{"id":2657,"date":"2015-07-19T08:12:38","date_gmt":"2015-07-19T15:12:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/?p=2657"},"modified":"2015-07-18T17:13:10","modified_gmt":"2015-07-19T00:13:10","slug":"we-dont-sell-saddles-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2015\/07\/19\/we-dont-sell-saddles-here\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;We Don&#8217;t Sell Saddles Here&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just re-read Slack (and Flickr) founder\u00a0Stewart Butterfield\u2019s essay from two years ago (right before Slack launched), and man, it eats like a meal. If you care at all about product development, <a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/accel-insights\/we-dont-sell-saddles-here-4c59524d650d\">you should read the whole thing<\/a>. I jotted down a few of my favorite observations &amp; am sharing them here:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li>[O]ur job is also to <strong>understand what people think they want and then translate the value<\/strong> of Slack into their terms. \u2026 [This]\u00a0something we all work on. <strong>It is the sum of the exercise of all our crafts<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li>We should be working carefully from both the product end and the market end: Doing a better and better job of providing what people want (whether they know it or not); Communicating the above more and more effectively.<\/li>\n<li>We are setting out to define a new market. And that means we can\u2019t limit ourselves to tweaking the product; we need to tweak the market too.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Innovation is the sum of change across the whole system<\/strong>, not a thing which causes a change in how people behave.<\/li>\n<li>What we\u2019re selling is organizational transformation. The software just happens to be the part we\u2019re able to build &amp; ship.<\/li>\n<li>We will be successful to the extent that we create better teams.<\/li>\n<li><strong>The best possible way to find product-market fit\u00a0is to define your own market<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Who Do We Want Our Customers to Become?<\/strong>\u2026\u00a0We want them to become relaxed, productive workers\u2026\u00a0masters of their own information and not slaves\u2026\u00a0who communicate purposively.<\/li>\n<li>Be harsh, in the interest of being excellent. <em>[Or as I\u2019ve always put it, \u201cI swear because I care.\u201d \u2014J.]<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just re-read Slack (and Flickr) founder\u00a0Stewart Butterfield\u2019s essay from two years ago (right before Slack launched), and man, it eats like a meal. If you care at all about product development, you should read the whole thing. I jotted down a few of my favorite observations &amp; am sharing them here: [O]ur job is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2657"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2657"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2659,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2657\/revisions\/2659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}