Stewart Butterfield

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?

Hyper realistic work-like activities is superficially identical to work. We are sitting in a conference room and there's something being projected up there, and we're all talking about it. But this is actually a fake bit of work.

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.

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.

Your failure to really be considerate and exercise this courtesy and really be empathic about other people's experience is an advantage that you can create. Most people don't have good taste and don't invest.

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.

We came up with what was called the shouty rooster, and internally we said, 'Don't be a cock.' A little rooster would pop up 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?'

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.

For most creators of products, there are a handful of cases where reducing friction really matters - user registration, authentication, checkout flows. But for most unique parts of any application, the challenge is going to be comprehension inside of friction.

We realized people were signing up for Slack, and it's one engineer on this team inside of this larger organization, 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.'

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 what they're supposed to be doing.

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.

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.