kind of side of thing. Or it could be that story that… I can’t remember his name right now. The guy who started Bridgewater tells about Michael Jordan-
Lenny Rachitsky: Ray Dalio.
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah, Ray Dalio in his book talks about Michael Jordan learning to ski. Every time he messed up, he wanted the ski instructor to tell him exactly what he was doing wrong. Because to him, every one of those was a gem that he could collect, and he could actually become a good skier. And what he wanted to do was become a good skier. That requires a lot of trust inside the organization.
But if you can get to the point where like, “Hey, we are trying to find improvements. We’re trying to be critical because you’re trying to make this as great as it can possibly be.” And not always, not with every person, but most of the time with most people, you can get them to the point where that really direct criticism is actually motivational. It is like people are grateful to have the feedback, whether that’s coming from their peers inside the company or from end users of the product. Because you realize, oh yeah, that is bad and we should fix it.
Lenny Rachitsky:
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Stewart Butterfield: Yeah. I mean, so this is a lot to do with, and maybe this is more recently, it shows up in politics a lot for me. But by the way, if anyone listening to this can help me find this tweet store from somewhere between 2016 and 2020, I don’t have a precise idea. And it was this guy’s thread about how hard it was to get a stop sign set up. And I believe it was in response to someone claiming that Bitcoin is going to replace US dollars, something about crypto. And his point was like, here’s what happened when we tried to get a stop sign put up on a residential street in my neighborhood. And the literal years it took, and the number of agencies that were involved.
Like the engineering department, traffic planners, the HOA, and… I don’t remember all of the organizations because, and I did that I could search better and find this again. Because it was truly a masterpiece of how difficult it is to get a stop sign put up in most places. The message that I hear from most politicians, and unfortunately this works really well, is things should be good. But they’re not because someone is doing something bad, which is preventing the goodness.
So billionaires are making things unaffordable. Or immigrants are taking your jobs. Or lazy freeloaders are sucking off a government tea, and causing us all have to pay more taxes, or something like that. The reality is almost nothing works. It’s actually another call. I said in this case, John has a great encapsulation of this and I’m sure you’re familiar with it, like that. It ends with the world as a museum of passion projects. Because for anything to get done at all requires not just the resources and effort required to instantiate that thing in the real world, but all of the politicking and the sociology and the convincing.
And there’s a book called Why Nothing Works Recently, which is like, it’s not an… I’m sorry to the author, if they… I doubt they’re listening, but just it’s not like an amazingly written book. I found it a little bit repetitive, but the content was really incredible, just explaining why it’s so hard. And how there’s this progressive increase in the number of vetoes that are available for any kind of course of action and how difficult it is… And this shows up in permitting for new construction and stuff like that. But also shows up obviously inside of organizations.
And the challenge is that people, A, I think this is evolutionary biological. It’s hard for us to understand the world, except by anthropomorphizing it. And so if it didn’t rain this year, it’s because a God is mad, and probably because we didn’t sacrifice enough goats or something last year. It’s hard for people to understand just that, wow, weather is incredibly complex and chaotic, and ecosystems and climatology, and all that.
Same thing with the world. Like if I am struggling to pay all of my bills and be able to afford a little bit of luxury in the sense of location or a present for my kids or whatever, it’s got to be somebody’s fault. There has to be a decision that’s made somewhere. And the reality is everything is so complicated. Everything is so multivariate, it’s not satisfying. It’s a terrible political message.
It’s much easier to say that there is like, oh, we understand why things are bad in the way that you’re concerned about. And it’s turns out that it’s some someone’s decision, and because of them it’s bad. And so if we got rid of them or were able to overcome their decision, overturn it, and institute our own thing, then things would be good for you. And this really to me shows up inside of those organizations as well. I’ll pause there.
Lenny Rachitsky: I know kind of along those lines, you’re a big believer in something called Parkinson’s Law.
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah. So the original of that is, I think it’s 1956. It’s an article in The Economist by Parkinson. And the Maxim is work expands to fill the time available for its completion. And the way that it shows up, this is a little bit subtle. So like one of the things I found, since I don’t have a job is there’s much less time pressure. And that maxim, like if you want something done, give it to a busy person. The inverse is also true that like, if you’re not that busy, wow, basic things take a really long time.
And so Parkinson actually starts out with his example of writing and posting a letter. And I don’t remember who he used with the first example, but someone who’s incredibly busy and has all these things they have to respond to. And then another case like a retired robot who has all the time in the world. It takes her a long time to write the letter. It takes her a long time to put it in the envelope, and then you go to the post office and post it.
But the real meat of it is, for me later when he talks about the size of the organization, and he uses a bunch of examples. This is again 1950s, and he’s British, so he’s looking at the Royal Navy. And specifically he’s looking at a chart that shows the relationship between the number of capital ships in the Navy, the number of sailors, and the number of administrators. And very familiar graph for people looking at any part of government. Any part of the relationship between the number of administrators at a university and the number of students and faculty, teaching faculty. Where it’s like, okay, the number of ships goes like this and the number of sailors is looking right along with it. And the number of administrators goes like this.
And the reason this ties into the work expands to fill the time available for its completion is people hire, and they train. And here’s the sad truth for anyone running a company is there are exceptions. There’s certain types of engineers that are an exception to this. But the overwhelming majority of people you hire want to hire more people who report to them. And it’s not because they’re evil, and it’s not because they’re stupid. In fact, they’re smart because everyone knows that the number of people who report to you correlates with your career trajectory, the amount of money that you’re paid. The amount of authority you have inside the organization and on and on and on.
So we would hire 27 Royal product managers in Slack who immediately want to hire someone. It’s like, what the hell? What would that person do? And they articulate it this way, but essentially it’s like, “Well, that person would do the product management and then I would do strategy.”
Lenny Rachitsky: Classic.
Stewart Butterfield: It’s really, I think the essential thing to understand about this is it’s not because people are evil, and it’s not because they’re stupid. And it’s to me, very related to everything is complex. And if maybe this is my butterfly’s law, I haven’t thought about this way before. But I tweeted this a very, very long time ago like if you… Everything is simple if you have no idea what you’re talking about. So the other side of that is like if something seems simple, probably you don’t understand it. And there’s obvious exceptions to that.
But for anything that involves a large organization or a lot of human beings, if the problem seems simple, you don’t get it. So every budget process, no head of engineering know, head of sales, no CFO, no GC, who’s ever going to come back and say, “Oh, I’ve actually think next year we can just hire fewer people. Or we’re going to keep it flat or we’re going to shrink through attrition because we don’t need any more people to do what we’re doing.” Not because they’re evil, not because they’re stupid, but it’s almost overpowering impulse inside the organization that often leads to disastrous results. And so there’s an…
I’ll give one example from Slack’s history, and I have tried in the past to disguise this example so that no one feels bad about it but I… Unfortunately, the specifics are so important to the example that it’s not disguised and so I’ll just reiterate that the people involved aren’t stupid or evil. And one example that’s from the outside. So the example inside of Slack was we introduced threads, which was the ability to reply to a message inside of a channel. And let’s say you, Lenny, post a message. I, Stewart reply to it. You will automatically get a notification. And now Sarah later on replies to the same message. Both you and I, as people who have push in that thread will receive a notification that there’s been more activity, and so on. So like every single time anyone replies to it.
So when the feature first was released or like when we did the final product review before it was released, the input box was pre-populated with at the person before you in the thread. And I was using the feature and I would put the insertion point there, select all delete, and then start writing my message. And even if I wanted to add someone specifically, I almost never wanted to start my sentence with at that, because it just made it hard to reference what they were saying before. So I said, “Get rid of this because, A, I think most people won’t use it. Or if they did want to add someone, they’re not going to want to do it at the beginning of the sentence.
And by the way, you’re teaching them to use the product wrong. Because it’s important that everyone understand that every previous poster in this thread will automatically receive a notification unless they’ve figured it.”
So okay, we release it. Six months goes by and suddenly the at thing comes back. And so I messaged someone around the team and I said, “Hey, there’s been a regression. This is super weird. I don’t know what happened. But the at thing came back.” And they said, “Oh no, this is on purpose. We did a bunch of research.” And so I was like, “What?” And I went through this and it was, if I recall correctly, it wasn’t even P-95 certainty on this analysis. But it was something like when we do this, threads are 2.17 messages long, versus 2.14 messages long on average for when we don’t do it.
And so first of all, why is a longer thread better? Like maybe a shorter thread is better? It can be fewer messages that people have to go back and forth. Also, that’s such a tiny difference. Also, again, I don’t remember the actual statistical analysis, so I’m not going to claim that it was incorrect. But I’m pretty sure this was outside the bounds of certainty that they can have. But the real thing was, oh my God, so you guys put flags into the product, you A-B tested it. You did the instrumentation. You created tables in the database or whatever we’re using to record all of that.
You wrote queries to pull that. You created charts based on that data. You had meetings to discuss it. And just kind unpacking all of the things that would’ve had to happen for this to come back. And it’s like thousands of person hours at a minimum, because any feature change at that scale of organization, it’s involving like a dozen people. Engineering, QA, analytics teams, project managers, user research and stuff like that. The problem with that, so I think it was a bad idea, right? But the problem with that was the difference that you could possibly achieve between having this feature and not having this feature is like this much whatever units you want. The cost of doing the analysis was this much. So it’s guaranteed to be a loser.
Like there’s just, there’s no world in which anyone could imagine putting the at previous respondent in the thread at the beginning of the message could possibly make that much of a difference to the quality of Slack, and how much utility it provides for people and all of that. But you know that to put the feature flags in, to ship new versions of the product, to put the instrumentation in. To have it all the API calls to record every action that people take to do all the analytics, to create the dashboard. To put paste a screenshot of that into a Google Slides presentation. To send the invitations to the meeting, to reschedule the meeting because someone couldn’t make it. To have everyone sit down and look at the thing. Like guaranteed loser.
And I know that Fareed told you to ask me about this hyper realistic work-like activities. And so here’s my grand theory. Hyper realistic work-like activities goes along with this other concept called known valuable work to do. And when I say known, I mean both you know what it is and you know that it’s valuable. And the problem with almost every organization at the very beginning, you have an enormous amount of work that you know what to do, and you know that it’s going to be valuable. So like starting a business, open a bank account. Because there’s almost infinite general value of opening a bank account. You have to do it. It’s very simple to do.
And so at the very beginning of any startup, they’re like, “I’m creating a user’s table, and I’m doing sorting passwords,” and you’re doing all the things that are kind of absolutely necessary. And everyone knows exactly what they are. And so everyone’s going to work in the morning and they’re like right on. And I have 10 things to do, and every single one of them is something I know how to do. And it’s definitely going to be valuable. Time goes on. And the relationship between the supply of work to do and the demand for doing work just starts to change.
More and more people get hired. Every product manager wants to hire a junior product manager. Every new person, the first person you bring in on the risk and compliance team is like, “Oh my God, there’s so many risks and things we have to be compliant with. We better hire more people on my team to do more risk and compliance work.” Which probably to some degree is right. But we’re going to have more and more of those people and they’re going to call meetings with each other.
And now suddenly you have all these people with work to do and you’ve done all the easy obvious stuff. And now your questions are like, “God, should we do FedRAMP high and make a Slack version? Which is going to require us to have wholly separate physical infrastructure for the hardware that runs the software? And also a whole different operations team, which has only US citizens on it? What is the possible number of dollars that we could make from doing this? And how much complexity is going to be when we want to do updates to the software because we update two totally separate independent systems and rec.”
It just gets out of whack, and so people end up… Like if you hire 17 product marketers, you’re going to have 17 product marketers worth of demand for work to do. And if you don’t have sufficient supply of product marketing work to do, they’re just going to do other stuff. Again, very important, not because they’re stupid, not because they’re evil. But because they’re like, I’m a product marketer and I want to be recognized for my work. And my spouse has criticized me because they take, I should have already got promoted in the last cycle, and they really got to demonstrate some wins here and whatever it is.
And so people are like calling meetings with their colleagues to preview the deck that they’re going to show in the big meeting to get feedback on whether they should improve some of the slides. And that hyper-realistic work-like activity is superficially identical to work. Like we are sitting in a conference room and there’s something being projected up there, and we’re all talking about it. And that’s exactly what work is. Hopefully not all of work for everyone inside of your company. But that’s exactly what we do when we’re working.
But this is actually a fake bit of work, and it’s so subtle that I’ll do it. Our board members will do it. Every executive will do it. And the further you are from having all of the context and all of the information and the decision-making authority and stuff like that, the easier it is to get trapped in this stuff. And people will just perform enormous amounts of hyper-realistic work-like activities, and have no idea that that’s what they’re doing. And the result of that, I guess, is that if you are a leader, if you’re manager, director, an executive, you’re the CEO, it’s on you to ensure that there is sufficient supply of known valuable work to do. And there almost always is, but it’s creating the clarity around that. Creating the alignment. Making sure everyone understands it, but that’s what they’re supposed to be doing, and then obviously doing it.
Lenny Rachitsky: Amazing. I could listen to Stewart’s rants all day. Hyper- realistic work-life activities. We need to coin this-
Stewart Butterfield: Unfortunately, it doesn’t make a good acronym. It’s pretty ugly.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay.
Stewart Butterfield: [inaudible 01:07:37].
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. [inaudible 01:07:37] it a try. And just to close the loop on that, the solution is the leader recognizing this is happening and stopping it. Telling people why are we spending time on this thing that is not going to get us anywhere?
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah. And what you just said probably isn’t the best way because that sounds like you’re chiding them, and they’re dumb. When it’s actually your responsibility to make sure that there’s sufficient clarity around what the priorities are, and explicitly saying no to things upfront and stuff like that. Rather than merging and say like, “Hey, you guys are a bunch of idiots wasting your time on this thing that doesn’t matter.” Whose fault is it? It’s the manager’s fault. It’s the VP of whatever’s fault. It’s the CX, whatever, it’s the C… Ultimately, it’s the leader of the organization that has the responsibility to make sure that there is sufficient known-valuable work to do. And that’s actually harder than it might appear.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. Before we run out of time, I want to touch on two other topics. One is, when people think of Stewart Butterfield, I think a lot of people think of, We Don’t Sell Saddles Here. Your legendary Medium post that is just, I don’t know, it’s become a historic piece of literature in the annals of product building and in startups. I haven’t heard people ask you much about this recently. So let me just ask a couple of questions. What was the reason you put that out? What was the backstory on writing that memo? Why was it necessary?
Stewart Butterfield: Well, it really was an internal memo.
Lenny Rachitsky: … Memo. Why was it necessary?
Stewart Butterfield: Well, it really was an internal memo and there’s a bit of a digression. One of the crappy things about Slack is if all your corporate communication is on email, depending on exactly how it works and what system you use, you probably walk away with an archive of everything you said at Company X. If it’s Slack, once you’re turned off, you lose access to all that history. And so it’s kind of like, “Oh, man. If I had only exported all of my messages before I left, I would have all this stuff,” but that was absolutely verbatim. I did not change a word of what I said inside the company. Well, I think we were still eight people. Maybe at most 10, but I think it was eight people.
Lenny Rachitsky: It was before Slack launched even.
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah, it was before Slack launched. It was when we’re doing private beta. And the point of it was to start to instill those ideas as early as possible and really create this alignment inside of that small team so that it could persist to survive as we grew and scaled. Yeah, that was the idea.
Lenny Rachitsky: And the gist, just for people that aren’t super familiar with it, but we’ll link to it, is just it’s not enough just to build a great product. You just as much have to put effort into communicating what this does for them, the problem this is solving for them, the outcome this is going to achieve for them. Is that a good way to think about it?
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah. And again, comparing it to beer or cars, beer goes back to pre-civilization. Cars were obviously [inaudible 01:10:38], but at some point you had to convince people why they would want a car instead of a horse. For your new AI-based recruiting tool or your calendar app or whatever, there’s some reason why you think that people should use yours instead of the thing that they’re using now, which might be a wholesale one-for- one replacement, or more often is a change in the way that you’re working that has a bunch of other adjacencies and you want to expand into these other categories. You’re not just responsible for creating the product, but also, to a certain degree, creating the market.
There’s this book, Positioning, which is an absolute classic. It’s very short. I would recommend everyone read it, where the point of it is, from my perspective, it’s almost impossible to create a new idea in someone’s head. It’s much easier to take a couple of existing ideas and put them together. So it’s much easier to say it’s like Jaws meets Star Wars, or it’s Uber for Pets or something like that, than to come up with an actual new idea. But you have to do that because if your thing is different in any significant way from the alternatives, you’re not just creating the product. You’re creating the market. They’re really kind of one and the same.
Lenny Rachitsky: The reason I wanted to touch on it is I think still people continue to not listen to this advice and continue to over-invest in more features, more products, things like that. Just the specific example of, “We don’t sell saddles here,” just to quickly communicate this to folks, and correct me if I’m missing anything, is just instead of, “Hey, look at this amazing saddle we’ve bought,” which you want to communicate as, “Here, go horseback riding. Look at this incredible experience you can have.” And then they decide, “Oh, shit. I need to go buy a saddle to do that.”
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah. And 100%, that aspect of it is not original because I think that’s something that marketers have done for a long time, certainly in the marcom and advertising. If you want to sell Harley-Davidson’s, there are people who are going to geek out on the engines and stuff like that and the quality of the leather and stuff like that. But when you’re selling the motorcycle, you’re selling the open road and freedom and the wind in your hair. And if you’re Lululemon, you are obviously selling yoga pants, but you’re also selling health and aspiration and being the best version of yourself and a bunch of other stuff. Oh my God, I forgot the classic version of it.
Lenny Rachitsky: There’s the ship …
Stewart Butterfield: You’re selling the screwdriver.
Lenny Rachitsky: Oh, yeah. The nail.
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah, the nail. Anyway.
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, we missed that one. Well, there’s the one I think about is instead of trying to convince men to build a ship, instill a yearning for the sea.
Stewart Butterfield: Yes. Exactly. That’s something that goes back in history.
Lenny Rachitsky: Okay. Let me ask you about pivoting. You are potentially the king of pivots. You started two companies both famously pivoted, both from video games, which is why I asked you about that at the beginning, into very successful companies. I imagine many people come to you for advice on pivoting. Let me just ask when folks come to you asking, “Should I stick with my idea? Should I pivot?” what sort of advice do you find most helps them?
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s partly an intuition because obviously the decision is about, “Have you exhausted the possibilities?” and in the case where we were working on Glitch, this game where we used IRC for internal communication and we added a bunch of IRC which became the Proto Slack. I think Slack had an enormous advantage in the fact that we are working on this for several years without actually explicitly working on it and only doing the minimum number of features that were absolutely guaranteed to be successful in the sense that it was so irritating that we couldn’t stand it anymore or such an obvious improvement that we couldn’t help but take advantage of it. We still had $ 9 million left and everyone still liked the game and we were all happy working on it, but I think by that point I had exhausted every non-verdiculous long shot idea to make it commercially successful, and so I decided to abandon it.
But the default advice for anyone in anything is persevere. It’s like a kitten hanging off the branch and a poster says, “Hang in there.” There’s so many stories of, “So-and-so started out going door-to-door and was rejected by everyone and then suddenly there was Nike,” or something like that and just, “If you stick with it long enough, you’ll eventually be successful.” I think you have to really be coldly rational. Some of this shows up in the book Thinking in Bets. Some of it’s in Annie Duke’s second book, the title of which I’m forgetting right now, but someone will know it.
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah, Thinking in Bets, and then what was the second? I forget.
Stewart Butterfield: She actually uses Glitch and Slack as an example of a smart fold basically. My expected value here has diminished to the point where this alternative looks more attractive. And the reason I say you have to be coldly rational about it is because it’s fucking humiliating. I convinced so many and you have to convince so many people to get a company off the ground. You have to go to investors. You have to go to early employees and say, “You should leave your other job and come work for this because here’s the incredible feature we’re imagining.” You have to go to the press and you have to make all these promises and you have users and you’ve committed things to the users and you’ve convinced them to give up their time for this thing. And so I think for a lot of people, it feels better to just keep doing it until it dies of suffocation due to lack of capital or something like that. Then just to admit, “Okay, I was wrong. This didn’t work,” and it’s humiliating. It’s painful. It’s wrenching. It has a bad impact.
When we shut down Glitch, there was a lot of people who loved it and would spend all of their free time and couldn’t wait to get home from work to go play it more. And that was their community and the community just disappeared, all these people and all these identities that have been created. And obviously, people lost their jobs and people who had moved their families to a different city in order to take this job now weren’t going to have a job anymore. So pivots aren’t something I take lightly. I think it’s very different to be like, “There’s three of us and we started making this app and then we pivoted to a different app.” That doesn’t even really count. If you’re six months into something, you’re still messing around. You’re trying to figure out what it is that you’re building. It’s not really a pivot. Obviously in this case, it worked out great and there’s survivorship bias and that doesn’t mean that everyone should pivot all the time. But I think creating the distance so that you can make an intellectual, rational decision about it rather than an emotional decision is essential.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love, also, your piece of advice of just exhaust. Once you’ve exhausted all the ideas, that’s a really good time to see what else is out there.
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah, just all the good ideas.
Lenny Rachitsky: All the good ideas,
Stewart Butterfield: All the realistic. Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah. The point you made about just kind of persevering, I just had Melanie Perkins, CEO of Canva, in the podcast. 100 investors rejected her before somebody finally decided to invest and she just kept pushing.
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah. I think that’s a slightly different example, right? She eventually believed in the concept of the product and in the vision. It was just trying to figure out the right articulation to get investors who ended up being obviously very, very happy.
Lenny Rachitsky: Extremely happy. Oh, geez. Okay. Maybe a final topic depending on how time goes. I want to talk about generosity. I talked to a bunch of people, as I said, that have worked with you and the number one theme that came up again and again and again when I asked them about you and what has stuck most with them is just generosity. So I’m going to read a few examples that I heard from folks that are examples of your generosity over the years.
So one person shared that he needed a little money before Christmas and he said, “Stewart literally walked me out of the building, went to the cash machine, handed me $500, told me to go home to my family.” Other folks shared that, when you talked about Glitch just recently when you had to lay people off, you cried real tears when you were laying people off and then you spent an incredible amount of time helping them find new jobs and extending their severance pay and just taking it extremely, extremely seriously, much more than I think most people feel like CEOs do. Someone else shared that you paid 100% of employees health insurance to give them just fewer things to think about.
When you went public, you basically created the best possible situation for employees, no lockup, direct listing. Also, with the structure of the Slack deal, people said that acquisition was very employee friendly. That’s employees. There’s also just the way you thought about customers. A few examples: You gave free credits to businesses who were struggling to pay the bills during COVID. You released this fair billing, which I think was very innovative at the time, where you stopped charging people for seats they weren’t using, even though they signed a deal to charge for those seats. A lot of times, you slipped release schedules because you just wanted to make features better and better for people. And I’ll end with this quote: “Stewart is a leader who takes the responsibility he feels for his employees personally, and to which he extends the most generous circumstances he could muster. That feels worth celebrating.”
So first of all, I just want to celebrate you. I think it’s really rare and inspiring to meet a leader like that. Clearly, you’ve had a lot of impact on a lot of people. I don’t know exactly the question I want to ask, but I guess in what part is this intentional, just like, “This is how we win. I’m going to be very generous and help people because I know this will help long-term”? How much of this is just a [inaudible 01:20:48] and it’s just the way you are as a person?
Stewart Butterfield: I think a lot of it is just the way I am as a person and I had wonderful parents who raised me right, but I think there is a little bit of a lesson there and I’m just going to assume people’s familiarity with the prisoner’s dilemma. The acts of generosity to me are, “Oh, I am demonstrating that I am going to cooperate as we iterate in this game.” And if you do that, then people will also cooperate and you both benefit. Whereas if you never really know if the other person is going to defect at the first opportunity, then your best bet is to defect. And so there’s a game theoretic aspect, usually in games that are much, much, much more complicated than the prisoner’s dilemma.
I think one thing I didn’t touch on before, but to me was important enough, is that at more than one company all hands, I made everyone in the company repeat this as a chant. It was, “In the long run, the measure of our success will be the amount of value that we create for customers.” And I wanted to be super clear and explicit about that because it should be if anything you’re doing feels like a little bit shady, a little bit cheating, a little bit maximizing at the wrong moment or taking advantage of a customer or anything like that, definitely shouldn’t do it. Because to me, I mean I think it’s literally true, but it’s also an ethical way to run a business. And it’s not just that the ethics are good. It’s like there’s advantages for you. You’re able to attract a better class of employees. If all your employees are ethical, then it’s going to be a better place for everyone to work and you’re going to be happier and you’re going to have fewer internal problems and all that stuff.
But I think it really is true that especially in the long run, you can’t destroy value for your customers and expect to be successful. You have to actually make their lives better. And you could put effort into pointing it out to them and demonstrating that you have created this value and stuff like that, but there’s no substitute for actually having created it. And I think that is incredibly important and that implies a real generosity, whether that’s in negotiating terms with an enterprise deal or that’s policy decisions. One time that it blew up in our face was our SLA was like, “For any downtime, you get 100 times your money back.” Because from my perspective, it’s like if we’re down for two minutes, it’s like pennies. It doesn’t really make any difference. If we’re down for 10 hours or something like that, then we have bigger problems than paying back people.
Fast-forward, we now have hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and we’ve gone public. And shortly after we go public, we have one of the biggest outages we ever had. I don’t remember how long it was, but it was many hours. But by the time we got that scale, 100 times the money back for the third of a day that we were down was $8 million or something like that. It didn’t cost us any money because we just gave it to people in the form of credits, but it meant that a bunch of revenue that we had already anticipated for the next quarter wasn’t going to show up because people’s credits were going to offset what they would’ve otherwise paid us. And so we definitely changed the terms of service after that because being a public company is a little bit different. But in every other respect, I think they were all really important decisions that were helpful in us becoming successful.
Lenny Rachitsky: Was that policy … It was automatic? You didn’t even have to claim it. It was just automatically you get this credit?
Stewart Butterfield: And the default is you don’t have to pay if you let us know. This was, “We will automatically, proactively, preemptively without any input from you …”
Lenny Rachitsky: Too generous.
Stewart Butterfield: “Apply this credit to your account, and just send you a message that it happened. And by the way, we will do it on the aggregate for downtime, even if the issue didn’t affect you as a customer.”
Lenny Rachitsky: Wow. Too generous. You found the edge of where you want to be.
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: What was that mantra again that you had the company chant? I think this is a really nice way to end it.
Stewart Butterfield: It was, “In the long run, the measure of our success will be the amount of value we create for customers.”
Lenny Rachitsky: Incredible. I’m just trying to picture the entire team at Slack reciting this mantra.
Stewart Butterfield: It was hundreds of people. It felt very like, Kim Jong-Un or Stalin or something like that.
Lenny Rachitsky: Well, on that note, most people don’t know this about you, but your actual name when you were born was not Stewart. It was Dharma.
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah.
Lenny Rachitsky: And this all makes sense as you learn that.
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah. My name is Dharma Jeremy Butterfield, so my parents named me. And when I was 12, I changed it because I just really wanted to be normal and for some reason I thought Stewart was a normal name. And by the way, you’ll notice this now that I said it. Any character except for Stuart Little the mouse, anytime you see a character in a movie, a novel, TV show or whatever, there’s only the loser Stewart and the asshole Stewart. It’s obviously, in the collective consciousness, a terrible name and I shouldn’t have chosen it and I regret it. But by the time I realized that, Dharma and Greg had already come out and it would’ve seemed like I was bandwagon jumping. And people thought it was a girl’s name, even though in India it’s obviously only a boy’s name.
I’m going to add just one last little tidbit because I forgot about this earlier on and I think it helps tie things together, and it’s called the owner’s delusion. And this is based on something I posted on Twitter. The person who came up with the name later deleted their account and so I have no idea who it was and who to credit for this. But what I had posted was, and this was a long time ago when restaurant websites have gotten better and it doesn’t really matter because Google Local was taking over everything, but this is, let’s say, 10 years ago.
There’s five things you could possibly want when you go to a restaurant’s website and it’s their street address, their phone number, the menu, the hours of operation … Oh my God, I’m forgetting the fifth thing. Oh, and making a reservation, how to make a reservation. And again, this problem has to some extent taken care of it’s itself or at least improved, but what you would get was this super slow loading photo, the Ken Burns effect as it [inaudible 01:27:30] …
Lenny Rachitsky: The flashed.
Stewart Butterfield: And then fading in and then some music starts playing. And then if they show you the phone number, it’s not clickable.
Lenny Rachitsky: Image.
Stewart Butterfield: It’s not even text that you can copy because yes, it’s an image. And they don’t have the hours. They don’t put the address or whatever and it’s just like, “What?” For sure, whoever made this website for the restaurant owner and the restaurant owner themselves have definitely been in the position where they went to somebody else’s restaurant website because they wanted to get the address or the opening hours or the phone number or whatever. So why does it end up like this and what should we call this?
And whoever replied to the tweet, she said, “We should call it the owner’s delusion,” and I was like, “Oh my God. That’s perfect.” And I think that is incredibly powerful and what ends up with the result, like Apple naming whatever that feature is called Sleep, which it’s too hard to understand what that can possibly mean. And that’s why people anticipate, despite the fact that when they get to your website for the first time, their intent is absolutely the minimum number of micro points above the threshold required from them to actually take that action.
You’re like, “All right. Welcome to my website,” and there’s a bunch of BS and there’s a bunch of stuff that doesn’t make any sense and the buttons are inscrutable. And it’s unclear what to do next because I think that my thing is so important and I don’t recognize that you are at work and you were late this morning and you have to go to the bathroom and you’re just a regular human being who has stuff going on, that you’re concerned that your kid is a fuck-up and they’re getting in trouble at school and stuff like that. They’re not subjects who paid money to go to your play and are sitting in the audience and waiting for that curtain to go out. They’re people who are going to bounce in a fraction of a second. And so everyone should always be conscious of the owner’s solution.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love that. What’s the solution? Is it have other people look at it and give you feedback?
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah, and recognize it. And unfortunately, it’s one of those things like Murphy’s Law.
Lenny Rachitsky: Yeah.
Stewart Butterfield: Even you can go wrong even when you take into account Murphy’s Law.
Lenny Rachitsky: That’s right.
Stewart Butterfield: But if you don’t name it and recognize it and discuss it and train yourself to think that way, take a breath, pretend you’re a regular person, and then look at this again and see if it makes sense, then you’re screwed.
Lenny Rachitsky: I love that. I love that you threw this in here. I have a billion other questions I’m going to ask you in part two when we do this someday. Stewart, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much for being here.
Stewart Butterfield: Yeah. Thank you for having me, Lenny. I really enjoyed it.
Lenny Rachitsky: Same here. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Glossary
| English | 中文 |
|---|---|
| affordances | 可供性 |
| Ali Rael | Ali Rael |
| Andrea Torres | Andrea Torres |
| Annie Duke | Annie Duke |
| Ben Brown | Ben Brown |
| Brandon Velestuk | Brandon Velestuk |
| Cal Henderson | Cal Henderson |
| Chris Cordell | Chris Cordell |
| consumerized B2B SaaS | 消费者化B2B SaaS |
| divine discontent | 神圣的不满 |
| fair billing | 公平计费(fair billing) |
| Fareed | Fareed |
| hyperrealistic work-like activities | 超写实工作类活动 |
| Johnny Rogers | Johnny Rogers |
| Lenny Rachitsky | Lenny Rachitsky |
| Melanie Perkins | Melanie Perkins |
| Mental models | 心智模型 |
| Noah Weiss | Noah Weiss |
| owner’s delusion | 所有者错觉 |
| Parkinson’s law | 帕金森定律 |
| Positioning | 《定位》(Positioning) |
| prisoner’s dilemma | 囚徒困境(prisoner’s dilemma) |
| SLA | 服务级别协议(SLA) |
| Stewart Butterfield | 斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德 |
| Thinking in Bets | 《对赌》(Thinking in Bets) |
| utility curves | 效用曲线 |
| we don’t sell saddles here | 我们这里不卖马鞍 |
Reformatted by reformat_english.py
打造受人喜爱的产品,本质上是对价值创造与用户认知的极致追求。在本次对话中,Slack与Flickr创始人斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德分享了他深刻的产品心智模型。他坦言,产品人必须对作品保持苛刻审视,坚信长期成功唯有真实的客户价值可以替代。巴特菲尔德打破了“消除摩擦”的行业迷思,指出真正的挑战在于让用户在使用软件时不必思考。他更借“效用曲线”揭示了一个反直觉的洞见:功能投入与价值产出并非线性,在越过关键阈值前,半吊子的功能堆砌毫无意义。本文还探讨了面对业务转型时的理性决策法则。对于希望跳出功能窠臼、探寻产品本质的构建者而言,这篇对话提供了沉稳且极具穿透力的思考路径。
打造人们喜爱产品的心智模型(Mental models) 特邀 Stewart Butterfield
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 那是2014年,Slack真正发布的那年。我当时接受《麻省理工科技评论》采访,被问到我们是否在努力改进Slack。我说:“我觉得我们现在拥有的这东西就是一坨巨大的狗屎。它太糟糕了,我们把这东西提供给公众,应该感到羞耻。”对我而言,这就像是,“你应该感到尴尬。”如果你看不到几乎无限的改进机会,那你就不该设计这个产品。
Lenny Rachitsky: Slack作为早期的消费者化B2B SaaS(consumerized B2B SaaS)产品之一而闻名。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 在不止一次的公司全员大会上,我让公司里的每个人把这当作口号重复。从长远来看,衡量我们成功的标准将是我们为客户创造的价值量,你可以努力去证明你创造了这种价值之类的东西,但没有任何东西可以替代真正创造了价值本身。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我还听说你经常推崇的一个观点是,产品体验中的摩擦实际上往往是一件好事?
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 人们开始想当然地认为应该总是试图消除摩擦,而真正的挑战在于理解。如果你的软件停下来让我做个决定,而我又不太理解,你让我觉得自己很蠢。如果人们能克服将减少摩擦作为一个目标,或者减少做某事的点击或触摸次数的想法,转而关注我怎样才能让这变得简单?我如何才能防止人们为了使用我的软件而不得不思考?
关于创业转型
Lenny Rachitsky: 你创办了两家公司,都以著名的转型而闻名。我想很多人会来找你寻求关于转型的建议。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 这个决定在于你是否已经穷尽了所有可能性?拉开距离,以便你能对它做出理智的理性决定,而不是情绪化的决定,这是至关重要的。我说你必须对此保持冷酷理性的原因是,这实在太他妈丢人了。
节目开场与嘉宾介绍
Lenny Rachitsky: 今天我的嘉宾是斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德,一位极少做播客的创始人和产品传奇人物。斯图尔特创立了Flickr,随后创立了Slack,并以当时科技史上最大的收购之一将其卖给了Salesforce。他的脑海中蕴藏着大量的产品与领导力智慧。我觉得我们的对话只是触及了皮毛。我们讨论了效用曲线(utility curves)、他称之为“所有者错觉”(owner’s delusion)的概念、他在公司里看到的一种他称之为“超写实工作类活动”(hyperrealistic work-like activities)的滑稽模式,他关于产品、工艺、品味以及帕金森定律(Parkinson’s law)的经验,为什么你需要执着于不让用户思考,他那篇著名的《我们这里不卖马鞍》(we don’t sell saddles here)备忘录的背景等等。非常感谢Noah Weiss、Chris Cordell、Ali Rael和Johnny Rogers为这次对话建议的话题和问题。这是一期非常特别的节目,我非常希望能再次邀请斯图尔特来更深入地探讨。斯图尔特,非常感谢你来到这里,欢迎来到播客。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 谢谢你的邀请,我很兴奋。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我甚至更兴奋。很荣幸你能来这里。我从没告诉过你,但自从几年前我开始做这个播客以来,你一直是我最想邀请的嘉宾列表最顶端的人之一,所以我们终于促成这件事,我非常激动。我有很多问题想问你。我的第一个问题就是,你最近到底在忙些什么?我觉得自从你离开Slack后,我们就很少听到斯图尔特的消息了。我很好奇你在忙些什么,希望能有所作为,或者只是在放松。
近期动态与新思考
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 我基本上只是在放松。我两年半前离开了Salesforce,我有一个两岁半的孩子,她实际上是在我最后一天工作三天后出生的,所以有很多时间陪家人,能够在孩子还小的时候花时间陪伴他们是一种巨大的特权。没有新公司要宣布或类似的事情。我确实会收到很多电子邮件和短信。基本上每三到六周就有这样一个循环,因为Cal Henderson是Slack的CTO,我们也在Flickr上合作过,所以现在已经一起工作了23年,我们一直在讨论如果有什么要做的话,接下来想做什么。
但老实说,巨大的挑战在于,我认为这些东西正在摧毁世界,而我们擅长的正是制作软件。所以如果你能找到一种制作软件的方法来帮助人们减少使用手机的频率,那将是一个巨大的成功,但我还没有想出什么好主意。有很多慈善工作,目前还没有什么可宣布的,但有一些我正在参与的酷项目,还有很多只是个人的创意艺术项目以及支持其他艺术家之类的事情。
效用曲线与产品价值
Lenny Rachitsky: 为了准备这次对话,我与多年来和你共事过的许多人进行了交流,试图找出你在构建产品、组建团队和创建公司方面教给他们的、最让他们印象深刻、最能帮助他们打造出色产品的经验。第一个是一个叫做效用曲线(utility curves)的概念。这个概念在与你共事过的许多人中被反复提及。请谈谈什么是效用曲线,以及你如何用它来打造更好的产品。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 这个很容易解释,因为它是一条大家非常熟悉的S形曲线,开始时很平坦,然后开始向上弯曲,接着是一个非常陡峭的部分,最后又趋于平缓。在横轴上,你可以认为是成本或精力,在纵轴上,则是价值或便利性。这取决于你具体在讨论什么,但核心思想是,你在一件事上投入的第一点精力并不会产生巨大的价值。然后会有一个神奇的阈值,越过它就能产生巨大的价值,而继续投资就不再有回报了。我能想到的最基本的例子是,假设你在做一把锤子,在那个底轴上现在是质量,如果锤子的手柄一受冲击就断裂,那它就完全没用。如果你让它稍微坚固一点,它仍然很没用,就像废品,废品,废品,废品,废品。好了,不错,很棒。然后就不再重要了。
如果你在做一个应用程序,好吧,这个应用会有用户,所以让我们建一个用户表和一个数据库,到目前为止你还没有产生任何价值。我觉得这很重要的原因在于,当我们讨论某个功能时,通常会把功能看作是二元的。你要么有这个功能,要么没有。争论的焦点我想是,究竟是我们投入得不够,还是我们已经从这个功能中获得了所有可能获得的价值、便利性或质量等?而且我们已经指出了边际收益递减,它就不再重要了。我认为在很多情况下,人们会添加一个功能,但它不够好,所以人们不使用或不欣赏它,但现在你已经给应用增加了一些复杂性,然后人们放弃或者撤回它,或者他们在测试中尝试了一些东西却没有得到想要的结果,于是他们决定这件事是值得做的。我们会尝试真正去调查并决定我们是处于曲线的第一个平缓部分,第二个平缓部分,还是刚刚接近陡峭部分。所以我认为,当你谈论一个特定的应用和特定的功能时,更容易理解这个概念的价值,但我认为它最终有助于让人们理解某件事是否值得做。
Lenny Rachitsky: 所以为了复述一下我听到的内容,如果你想象这条曲线,在最底部时,就像是我甚至不知道这是什么。沿着曲线往上,就像是,好吧,我大概明白了。而在最顶端时,就是,好吧,既然我明白了这是用来干什么的,我就离不开它了。这感觉像是一种真正不同的思维方式,用来思考如何让用户达到顿悟时刻,让他们看到,好吧,保存的项目,我懂了,我需要经常使用它。感觉这既适用于特定功能,也适用于Slack本身,让用户甚至开始理解Slack能为你做什么。然后现在我就离不开Slack了。本质上,这是你用来确定在哪里投入产品资源的一个视角,因为如果你没有沿着曲线爬升到“我懂了”并且“我离不开它”的阶段,其他一切都不重要了。这就是这个框架吗?
标准提升与持续投资
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 是的,我认为然后你可以在其上叠加另一个概念,比如贝索斯使用过的“神圣的不满”这个词。这条线实际上是在移动的,因为一旦人们熟悉了一个软件或者某个功能的实现方式之类的东西,他们的标准就会提高,所以存在这种竞争。再说一次,这个轴可以是,效用是对它最好的通用术语,但它也可以是质量、便利性、速度,可以是任何数量的东西,但是当你改善你的搜索能力,或者改善你的登录体验、忘记密码体验、结账体验等等时,其他人也都在这样做。因此存在着持续的投资,当不去考虑新功能时,你看到的是产品整体是如何运作的,通常事情被实现一次,然后如果幸运的话,它们会定期得到改进。大多数事情得到改进的频率非常低,有些事情则从未得到改进。
我想举一个极其极端的例子,因为我其实不知道这种情况存在多久了,但我尽量不太多批评别人的软件,因为我对权衡、优先级排序以及这有多困难等等非常熟悉,诸如此类。但好吧,大多数人的手机上都有Gmail日历应用。我经常旅行。我大部分时间在东部时区,有时在山地时区,有时在太平洋时区,有时在英国时间,有时在日本、中欧。我可能只会选择10个、12个时区。当你在iOS应用上的Google日历中点击设置活动时区的选项时,它会按字母顺序显示世界上所有的时区。我的意思是,可能还有更糟糕的排序方式,但这其中没有任何价值。甚至当你开始搜索时,它仍然按国家按字母顺序显示它们。所以如果我在加州,想为下周回纽约时设置一个约会,我输入E-A-S-T,然后得到一堆垃圾,好吧,Eastern,然后第一个是澳大利亚东部,新南威尔士州,然后是澳大利亚东部,昆士兰州,然后是澳大利亚东部夏令时和澳大利亚东部标准时间。然后你会想,“好吧,见鬼,我记不住哪个是夏令时,哪个是标准时间?”我可以像这样继续说一会儿。这是一个至少被数亿人使用的应用,大概每个谷歌员工都在用。它糟糕得令人发指。有太多,有所有这些你可以做的聪明事情。比如你知道我在西海岸,第一个选项应该是东海岸,反之亦然。但绝对不应该是每个时区都被呈现为具有同等价值。我不需要几百个时区。我在加拿大长大。纽芬兰有自己的时区,偏移半小时。纽芬兰的人口大约有五十万。没有多少人去参观纽芬兰,也许历史上总共有一百万人,所以在80亿人中大概是一百五十万。然后是纽芬兰,中国时间也是一样,这里包含了世界上大约25%的人口。不管怎样,在这个例子上我花的时间比预期的要长一点,但这很疯狂,因为没有人会因为时区选择器好用,就从Outlook Exchange切换到Gmail或G Suite、Google日历,所以也许在某种意义上这不重要,但同时,让客户感到愉悦是有真正价值的,他们会形成或不形成一种情感联系。在某些情况下,这可能是非常积极的,比如他们会推荐它。当他们更换公司或决定创办自己的公司时,他们会因为这种情感联系而选择使用这个产品或为其辩护,反之亦然。
品味与竞争优势
Lenny Rachitsky: 让我们再深入探讨一下关于愉悦感和工艺的话题。Slack 作为早期的、可以说是消费者化B2B SaaS产品之一而闻名。Slack 致力于打造愉悦感、体验、工艺以及出色的体验。而你作为产品领导者,我想说你以非常有品味、非常注重工艺而闻名,这是相当罕见的,我认为现在依然罕见。所以这里有几件事我想谈谈。一个是品味。我听说你在一次演讲中谈论过品味,你对品味是什么、产品品味是什么样的有着非常独特的视角。你能分享一下吗?
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 再次回到效用曲线,有很多人痴迷于某一个小细节,并在超出它产生多大影响的节点之后,还在不断添加越来越多细致的改进。但关于品味我想说几点。首先是你能学着培养它吗?我认为可以,因为这个字面意思就来自于体验食物并把东西放进嘴里。人们能通过训练成为更好的厨师吗?是的,绝对可以。毫无疑问,有些人有天然的优势,天生就具备做出其他人难以做出的辨别的能力等等。但你绝对可以练习,也绝对可以变得更好。我想说的第二件事是,你可以通过倾注于品味来为自己、为你的产品、为你的公司创造真正的优势,因为大多数人没有好品味,也不去投资。你可能又很熟悉杰夫·贝索斯的那句话,“你的利润就是我的机会”,他这么说的意思相当明显。
倾斜雨伞的隐喻
我在 Slack 会一遍又一遍地讲这个故事。它实际上成了新员工入职欢迎的一部分。我在温哥华的办公室,和 Brandon Velestuk 一起散步,他当时是我们产品开发的创意总监,我想那是他的头衔。我们在温哥华的耶鲁镇街区,那里的人行道非常窄,因为它以前是一个仓库区,现在到处都是高档餐厅、美甲店和精品店之类的东西。就像温哥华常有的那样,开始下雨了。我们没有伞。我们走回办公室,大多数人都有伞,我们就在这些狭窄的人行道上,迎面走来撑伞的人。我们注意到很少有人会把他们的伞挪开。当然,另一个人,他们的伞,那些尖尖的部分刚好对准了迎面走来的人的眼睛高度。我们会被迫走下人行道,或者不得不弯下腰之类的。
这变成了一场游戏,就像我们在猜这个人会不会把伞倾斜让开让我们过去。大概只有三分之一的人会这么做。我们就此进行了一次对话,大概是这样的,我能想到人们不这么做的三个原因。一是他们生活中很少有行使权力的途径,而这算是其中之一。他们只是想出去支配别人并造成痛苦。不要把可以归咎于无知的事情归咎于恶意,所以这可能是极小极小极小一部分人的解释。
但另外两个解释也不怎么好。一个是他们看到了这种情况的发生,看到他们把别人挤下人行道或者戳到别人的眼睛之类的,然后他们就像,“妈的,太糟了。我希望我能对此做点什么,但我想不出任何办法。”最后一个原因就是他们根本没注意到。他们只是对自己对别人的影响毫无察觉。他们太沉浸在自己的世界里了,除此之外我真的想不出任何其他的解释了。
所以我们会说,倾斜你的伞并不是我们的机会。这并不是对“你的利润就是我的机会”的一个很好的改写,但你未能真正考虑去行使这种礼貌,真正对别人的体验感同身受,这是一种优势,你可以创造一个关键的优势。我认为 Slack 在当时成功的原因有很多。它成功了,我们认为我们有一堆非常好的顺风车和所有这些东西,但如果没有那些让人们形成情感联系的小便利,它就不会以那样的方式增长,因为我们的很多增长来自于初创公司 A 使用了 Slack,然后有人从初创公司 A 离职去了初创公司 B,而初创公司 B 还没有使用 Slack。然后他们会说,“天哪,伙计们,这个真的,这个太好了。我们得试试。”这种传播就是由这种真正的倡导驱动的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这是一个绝妙的隐喻。我喜欢那个瞬间成为了 Slack 产品工艺的一个价值观。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: “倾斜你的伞”在公司周边商品之类的东西上是一句非常常见的话。
魔法链接与体验权衡
Lenny Rachitsky: 有没有一个例子,我想肯定有很多,但在构建 Slack 的时期,尤其是在早期,当你选择在工艺、体验和愉悦感上投入大量精力,而不是追求速度时,事后看来你觉得那是一个非常棒的主意,并且对成功来说是真正核心的。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 这里有一堆小例子。别人想出了这个主意,我试图回想那是谁,让我们看看,也许是 Andrea Torres,也许是 Ben Brown,诸如此类的人,他们大概会说,“如果他们对电子邮件地址的所有权本来就是允许他们创建账户的东西,我们为什么要让人们输入电子邮件地址和密码?我们为什么不只问他们要电子邮件地址,然后给他们发一个链接?”
所以当 Slack 第一版移动应用发布时,我们就像,“如果你对密码卫生有任何最低限度的要求,在手机上输入密码就是一个糟糕的体验。”大写H,小写q,数字6,脱字符,句号。所以我们就让他们输入电子邮件地址。我们会给他们发一个链接。这个链接会自动打开应用并验证他们。这就是一个小例子。
Lenny Rachitsky: 哇。所以是你们发明了魔法链接体验。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 别人发明的。我想说清楚,我曾在别的地方见过这个想法,是别人写的一篇关于它的博客文章之类的。但据我所知,我们是第一个真正将其规模化并使其成为标准的。还有一个例子,在早期我们真的对此感到很困惑,人们从 AOL Instant Messenger 到 SMS 再到 WhatsApp,有很长的使用消息应用的历史,他们的期望是每收到一条消息就会得到一个通知。在 Slack 的情况下,这就不太说得通了,因为你是很多频道的成员,而且这些消息可能不是给你的,所以这就是为什么我们有@标记人的功能。我们当然没有发明这个,那是 Twitter 发明的。
但我们意识到的是,人们在注册 Slack 时,可能是这个大公司里大组织下某个团队里的一名工程师,他们会把旁边的人拉过来,然后说:“我们试试看吧。”
引导用户行为与功能设计
然后他们会发一条消息,然后就会有个人说:“我没收到通知。这什么破玩意儿。”我们很不情愿地决定,必须将每条消息都发送通知作为新账户的默认设置。但一旦你达到,我不记得具体阈值是多少了,我想是当你收到10条消息后,我们就会弹出一个小提示说:“嘿,你目前使用的是我们的通知默认设置。我们不希望 Slack 对你来说太吵。你想切换到我们的——”
……关于通知的。我们不希望 Slack 对你来说太吵。你想切换到我们的推荐设置吗?”然后他们只需点击一个链接,就会切换到本该作为默认的设置,也就是只有收到私信或有人@你时才会收到通知。但我们意识到,为了帮人们度过这个最初的门槛,这种投入是值得的。我再举一个简单的例子,然后再举一个稍微复杂的。首先,人们会像,我记不清那是叫紧急还是重要,但在 Outlook 里给收件人设置消息优先级的那个小旗子,在每个公司内部总是被滥用。只要有人这么做了,其他人就会想:“好吧,我的消息也要这么搞。”
于是你所有的消息都带上了小旗子,这就变得毫无用处。我们有 @everyone 功能,发送消息时它会向频道里的每个成员发送通知,人们会开始,组织里会有人发现这个功能。他们会 @everyone,每个人都会收到通知,然后下一个发消息的人就会觉得:“嗯,我的事情比 Bob 的事情更重要。我也要 @everyone。”这变得非常惹人厌,人们也会抱怨,但这就是,我不知道,算是公地悲剧吧。虽然不完全是一回事,但这确实是反复发生的真实动态。
所以我们就想出了所谓的“尖叫公鸡”的方案,在内部我们说:“别做鸡(别当混蛋)。”但我们在公开场合显然不会这么说,当你使用 @everyone 时,会弹出一只小公鸡,它嘴巴里发出声波,显得非常烦人,并且会说:“嘿,这将会给8个不同时区的147人发送通知。你确定要发送这条带有 @everyone 的消息吗?”当然,这招奇效,滥用的情况马上就降下来了。再说一次,这真的是在试图塑造人们的行为,让他们使用,一方面不是要非常死板,但我们知道有些使用方式会惹人厌并给所有人造成困扰。因此试图塑造组织内部的沟通文化,以便最好地利用它。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这个功能现在还在。我一直能看到那只公鸡,不,不是一直能看到,嗯,其实我 @channel 的时候能看到,因为我管理着一个大型 Slack,所以我看到了那只公鸡,它存活了下来。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 对。对,它存活了下来,而且很好,因为实现起来极其简单,却带来了非常大的改变。但它也教会了人们产品是如何运作的,因为人们可能不知道 @everyone 或者 @channel……至少没想过其中的代价。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太巧妙了。
“请勿打扰”功能的复杂发布策略
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 对。再举一个例子。我们决定要做“请勿打扰”这个功能。我们面临着,不算什么难题,但你必须考虑到 Slack 所有不同的使用场景,因为当我们在2017年实现这个功能时,已经有了数以万计的付费客户,这些组织里大概有数百万用户,也许是数十万个组织。我不记得具体数字了。每个人都以自己喜欢的方式设置好了东西,包括把运维警报发到世界上一些最大系统和应用的待命工程师所在的频道里。所以我们不能马上直接部署它。我们意识到一些决策者,即组织所有者,会对这件事有非常强烈的意见。我们也意识到一些终端用户也会有强烈的意见,我们想找出一种方法来平衡这些顾虑,并给人们提供适当的控制手段。
所以我们在发布时想出了这套非常精细的系统,也就是我们在功能上线前几周告诉了所有人,抱歉,是告诉了每一位 Slack 管理员这个功能即将推出。我们告诉他们,我们将为他们的组织设置一个默认值,我相信那是他们当地时区的晚上7点到早上7点,或者是早上8点到晚上8点,我记不清是哪个了,但同时他们可以覆盖这个默认值,而且单个终端用户也可以覆盖系统所有者设置的默认值。最后,如果系统所有者再次更改默认值,将会覆盖所有终端用户的偏好设置,然后终端用户可以再次覆盖它们。这并不是为了创造一种让人们相互对抗的动态,而是为了让你可以更改一项策略,然后人们依然可以进行自定义之类的操作。
但这是一个漫长得多也更复杂的过程,但它让数以百万计使用 Slack 的人能够用上这个功能,而不会产生一堆冲突,也不会让人们自动把它关掉。我认为关键的一点是,设置了一系列默认值,因为如果我们不设置默认值,大多数人根本不会打开它。如果我们不默认让你在晚上8点到早上8点之间处于“请勿打扰”状态,你大概,作为一个普通人,永远不会自己去设置。所以这是另一个精细的例子,我认为这种投入是合理的,因为这对很多人来说是一个关键功能。如果我们没有那样做,我想这会引起很多抱怨、冲突之类的事情。
Lenny Rachitsky: 这些例子太棒了。你们推出那个“请勿打扰”功能时,我非常感激。我仍然记得它上线的时候。我相信很多人对此非常感谢。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 对。
摩擦力作为特性
Lenny Rachitsky: 我还听到你经常提倡的另一件事,这对很多人来说很反直觉,那就是关于产品体验中的摩擦力。摩擦力实际上往往是一件好事。如果你运用得当,它在很多时候是一个特性,而不是一个缺陷。谈谈你在那方面的经验吧。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 对。是的,关于摩擦力还有另一个问题,那就是它变成了一种信条,或者只是一种假设,认为你总是应该试图消除摩擦力。在某些情况下确实如此。我们在 Slack 内部会讨论这个。它很难营销。如果你以前从未用过它,很难解释它是什么。你可以说它是面向企业的消息应用之类的,但是 Slack 做户外广告、竖广告牌相比啤酒或汽车的一个关键劣势是,没有人需要被解释为什么他们会想要一辆车或啤酒,但每个人总有一天都必须解释为什么他们想要 Slack。所以那里的问题在于理解门槛,这个问题会大量出现。所以现在想象一下,你想买旧金山泰勒·斯威夫特演唱会的门票,然后你去了 Ticketmaster 网站。
想想你的理解程度,它在这个案例中是完美的。这转化为你意图的明确性,你意图的程度也被拉满了。所以你看,我真的很想拿到这些门票。我完全清楚它们是什么,它们是某一天在某个场馆的泰勒·斯威夫特门票。所以在那种场景下,Ticketmaster 的网站慢一点或者支付页面出个错都没关系,你会坚持到底并完成购买。因此显然,减少摩擦力更好,但从某种意义上说,这样做的价值并没有那么大。
对于大多数产品创造者来说,也有少数情况对你来说确实如此。这包括用户注册、身份验证、电子商务的结账流程等。如果有 Apple Pay 或 Shop Pay 之类的东西,我购买某物的可能性会大大增加。相反,如果必须逐个手动输入地址的所有字段,而不是使用那些地址选择器,我完成购买的可能性就会大大降低。这很疯狂,但问题在于我的意图并不总是 100%,我意图的明确性也并不总是 100%。
所以如果你做的是直接面向消费者的 T 恤,并且通过 Instagram 广告获取客户,他们都知道 T 恤是什么。就像,“这对我来说看起来像件不错的 T 恤。”但我很少有 100% 的意图。我可能有一个非常明确的意图,但我的意图大概是 70%。所以如果摩擦力超过了这个比例,我就不会去做了。但现在,好吧,那些来到 Slack.com 的人,可能几个月前有个朋友提到过 Slack 并且对他们絮叨个不停,然后他们看到了一篇新闻报道,接着看到了某人的推文,然后在他们访问的网站上看到了一个广告,最后他们说,“好吧,我要去这个网站看看。”
所以他们的意图处于绝对的最小阈值。在最后一个事件发生之前,他们低于阈值,现在他们高于阈值,但也仅仅是高出一点。他们意图的明确性,比如“我需要买某一天在某个场馆的泰勒·斯威夫特演唱会门票”,也是非常低的,因为他们会觉得,“这是个工作用的东西。我不确定它是个电子表格还是日历,或者它到底是什么。”所以他们是带着超过这些关键阈值 0.1% 的状态进来的。挑战是什么?不是摩擦力,因为他们不像是在瞄准某个东西,并且清楚自己在瞄准什么,只是在努力让自己达到那个目标。
我们需要担心的是建立理解,这体现在两个方面:这是什么东西?我接下来应该做什么?这种在解释事物意义上的建立理解,这种在 UI 设计、屏幕、页面或其他任何东西的设计意义上的建立理解,以及视觉层级、存在的可供性(affordances)、可交互事物的指示,以及接下来应该做哪件事等等所有这些东西,变得非常关键。我认为极少有人认识到这一点,他们会想,“我想让来到我网页的人尽可能快地到达注册表单。”
但如果他们不知道自己要注册什么,也不知道接下来会发生什么,会给他们发垃圾邮件吗?他们不知道,“我下一步是不是得付钱之类的?”那他们就会直接退出。这是一场旷日持久的战斗,因为消除摩擦力的导向在人们心中太根深蒂固了。再说一遍,在人们确实有意图并且确实知道自己想做什么的情况下,它确实能发挥重要作用,但当真正的挑战是理解时,这就是一种糟糕的方法。
我认为秘诀在于,产品设计的绝大部分,70%、80%或者随便多少,都在于这个理解步骤。因为如果人们真的打开了偏好设置标签页并查看所有选项,他们很少有清楚想法的时候。如果你不能教他们,或者不能让他们有可能发现这些功能是什么,那么他们就不会去利用这些功能,也不会从中获得太多价值。我认为诀窍在于,对于任何应用程序的大多数独特部分,你的应用、产品、软件所做的大多数特定事情,挑战都将是理解而非摩擦。
这真的可以是任何东西,比如 Shopify,其服务对其最终用户的目的通常会比较清晰。但是大多数人,大多数第一次开店的人,不知道他们可以获取报告。或者即使知道可以获取报告,也不知道有哪些类型的报告。如果他们知道可以获得哪些类型的报告,他们也不知道如何调整这些报告,时间安排应该是怎样的,以及哪些东西更重要需要展示。我可以一直说下去,人们就是没有认识到这一点。
所以我想看看这是不是仍然成立,我就打开我手机上的时钟应用看看,他们对闹钟有着最疯狂的描述。这有点不一样,但大家可以看看自己的手机。所以我这里写着,闹钟,然后写着睡眠和一个竖线,唤醒,然后写着无闹钟,还有一个写着更改的按钮。然后如果你点击它,它会说睡眠已关闭,要自动开启睡眠功能并编辑你的日程安排,你需要开启睡眠。
所以很明显,如果你已经有办法让人们理解这个东西,那么“睡眠”是个好名字。如果你没有,它就不合语法并且难以理解,你为什么要这么做呢?我敢猜,这么多年过去了,90%以上甚至可能 98% 的人只是做我做的事,也就是你直接创建,“我想开启闹钟,然后我要设置它的时间。”我不知道开启睡眠会做什么,但正是缺乏理解阻碍了人们获得价值。
我确信在开启睡眠背后有一大堆价值,不管那意味着什么,人们在这些功能上花了很多时间。它还与生物识别和你的手表集成,或者谁知道呢。再说一遍,我还是不知道,因为开启睡眠就像是,那是做什么的?它会让我付出什么代价?它会产生什么影响?
决策的认知与情感成本
对我来说,这些例子简直比比皆是。我不使用大多数有实际选择点的软件的原因,或者我不使用大多数对我来说有选择点的功能的原因,是因为我不理解它们要做什么,而且我根本不在乎。如果有一个信条可以让我用来替代的话,那就是 Don’t Make Me Think,我不知道你是否记得那本书。
Lenny Rachitsky: 当然记得。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 是的。老实说,我读那本书已经是十多年前的事了,所以我甚至不记得书里所有的例子了。但作为一个信条,它的地位和效用曲线一样高,原因有两点。一个是做决定真的很昂贵,你真地在消耗葡萄糖。存在一种代谢作用,在你的线粒体和神经元中产生了 ATP,发生了一堆事情。人们确实会感到决策疲劳,所有这些东西都有认知成本。但还有一个情感层面,那就是,如果你的软件把我拦下一秒钟,让我做一个决定,而我又不太理解它,你让我觉得自己很蠢。我会觉得,“我不明白这个。”
减少点击与降低认知负担
有些人的倾向可能是,“好吧,是这软件太蠢了。”但我认为大多数人的反应是,“哦,是我太笨了。”如果你和不怎么精通技术的人聊过,典型的例子就是50岁以下的人教父母使用某款软件以及他们该怎么做时,父母总会觉得自己很蠢,仿佛是他们做错了什么。因此,如果你迫使人们去思考,往好了说,这毫无必要地消耗了他们的生理资源;往坏了说,你现在让他们感觉很糟,在情感上很糟,而且他们会永远将这种糟糕的感觉与你的产品联系在一起。这些事情就这么一种接着一种地交织在一起。
所以我要接着讲最后一点,因为它们恰好凑到了一起,那就是伴随减少摩擦而来的,像是减少某人完成某事所需的点击或轻触次数,这几乎总是完全错误的做法。你可以通过在一个滚动了成千上万页的屏幕上展示每一种可能性,让应用里的任何操作都只需单次点击或轻触,这是最简单的方法。显然这糟透了。那为什么人们会觉得稍微来一点这种做法是好的呢?这里有个例子。你打开一个菜单,里面有14件人们可能想做的事。第一层是把它们归类为相似的项目,并在中间放一个垂直的,抱歉,水平的分隔线,这样至少人们可以分块并看到里面有什么。第二步是展示两三个最常见的选项,或者五个最常见的,随便多少,然后提供某种形式的“其他”,接着你进入一个包含更多项目的子菜单,而如何调优这个决定变得极其重要。我又要拿谷歌开涮了,只是因为……我觉得我在这里简直像唐纳德·特朗普,但我又要用另一个故事打断自己了。那是——
Lenny Rachitsky: 好啊,讲吧。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 在某次大会或活动上,我不记得是什么了,大概八年前,会议结束后我们在那个地方的酒吧里。Stripe 的 John Collison 在那里,谷歌的首席执行官 Sundar 也在那里。然后 John,抱歉,Patrick 走到 Sundar 面前,他们本可以聊任何事。Stripe 在那时还不是现在的庞然大物,但它已经是一家重要的公司了,正在崛起。而 Patrick 想和 Sundar 聊的是什么呢?是 Gmail 应用里拖拽联系人的功能。当你回复全部时,你经常想把“收件人”改成“抄送”,或者把某人从“抄送”移到“收件人”之类的。而要在 Gmail 应用里做到这一点,身体上所需的灵巧程度非常高。
这个问题至今仍未修复,但让我真正感到震撼的是,Patrick 本来可以提出任何要求的。可以是任何话题,也可以是合作。但这个功能如此让他恼火,他简直无法释怀。所以不管怎样,回到吐槽谷歌的话题上,谷歌在许多方面做得非常出色,他们在某些方面、某些方面做了一堆很棒的事情,但 Gmail 针对单封邮件的操作被拆分到了两个不同的、非常长的菜单中。而其中一个操作在任何一个菜单里都不存在。有一个没有标签的图标是唯一能完成该操作的方式,那就是把已读的邮件标记为未读。我完全不明白为什么有些操作在这个菜单里,有些又在另一个菜单里。我想可能是因为有些操作是针对单封邮件的,有些是针对整个邮件线索的,但这似乎并不怎么一致。
每一种可能的操作都被罗列在一个地方。于是它变得极其难用,因为有时你必须在两个菜单里都点一下,读遍所有的选项,然后说:“好吧,我用排除法,它不在这里,那肯定在那里。”Uber 现在不再是这种运作方式了,但当我第一次在 Slack 内部向人们提出这个问题时,Uber 应用曾有那么一个阶段,当你打开它时,界面上只有“你想去哪里?”和其他。“其他”里包含了所有事情,比如更改支付方式、设置你的位置,任何你能在 Uber 里做的事情。那简直太完美了,因为几乎在所有时候,人们只是想选择他们想去的地方。有时你想更改上车地点,因为你还没到那里或者怎样。那感觉就像,还有什么比“我要告诉你我想去哪里,或者我要完成其他事情”更简单的呢?
极致流畅的交互体验
我真的极力去推动人们思考,人们在这里可能想做的一件事是什么,或者两件事是什么,又或者可能是三件事是什么,然后把所有其他东西都放在“其他”里面。然后,如果这需要他们点击或轻触八次才能完成某事,但每一次都极其简单,那就很棒。如果你把它减少到两次点击或轻触,但这其中的每一个部分都充满了令人纠结的决定——我要打开所有的菜单,试图弄清楚哪个才是正确的选项——而且,将三样东西互相比较就已经很困难了,四样东西……把15个不同的选项互相比较,来看看这是否是你想要的那个,这种成本是呈几何级数增加的。那只会变得昂贵得无法承受。所以对我来说,这些全都紧密相连。如果人们能够克服将减少摩擦作为[听不清]或者减少做某事的点击或轻触次数的想法,转而专注于“我怎样才能让这件事变简单?”、“我如何才能防止人们为了使用我的软件而不得不思考?”、“我怎样才能让这件事变得极其简单?”,那就好了。最后一个例子,因为这对我的影响真的很大。当时我们在 Slack 内部讨论所有这些问题,我正往返于温哥华和旧金山之间,我在登机排队时跟在一个青少年后面,当时我们在登机廊桥上。队伍排了很久。我看着她使用 Snapchat,那简直疯狂。
她每秒钟至少轻触四次,有时每秒六七次。就像是在划掉动态、做些别的事情。但这其中有一种流畅感,因为一切都是类似这样的:我想再看一遍这个吗?我想看这个人的下一条动态吗?我想切换到另一个人吗?相反,一条通知弹了出来,她回复了某人的消息,她给自己拍了张自拍,一切就像……所以她以每秒四次的频率轻触了六分钟。我的意思是,中间可能有些停顿。而那就是在2016年或那是何时,一个15岁女孩对 Snapchat 最高效、最极致的运用。想象一下,如果目标是试图让她少点几下,那对她和 Snapchat 都想创造的那种体验来说,将会造成多大的阻碍?
产品领袖的不满与重构
Lenny Rachitsky: 听你讲这些以及你给出的例子真的很有趣,这让我们深入了解了你的思维方式,那就是你对自己的产品和其他产品的工作方式始终不满足。我认为这就是核心。Patrick 就是 Stripe 的一个很好的例子。我觉得这是非常成功的产品领袖身上反复出现的一个主题,那就是对事物运作的方式始终不满足、不开心。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 是的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我甚至很喜欢你总结这些的方式,这是一个非常好的重新建构:与其痴迷于减少摩擦和减少步骤,不如去想,我如何才能减少用户必须进行的思考量?我从未听过有人这样描述过,即你必须考虑到真正用于思考的 ATP 和葡萄糖,而你的目标是减少这些消耗,而不是仅仅去减少摩擦、减少点击。
直面缺陷与将批评视为动力
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 是的。我想在我那些比较愤世嫉俗的例子里,我会对人们说:“停下手头的工作一秒钟,闭上眼睛,做几个深呼吸,然后假装你是一个真正的人类。然后再睁开眼睛,看着这个东西,看看你能不能弄清楚它应该做什么或说什么,或者你应该采取什么行动,以及采取该行动会产生什么影响。”这还有另一个相关的循环。但在我讲这个之前,我知道我比较啰嗦,我想先总结一下你刚才关于人们不满足的最后一个例子。这是我当时想找的那段引言,当时是2014年,也就是Slack在2月正式发布的那一年,时间已近年底。我接受了《麻省理工科技评论》的采访,被问及我们是否在努力改进Slack。我说:“天哪,是的。我试图将这种观念灌输给团队的其他成员,但我自己确实觉得我们现在拥有的这个东西就是一堆巨大的狗屎。它简直糟透了,我们把它提供给公众应该感到羞耻。不过并非所有人都觉得这很鼓舞人心。”第二天我来到办公室,人们把那段引言打印在了大约40张纸上贴在墙上。但对我来说,这意味着你应该为此感到尴尬。这应该是一种持续改进的渴望。你大概也会觉得“哦,这太棒了”,你也可以为单个的工作成果感到自豪。但从总体来看,如果你看不到几乎无限的改进机会,那你就不应该设计这个产品,或者你不应该掌管这家公司,或者你几乎什么都不该做。再说一次,哪怕只是缩小到一个微小的功能,也远未达到完美。如果第一,这在组织内部被坦然承认;第二,人们将不断改进视为目标,这就类似于六西格玛、丰田的改善(Kaizen)之类的理念。或者是那个故事……我现在想不起他的名字了,创立桥水基金的那个人讲的关于迈克尔·乔丹的故事——
Lenny Rachitsky: Ray Dalio。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 对,Ray Dalio在书中谈到迈克尔·乔丹学滑雪。每次失误,他都希望滑雪教练准确告诉他哪里做错了。因为对他来说,每一次错误都是他可以收集的宝石,他能借此真正成为一名优秀的滑雪者。而他的目标就是成为一名优秀的滑雪者。这需要在组织内部建立极大的信任。但如果你能达到这样一种境界:“嘿,我们正在寻找改进的地方,我们正在努力挑剔,因为你想让这个东西变得尽可能好。”虽然不是每次都对每个人有效,但在大多数情况下对大多数人,你可以让他们达到这样一种境界:那种非常直接的批评实际上起到了激励作用。就像人们会很感激得到这些反馈,无论这些反馈是来自公司内部的同事,还是来自产品的最终用户。因为你会意识到,哦对,那个地方确实很糟,我们应该修好它。
默认失效状态与现实世界的复杂性
Lenny Rachitsky: 这让我想起了,暂且称之为你的一次长篇大论吧,你说让任何事情运转起来都需要付出大量工作,默认状态就是不运转。你能分享一下你在这方面的看法吗?
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 是的。我的意思是,这在很大程度上与……也许这是最近的事,它在政治方面对我显现得很多。顺便说一下,如果正在听的任何人能帮我找到2016年到2020年间某个地方的这条推文串,我不太确定具体时间。那是这个人发的帖子,讲设立一个停车标志有多难。我相信这是在回应某人声称比特币将取代美元,关于加密货币之类的言论。他的观点是,这就是当我们在我们社区的住宅街道上试图竖立一个停车标志时发生的情况。这花了字面意义上的几年时间,以及涉及到了众多机构。比如工程部门、交通规划师、业主委员会,还有……我不记得所有的机构了,因为……如果我能更好地搜索,就能再次找到它。因为它真是一篇杰作,展示了在大多数地方竖立一个停车标志有多困难。我从大多数政客那里听到的话,不幸的是这非常管用,那就是事情本应该是好的。但之所以不好,是因为有人在做坏事,阻碍了美好的发生。所以是亿万富翁让东西变得买不起,或者是移民抢走了你的工作,又或者是懒惰的寄生虫在吸政府的血,导致我们所有人都得交更多的税,诸如此类。现实是几乎什么都不起作用。这实际上是另一种说法……我在这个案子里说,John对此有一个极好的概括,我相信你很熟悉,就像那样。它以“世界是一个热情项目的博物馆”结尾。因为要让任何事情得以完成,不仅需要将那个事物在现实世界中具象化所需的资源和努力,还需要所有的政治手腕、社会学考量以及说服工作。最近有一本叫《为什么什么都不起作用》(Why Nothing Works)的书,这不是一本……如果作者在听的话我很抱歉,我怀疑他们在听,但这并不是一本写得极其惊艳的书。我觉得它有点重复,但内容真的令人难以置信,就是解释了为什么事情会这么难。以及任何行动方案可用的否决权是如何逐步增加的,以及这有多困难……这体现在新建工程的许可审批之类的事情上,但显然也体现在组织内部。而挑战在于,第一,我认为这是进化生物学层面的。除了通过拟人化,我们很难理解这个世界。所以如果今年不下雨,那是因为神生气了,很可能是因为我们去年没有献祭足够的山羊之类的东西。人们很难仅仅理解为,哇,天气是极其复杂和混沌的,还有生态系统和气候学,以及所有这些因素。世界也是一样。比如如果我为了付清所有的账单而苦苦挣扎,并且在地理位置或给孩子买礼物等方面负担不起一点点奢侈品,那一定是某个人的错。一定是在某个地方做出的某个决定导致的。而现实是一切都太复杂了,一切都受到太多变量的影响,这让人很不满足。这是一个糟糕的政治信息。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 说起来要容易得多,比如,“哦,我们理解你关心的那些事情为什么这么糟。”结果发现那是某个人的决定,因为那个人,事情才变糟。所以如果我们除掉他们,或者能够推翻他们的决定,将其推翻并实施我们自己的方案,那么对你来说事情就会变好。对我来说,这其实也体现在那些组织内部。我先停在这里。
帕金森定律与组织膨胀
Lenny Rachitsky: 我知道顺着这个思路,你非常相信一个叫帕金森定律的东西。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 对。它的起源,我想是在1956年。是帕金森在《经济学人》上发表的一篇文章。这句格言是:工作会膨胀以填满完成它所需的可用时间。它表现出来的方式,有点微妙。比如我发现的一件事是,因为现在我没有工作,时间压力小了很多。那句格言,就像“如果你想做成一件事,就交给一个忙人”。反过来也是成立的,就像,如果你没那么忙,哇,基本的事情也会花非常长的时间。
帕金森实际上是以写信和寄信的例子开场的。我不记得他第一个例子用的人是谁了,但那是一个极其忙碌、有一堆事情必须回复的人。然后另一种情况就像一个无所事事的退休老妇人。她写信要花很长时间。把信装进信封也要花很长时间,然后你去邮局把它寄出去。
但对我来说,真正的核心在于他后来谈论组织规模的部分,他举了一堆例子。这又是在20世纪50年代,他是英国人,所以他在看皇家海军。具体来说,他在看一张图表,显示了海军中主力舰的数量、水手的数量以及管理人员的数量之间的关系。对于观察政府任何部门的人来说,这是一张非常熟悉的图表。对于大学管理人员的数量与学生、教学教职员工数量之间的任何关系来说,也是如此。就像这样,好吧,舰船数量是这样走的,水手数量紧随其后。而管理人员数量是这样走的。
这之所以与“工作会膨胀以填满完成它所需的可用时间”联系在一起,是因为人们会招聘,会培训。对于任何经营公司的人来说,这里有一个可悲的真相,虽然也有例外。某些类型的工程师就是个例外。但你雇佣的绝大多数人都想雇佣更多向他们汇报的人。这不是因为他们邪恶,也不是因为他们愚蠢。事实上,他们很聪明,因为每个人都知道,向你汇报的人数与你的职业轨迹、你拿到的薪酬数额相关。与你在组织内部拥有的权威程度等等等等都相关。
所以我们在Slack会雇佣大约27名产品经理,他们立刻就想招人。就像,搞什么鬼?那个人要做什么?他们是这么表达的,但本质上就像,“嗯,那个人会去做产品管理,然后我就可以做战略了。”
Lenny Rachitsky: 经典。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 我真的认为,理解这件事的关键在于,这不是因为人们邪恶,也不是因为他们愚蠢。对我来说,这与“一切都很复杂”非常相关。如果也许这是我的蝴蝶定律,我以前没有这样思考过。但我在很久很久以前发过一条推文,就像如果你……如果你对你谈论的东西一无所知,那么一切都很简单。所以它的另一面就像,如果一件事看起来很简单,很可能你并不理解它。当然这也有明显的例外。
但对于任何涉及大型组织或大量人类的事情,如果问题看起来很简单,那你就是没搞懂。所以在每一次预算流程中,从来没有工程负责人、销售负责人、首席财务官、总法律顾问会回来说,“哦,我真的觉得明年我们可以少雇点人。或者我们将保持人员持平,或者我们将通过自然减员来缩编,因为我们不需要更多的人来做我们正在做的事。”这不是因为他们邪恶,不是因为他们愚蠢,而是组织内部存在一种几乎无法抗拒的冲动,往往会导致灾难性的结果。所以有一个……
Slack的内部案例:话题回复功能的回退
我来举一个Slack历史上的例子,我过去曾试图掩饰这个例子,这样就不会有人感觉不好,但是我……不幸的是,具体细节对这个例子太重要了,所以它没法被掩饰,因此我只想重申,涉及的人既不愚蠢也不邪恶。还有一个来自外部的例子。所以Slack内部的例子是,我们引入了 threads(话题回复),也就是在频道内回复某条消息的能力。假设你,Lenny,发了一条消息。我,斯图尔特,回复了它。你会自动收到一条通知。现在Sarah后来回复了同一条消息。你和我,作为在这个话题中有推送权限的人,都会收到一条有更多活动的通知,以此类推。所以就像每次任何人回复它时一样。
所以当这个功能首次发布时,或者就像我们在发布前做最终产品审查时,输入框里会预先填充上“@”你在话题里的前一个人。我在使用这个功能时,会把光标放在那里,全选删除,然后开始写我的消息。即使我想特意加上某人,我也几乎从不想用“@某人”来开始我的句子,因为这让引用他们之前说的话变得困难。所以我说,“把这个去掉,因为A,我认为大多数人不会用它。或者如果他们确实想加上某人,他们也不会想在句子的开头这么做。顺便说一句,你在教他们错误地使用产品。因为重要的是每个人都必须明白,在这个话题里每一个之前的发帖人都会自动收到通知,除非他们已经搞明白了这一点。”
所以好吧,我们发布了它。六个月过去了,突然那个“@”的东西又回来了。所以我给团队周围的某个人发了消息,我说,“嘿,这里出现了功能回退。这超级奇怪。我不知道发生了什么。但是那个‘@’的东西回来了。”他们说,“哦不,这是故意的。我们做了一堆研究。”所以我就想,“什么?”我仔细看了一下这个,如果我没记错的话,这项分析的置信度甚至没有达到P-95。但结果大概是这样的,当我们这样做时,话题平均有2.17条消息长,而当我们不这样做时,平均是2.14条消息长。
所以首先,为什么更长的话题就更好?也许更短的话题更好?这样人们来回发送的消息就可以更少。而且,这差异也太小了。另外,我再次声明,我不记得实际的统计分析是怎样的了,所以我不会断言它是错的。但我很确定这已经超出了他们所能具有的确定性边界。但真正的问题是,我的天哪,所以你们在产品里加了标记,你们做了A/B测试。你们做了埋点。你们在数据库里建了表,或者用任何我们用来记录所有这些东西的工具。
你们写了查询语句来提取数据,基于这些数据创建了图表,还开会讨论了这件事。只要稍微拆解一下为了让这个功能回归所必须发生的所有事情,就会发现这至少相当于数千人时的工作量,因为在那种规模的组织中,任何功能更改都涉及十几个人,包括工程、QA、分析团队、项目经理、用户研究等等。我觉得这是个糟糕的主意,对吧?而这其中的问题在于,有这个功能和没有这个功能之间你能实现的可能差异,也就只有这么多,无论你想用什么单位来衡量,而做这项分析的成本却是这么多。所以这注定是个亏本买卖。
就像是,根本不存在这样一个世界,任何人能想象出在消息开头加上话题里的前一个回复者,能对Slack的质量、它为人们提供的效用等等产生那么大的影响。但是你知道,要加入功能开关,要发布产品的新版本,要加入埋点,要让所有的API调用来记录人们采取的每一个动作以进行所有的分析,要创建仪表板,要把截图粘贴到Google幻灯片演示文稿中,要发送会议邀请,要因为有人不能来而重新安排会议,要让所有人坐下来看这些东西。这注定是个亏本买卖。
超写实工作类活动与已知有价值的工作
我知道Fareed让你问我关于这个超写实工作类活动的事情。所以这是我的宏大理论。超写实工作类活动伴随着另一个概念,叫做已知有价值的工作可做。当我说已知时,我的意思是你既知道它是什么,也知道它是有价值的。几乎每个组织在最开始时的问题在于,你有大量的工作,你知道该做什么,也知道它会产生价值。比如创办一家企业,开一个银行账户。因为开银行账户几乎具有无限的普遍价值。你必须得做。做起来也非常简单。
所以在任何初创公司的最开始,他们就像,“我在创建用户表,我在做密码排序,”你在做所有那些绝对必要的事情。每个人都确切地知道它们是什么。所以每个人早上起床去上班时都会觉得太棒了。我有10件事要做,每一件都是我知道怎么做的,而且它绝对会产生价值。随着时间的推移,要做的工作的供给和做工作的需求之间的关系就开始发生变化。
越来越多的人被雇佣。每个产品经理都想招一个初级产品经理。每一个新人,你引入风险与合规团队的第一个人就会说,“天哪,有这么多风险和我们需要合规的事情。我们最好在我的团队里招更多的人来做更多的风险和合规工作。”这在某种程度上可能是对的。但我们会拥有越来越多这样的人,然后他们就会相互召集会议。
现在你突然有了所有这些有工作要做的人,而你已经做完了所有简单明显的事情。现在你的问题变成了,“天哪,我们是否应该做FedRAMP High认证并做一个Slack版本?这将要求我们为运行软件的硬件提供完全独立的物理基础设施?还有一个完全不同的运营团队,里面只能有美国公民?我们做这件事可能赚到多少美元?当我们要对软件进行更新时会产生多少复杂性,因为我们要更新两个完全独立的系统并……”
这就变得失衡了,所以人们最终……就像如果你雇佣了17个产品营销人员,你就会产生相当于17个产品营销人员的工作需求。如果你没有足够的产品营销工作供给,他们就会去做其他事情。再次强调,这非常重要,不是因为他们愚蠢,也不是因为他们邪恶。而是因为他们觉得,我是个产品营销人员,我想因为我的工作得到认可。而我的配偶批评过我,因为他们觉得我应该在上一轮考核中已经得到晋升了,他们真的得在这里展示一些成果之类的东西。
所以人们就像召集同事开会,预览他们要在大会上展示的幻灯片,以获取关于是否应该改进某些幻灯片的反馈。而这种超写实工作类活动在表面上与工作完全相同。就像我们坐在会议室里,那里投影着一些东西,我们都在讨论它。而这正是工作的样子。希望你公司里的每个人做的并不全是这种工作。但这正是我们工作时的所作所为。
但这实际上是一份假的工作,它是如此微妙,以至于连我也会做。我们的董事会成员会做。每个高管都会做。而你越是不具备所有的上下文、所有的信息以及决策权之类的东西,就越容易陷入这些东西之中。人们只会执行大量的超写实工作类活动,却根本没有意识到他们正在做的是什么。我想,其结果就是,如果你是一个领导者,如果你是经理、总监、高管,或者你是CEO,确保有充足的已知有价值的工作可做,这是你的责任。这几乎总是存在的,但难点在于围绕它建立清晰度。建立共识。确保每个人都理解它,那是他们应该做的,然后显然就是去执行它。
Lenny Rachitsky: 太棒了。我可以听斯图尔特的抱怨一整天。超写实工作类活动。我们需要造一个词来形容这个——
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 不幸的是,它缩写起来不好听。相当难看。
Lenny Rachitsky: 好吧,我们可以试试。为了给这个话题收个尾,解决方案就是领导者意识到这种情况正在发生并阻止它。告诉人们我们为什么要在这个根本不会让我们有任何进展的事情上浪费时间?
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 是的。你刚才说的可能不是最好的方式,因为那听起来像是在斥责他们,觉得他们很蠢。而实际上确保优先事项有足够的清晰度,并在事前明确地对事情说不,这是你的责任。而不是事后跑过去说,“嘿,你们这群白痴,把时间浪费在这个无关紧要的事情上。”这是谁的错?这是经理的错。是某个副总裁的错。是首席X官,不管什么官,是C……归根结底,组织的领导者有责任确保有充足的已知有价值的工作可做。这实际上比看起来要难得多。
我们这里不卖马鞍
Lenny Rachitsky: 好吧。趁我们还有时间,我想谈谈另外两个话题。一个是,当人们想到斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德时,我想很多人会想到《我们这里不卖马鞍》。你那篇传奇的Medium文章,我不知道,它已经成为产品构建和初创公司编年史中具有历史意义的文学作品了。我最近没怎么听到有人问你这方面的事。所以我就问几个问题吧。你发表那篇文章的原因是什么?写那份备忘录的背景故事是什么?为什么它是必要的?
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 嗯,它确实是一份内部备忘录。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 嗯,它确实是一份内部备忘录,这里稍微岔开一下。Slack 的一个糟糕之处在于,如果你所有的公司沟通都在电子邮件上,取决于具体的运作方式和使用的系统,你离职时很可能带走你在 X 公司说过的所有内容的存档。如果是 Slack,一旦你的账号被关闭,你就会失去对所有这些历史记录的访问权限。所以感觉就像,“天哪,如果我在离开前导出了我所有的消息,我就会拥有所有这些东西了”,但那份备忘录绝对是一字不差的。我没有修改我在公司内部说过的任何一个字。嗯,我想当时我们还是八个人。也许最多十个人,但我想是八个人。
Lenny Rachitsky: 那甚至在 Slack 发布之前。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 是的,在 Slack 发布之前。那是我们在做私有测试版的时候。这样做的目的是尽可能早地灌输这些理念,真正在那个小团队内部创造这种共识,以便在我们发展和扩张时能够持续留存下来。是的,这就是初衷。
Lenny Rachitsky: 其中的要旨,为了那些对它不太熟悉的人说明一下,我们会附上链接,就是仅仅构建一个出色的产品是不够的。你同样必须花精力去传达这能为他们做什么,这为他们解决了什么问题,这将为他们实现什么结果。这样理解可以吗?
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 是的。再次将其与啤酒或汽车进行比较,啤酒可以追溯到前文明时代。汽车显然[听不清 01:10:38],但在某个时刻你必须说服人们为什么他们想要一辆汽车而不是一匹马。对于你的新人工智能招聘工具或日历应用之类的东西,你之所以认为人们应该使用你的而不是他们现在正在使用的东西,是有一些原因的,这可能是一种整体的一对一替换,或者更常见的是工作方式的改变,这种改变具有许多其他相邻领域,而你想扩展到这些其他类别。你不仅负责创造产品,而且在某种程度上也负责创造市场。
有一本书叫《定位》(Positioning),绝对是一本经典之作。它非常短。我推荐大家都读一下,从我个人的角度来看,它的要点是,在别人的头脑中创造一个新想法几乎是不可能的。把几个现有的想法结合起来要容易得多。所以说它像《大白鲨》遇上《星球大战》,或者是宠物界的 Uber 之类的话,比想出一个真正的新想法要容易得多。但你必须这样做,因为如果你的东西与替代品有任何显著的不同,你就不仅仅是在创造产品。你是在创造市场。它们实际上真可以说是同一回事。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我想提及这个的原因是,我认为人们仍然继续不听从这个建议,继续在更多功能、更多产品之类的事情上过度投资。就“我们这里不卖马鞍”这个具体例子来说,只是为了向人们快速传达这一点,如果我遗漏了什么请纠正我,就是与其说,“嘿,看看我们买的这个惊人的马鞍”,你想要传达的是,“来这里,去骑马吧。看看你能拥有的这种不可思议的体验。”然后他们决定,“哦,靠。我需要去买个马鞍才能做到这一点。”
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 是的。百分之百,这方面并非原创,因为我认为这是营销人员很久以来一直在做的事情,当然是在营销传播和广告中。如果你想卖哈雷戴维森摩托车,会有人对发动机之类的东西和皮革的质量之类的东西极客般地痴迷。但是当你卖摩托车时,你卖的是开阔的道路、自由和吹过你头发的风。如果你是 Lululemon,你显然在卖瑜伽裤,但你也在卖健康、抱负、成为最好的自己以及一堆其他的东西。我的天,我忘了那个经典的版本。
Lenny Rachitsky: 有那个船的……
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 你在卖螺丝刀。
Lenny Rachitsky: 哦,对。钉子。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 是的,钉子。总之。
Lenny Rachitsky: 是的,我们漏掉那个了。嗯,我想到的一个是,与其试图说服人们去造船,不如灌输对大海的渴望。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 是的。完全正确。那是可以追溯到历史上的东西。
转向
Lenny Rachitsky: 好的。让我问问你关于转向的事。你可能是转向之王。你创办了两家公司,都著名地进行了转向,都是从视频游戏转过来的,这就是为什么我在一开始问了你关于这方面的问题,最后都成为了非常成功的公司。我想很多人会来找你寻求关于转向的建议。我就直接问吧,当人们来找你问,“我应该坚持我的想法吗?我应该转向吗?”你发现哪种建议最能帮助他们?
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 是的,我的意思是,我认为这有一部分是直觉,因为显然这个决定关乎,“你是否已经穷尽了所有可能性?”在我们开发 Glitch 的那个案例中,这款游戏我们使用 IRC 进行内部沟通,我们添加了一堆 IRC 功能,这就成了 Slack 的原型。我认为 Slack 有一个巨大的优势,事实上我们在没有明确专门开发它的情况下已经为此工作了几年,并且只做了最低限度的功能,这些功能绝对保证会成功,从这个意义上说,它要么是如此令人烦躁以至于我们再也无法忍受,要么是如此明显的改进以至于我们忍不住去利用它。我们还有 900 万美元,每个人都仍然喜欢这款游戏,我们都很乐意开发它,但我想在那个时候我已经穷尽了每一个不算荒谬的、用来使其获得商业成功的长远想法,所以我决定放弃它。
但是对任何人做任何事来说,默认的建议都是坚持。就像一只小猫挂在树枝上,海报上写着“坚持住”。有太多这样的故事,“某某人一开始挨家挨户敲门,被所有人拒绝,然后突然就有了耐克”之类的事情,也就是,“只要你坚持足够长的时间,你最终会成功的。”我认为你必须真正保持冷酷的理性。其中一些内容出现在《对赌》(Thinking in Bets)这本书中。有些在她的第二本书里,我此刻忘了书名,但肯定会有人知道的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 是的,《对赌》,那第二本是什么?我忘了。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 她实际上把 Glitch 和 Slack 作为一个聪明的弃牌的例子。我在这里的期望值已经降到了这样一个地步,以至于这个替代方案看起来更有吸引力。我说你必须对此保持冷酷理性的原因是,这他妈的太丢人了。我说服了很多人,而你也必须说服很多人才能让一家公司起步。你必须去找投资人。你必须去找早期员工并说,“你应该辞去你的另一份工作来这里工作,因为这是我们在设想的不可思议的功能。”你必须去找媒体,你必须做出所有这些承诺,而且你有用户,你向用户承诺了事情,你说服他们为这个东西放弃他们的时间。所以我认为对很多人来说,继续做下去直到它因为缺乏资金之类的原因窒息而死,感觉会更好一些。而不是仅仅承认,“好吧,我错了。这行不通”,这是很丢人的。这很痛苦。这很揪心。这会产生很坏的影响。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 当我们关闭Glitch时,有很多人非常喜欢它,会花掉所有空闲时间,等不及下班回家去多玩一会儿。那是他们的社区,而这个社区就这样消失了,所有这些人以及所有建立起来的身份认同也随之消失。显然,人们失去了工作,那些为了这份工作把家人搬到另一个城市的人现在也保不住工作了。所以转向不是一件我会轻视的事情。我觉得这和“我们有三个人,开始做这个应用,然后我们转向了另一个应用”是非常不同的情况。那甚至算不上真正的转向。如果你做一件事才六个月,你还在摸索。你还在试图弄清楚你要构建的到底是什么。这不是真正的转向。显然在这个案例中结果非常好,而且存在幸存者偏差,这并不意味着所有人都应该一直转向。但我认为,拉开距离以便你能对此做出理智、理性的决定,而不是情绪化的决定,是至关重要的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我也很喜欢你的那个建议,就是穷尽。一旦你穷尽了所有的想法,那就是去看看外面还有什么其他可能性的绝佳时机。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 对,就是穷尽所有的好想法。
Lenny Rachitsky: 所有好的想法。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 所有现实的想法。对。
Lenny Rachitsky: 对。你刚才提到关于坚持的观点,我刚好在播客里请到了Canva的首席执行官Melanie Perkins。在终于有人决定投资她之前,有100位投资人拒绝了她,而她就是一直坚持推进。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 对。我觉得这是一个稍微不同的例子,对吧?她最终相信了产品的概念和愿景。这只是为了找到正确的表达方式,去吸引那些最终显然非常非常高兴的投资人。
Lenny Rachitsky: 极其高兴。天哪。好吧。也许这取决于时间,我们聊聊最后一个话题。我想谈谈慷慨。正如我所说,我和许多与你共事过的人聊过,当我问起他们关于你以及最让他们印象深刻的事情时,反复出现的第一主题就是慷慨。所以我打算读几个我从人们那里听到的例子,这些都是这些年来你慷慨待人的体现。
一个人分享说,他在圣诞节前需要一点钱,他说:“斯图尔特直接带我走出大楼,去了自动取款机,递给我500美元,让我回家陪家人。”其他人提到,就在最近当你谈到不得不裁掉Glitch员工时,你在裁员时流下了真实的眼泪,然后你花了难以置信的大量时间帮他们找新工作,延长他们的遣散费,并且极其、极其严肃地对待这件事,我认为这比大多数人觉得CEO会做的要多得多。还有人分享说,你支付了员工100%的健康保险,只为让他们少操点心。
当你们上市时,你基本上为员工创造了最好的可能情况,没有锁定期,直接上市。而且,凭借Slack交易的结构,人们说这次收购对员工非常友好。这是对员工。还有你对待客户的方式。举几个例子:你向在新冠疫情期间难以支付账单的企业提供了免费额度。你推出了公平计费(fair billing),我认为这在当时非常具有创新性,你停止向人们收取他们未使用的席位的费用,即使他们签署了为这些席位付费的协议。很多时候,你推迟了发布计划,因为你只想为人们把功能做得越来越好。我用这句话来结束:“斯图尔特是一位将他对员工的责任感深系于心的领导者,并尽其所能为员工提供了最慷慨的条件。这感觉值得赞赏。”
所以首先,我只想对你表示赞赏。我认为遇到一位这样的领导者真的很罕见且令人备受鼓舞。显然,你对很多人产生了很大的影响。我不完全确定我想问的具体问题是什么,但我想问的是,这其中有多少是刻意为之的,就像,“这就是我们获胜的方式。我会非常慷慨并帮助别人,因为我知道这在长远来看会有所帮助”?这其中又有多少只是[听不清],只是你作为一个人本来的样子?
关于慷慨
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 我认为这其中很大一部分只是我作为一个人本来的样子,我有很好的父母,他们把我教育得很好,但我认为这里也有一点教训,我就假设大家对囚徒困境(prisoner’s dilemma)很熟悉了。对我来说,慷慨的行为意味着,“哦,我正在表明,当我们在这种博弈中迭代时,我是会合作的。”如果你这样做,那么人们也会合作,双方都会受益。而如果你永远无法确定对方是否会在第一时间背叛,那么你最好的选择就是背叛。所以这里有一个博弈论的层面,通常是在比囚徒困境复杂得多、多得多的博弈中。
为客户创造价值
我认为有一件事我之前没有提到,但对我而言非常重要,那就是在不止一次的公司全体大会上,我让公司里的每个人都把这作为口号重复念出。这句口号是:“从长远来看,衡量我们成功的标准将是我们为客户创造的价值量。”我想对此表达得超级清晰和明确,因为如果你正在做的任何事情感觉有点阴暗,有点像在作弊,有点像在错误的时机追求利益最大化,或者在利用客户或类似的情况,你绝对不应该做。因为对我来说,我的意思是我认为这从字面上看是正确的,但这也是一种合乎道德的经商方式。而且不仅仅是道德好这么简单。这对你来说是有优势的。你能够吸引到更好层次的员工。如果你所有的员工都是讲道德的,那么这将会对每个人来说都是一个更好的工作场所,你会更快乐,你会有更少的内部问题等等。
但我认为这确实是真的,尤其是从长远来看,你不能破坏客户的价值却指望获得成功。你必须真正让他们的生活变得更好。你可以努力向他们指出这一点,并证明你创造了这种价值之类的事情,但没有任何东西可以替代真正创造出的价值。我认为这极其重要,这意味着一种真正的慷慨,无论是在与企业交易谈判条款时,还是在做出政策决定时。有一次这反而让我们吃了大亏,我们的服务级别协议(SLA)写着:“对于任何停机时间,你将获得100倍的退款。”因为从我的角度来看,这就像如果我们宕机了两分钟,那也就几分钱。这并没有什么真正的区别。如果我们宕机了10个小时或者类似的情况,那么我们将面临比赔钱更大问题。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 快进到后来,我们现在的收入已达数亿美元,并且已经上市。上市后不久,我们就遭遇了有史以来最大规模的宕机之一。我不记得具体有多久,但确实是好几个小时。但当我们达到那个规模时,对于我们宕机的三分之一天时间,100倍的退款大约是800万美元左右。这并没有真正耗费我们现金,因为我们只是以积分的形式发放给了用户,但这意味着我们原本预期在下一季度能实现的一大部分收入将无法入账,因为人们的积分会抵消他们本应支付给我们的费用。因此在那之后,我们绝对修改了服务条款,因为成为一家上市公司还是有些不同的。但在其他所有方面,我认为它们都是非常有助于我们走向成功的重要决定。
Lenny Rachitsky: 那个政策……是自动的吗?你甚至都不需要申请,就会自动获得这项积分吗?
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 而且默认情况是,如果你通知我们,你就不必付款。这实际上是,“我们将自动地、主动地、预先地,在没有任何来自你的操作的情况下……”
Lenny Rachitsky: 太慷慨了。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: “将这笔积分记入你的账户,并且只给你发一条消息告知此事。顺便说一下,我们将会针对总体宕机时间进行处理,即使这个问题作为客户并没有影响到你。”
Lenny Rachitsky: 哇。太慷慨了。你找到了你想处于的边界。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 是的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 你让公司全员反复念的那句口号是什么来着?我觉得用这个作为结尾真的非常好。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 是,“从长远来看,衡量我们成功的标准将是我们为客户创造的价值量。”
Lenny Rachitsky: 难以置信。我只是在想象 Slack 整个团队齐声朗诵这句口号的画面。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 有好几百人。感觉非常像金正恩或斯大林之类的。
名字的由来
Lenny Rachitsky: 既然说到这个,大多数人可能不知道,你出生时的真名其实不叫斯图尔特,叫 Dharma。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 是的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 当你了解到这一点后,一切都说得通了。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 是的。我的名字叫 Dharma Jeremy Butterfield,这是我父母给我起的。我12岁的时候改了名,因为我当时真的很想变得正常,而且由于某种原因,我觉得斯图尔特是个很正常的名字。顺便说一下,既然我说了这一点,你现在就会注意到了。除了《精灵鼠小弟》里的那只老鼠之外,任何时候你在电影、小说、电视节目或任何东西里看到一个叫斯图尔特的角色,要么是失败者的斯图尔特,要么是混蛋的斯图尔特。显然,在集体意识中,这是一个糟糕的名字,我不该选它,我对此很后悔。但等我意识到这一点时,《Dharma and Greg》这部剧已经播出了,改回去看起来就像我在跟风。而且人们还以为这是个女孩的名字,尽管在印度它显然只是个男孩的名字。
所有者错觉(owner’s delusion)
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 我想补充最后一个小细节,因为我之前忘了提,而且我认为它有助于把事情串联起来,这叫做所有者错觉(owner’s delusion)。这是基于我在 Twitter 上发的一条内容。想出这个名字的人后来删除了他们的账号,所以我不知道那人是谁,也不知道该归功于谁。但我当时发的内容是,那是很久以前的事了,当时餐厅的网站还做得不好,不过现在这已经不重要了,因为 Google Local 已经接管了一切,但这大概是在10年前。
当你访问一家餐厅的网站时,你可能想要的无非是五样东西:他们的街道地址、电话号码、菜单、营业时间……天哪,我忘了第五个了。哦,还有预订,如何预订。再说一次,这个问题在某种程度上已经自行解决,或者至少有所改善,但你当时看到的会是这种加载超级慢的照片,伴随着 Ken Burns 效果……然后淡入,接着一些音乐开始播放,而如果他们向你展示了电话号码,它是不可点击的。
Lenny Rachitsky: 是图片。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 它甚至不是你可以复制的文本,因为没错,它是一张图片。而且他们没有标明营业时间,他们不放地址或者别的什么,这就像是,“搞什么?” 肯定的是,无论是为餐厅老板制作这个网站的人,还是餐厅老板本人,绝对都遇到过这样的处境:他们去过别人的餐厅网站,因为他们想获取地址、营业时间或电话号码之类的。那么为什么它最终会变成这样,我们该怎么称呼这种情况呢?
然后回复那条推文的某个人说,“我们应该叫它所有者错觉(owner’s delusion)”,我就觉得,“天哪。太完美了。”我认为这极其有说服力,而且最终导致的结果是,比如苹果把那个功能命名为睡眠(Sleep),这就太难理解它到底可能意味着什么了。这就是为什么人们会产生预期,尽管事实上当人们第一次访问你的网站时,他们的意图刚刚超过采取该行动所需的最低微小门槛。你就好像是,“好了。欢迎来到我的网站”,然后有一堆废话,有一堆毫无意义的东西,而且按钮晦涩难懂。接下来该做什么也不清楚,因为我觉得我的东西太重要了,而且我没有意识到你正在工作,你今天早上迟到了,你得去洗手间,你只是一个有事情要处理的普通人,你会担心你的孩子是个没用的东西,他们在学校惹麻烦之类的事情。他们不是花了钱去看你的戏剧、坐在观众席里等着幕布拉开的对象。他们是在零点几秒内就会离开的人。因此每个人都应该始终意识到所有者的解决方案。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我喜欢这个。那解决方法是什么?是让其他人来看看并给你反馈吗?
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 是的,并认识到它。不幸的是,它是像墨菲定律那样的东西之一。
Lenny Rachitsky: 是的。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 即使你把墨菲定律考虑在内,你也可能出错。
Lenny Rachitsky: 没错。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 但如果你不把它命名出来、不认识它、不讨论它、不训练自己这样思考,不深呼吸、假装自己是个普通人,然后再看一遍这东西是否合理,那你就完蛋了。
Lenny Rachitsky: 我太喜欢这个了。我很高兴你把这个加了进来。等我们将来做第二部分时,我还有十亿个其他问题要问你。斯图尔特,非常感谢你能做这期节目。非常感谢你的到来。
斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德: 是的。谢谢你邀请我,Lenny。我真的很享受。
术语表
| 原文 | 中文 |
|---|---|
| affordances | 可供性 |
| Ali Rael | Ali Rael |
| Andrea Torres | Andrea Torres |
| Annie Duke | Annie Duke |
| Ben Brown | Ben Brown |
| Brandon Velestuk | Brandon Velestuk |
| Cal Henderson | Cal Henderson |
| Chris Cordell | Chris Cordell |
| consumerized B2B SaaS | 消费者化B2B SaaS |
| divine discontent | 神圣的不满 |
| fair billing | 公平计费(fair billing) |
| Fareed | Fareed |
| hyperrealistic work-like activities | 超写实工作类活动 |
| Johnny Rogers | Johnny Rogers |
| Lenny Rachitsky | Lenny Rachitsky |
| Melanie Perkins | Melanie Perkins |
| Mental models | 心智模型 |
| Noah Weiss | Noah Weiss |
| owner’s delusion | 所有者错觉 |
| Parkinson’s law | 帕金森定律 |
| Positioning | 《定位》(Positioning) |
| prisoner’s dilemma | 囚徒困境(prisoner’s dilemma) |
| SLA | 服务级别协议(SLA) |
| Stewart Butterfield | 斯图尔特·巴特菲尔德 |
| Thinking in Bets | 《对赌》(Thinking in Bets) |
| utility curves | 效用曲线 |
| we don’t sell saddles here | 我们这里不卖马鞍 |
此文档由 AI 分片翻译(translate_long_document)