Announcing Panobi
TL;DR I’ve been heads down for the last while working with an incredible team to build Panobi, a love letter to growth teams. You can sign up for our waitlist (or a demo!) today at https://panobi.com…
Seven years ago, when people started calling Slack one of the fastest growing enterprise businesses of all time, I was running its growth team. In retrospect this label was incredibly cool, but it did not feel that way at the time. I was under intense pressure and often felt like I was falling behind.
You see, I started at Slack as a lone PM to work on new user experience. I picked off-the-shelf software and instrumented our funnel, did usability research, and made the case for an updated onboarding. It went well, and by the end of 2016 my team was 50 people. Externally I probably looked like some sort of poster child for career success, but most days I was treading water instead of making waves.
One of my biggest missed opportunities was an expensive biweekly meeting with the executive team called the Growth Council. The slide deck for the Growth Council took about 8 hours of work to prepare, but because of the kaleidoscope of priorities and inputs that each leader brought to the meeting, we often failed to meet the demands of the brilliant folks hammering us with questions.
Growth is a massively cross-functional effort and it was good and right that so many leaders were invested in what is arguably the most important initiative at any company. The format of the meeting wasn’t wrong, and neither was the growing group of people who attended. The failure point was our tools — static decks, docs and rigid dashboards that weren’t flexible enough to put growth in the context of the business and explain what was happening live rather than in the past.
Ultimately, we didn’t have a flexible way for anyone at the company to zoom out on our growth and see the huge number of factors (many of which were not under the remit of the growth team) that impacted our metrics.
Our tools failed us in more ways than just the Growth Council meeting, though. My team wanted and needed more time to work on the growth levers we owned and to help the rest of the company understand and drive theirs. But instead we had no choice but to spend a huge amount of time trying to keep our data somewhat sorted into the right places. Even I spent roughly one day a week just updating different tools and asking and answering the same questions. The alternative was that the answers about what drove our business would never be compiled, leaving the company without a view into our growth. Plainly, that wasn’t a viable option. So, we invested considerable time and effort compiling answers each week, but at the cost of more focus on experiments and projects that would drive actual results. Treading water indeed.
What we needed was a platform that wasn’t fighting our productivity, so we could quickly explore, understand and share answers, and then get back to building for the future. We got a lot of things right despite our poor tooling, in part by building bespoke internal systems that persist at Slack, and by working incredibly hard to understand our customers. Not all growth teams are so lucky, though.
