Slack · Go-to-market · Mid · 45 to 60 minutes

How should Slack launch to teams?

Slack is a workplace messaging product that helps teams communicate in channels instead of scattered email and chat tools. Answer this product management case and get it graded line by line against a weighted rubric.

Go to market strategy
Product sense
Prioritization
Metrics
Customer empathy

The situation

Stewart Butterfield asks you for a go to market recommendation as Slack prepares to move beyond internal use and a small set of friendly test companies. The product is promising, but behavior changes a lot by team size, and larger groups are surfacing issues in channel discovery, onboarding, and day to day habits. At the same time, many prospects are not switching from a direct competitor at all, they say they use "nothing" for internal communication, even though they actually rely on a messy mix of email, SMS, Skype, and other ad hoc tools. That means Slack has to sell both a product and the idea that this category matters. The team wants to create momentum soon, but a bad first wave could create internal vetoes inside customer teams and stop adoption. Assume engineering can ship only a few meaningful fixes each month, support can personally onboard only a limited number of teams, and there is no large paid marketing budget or mature enterprise sales motion yet. You need to recommend how Slack should bring in the next wave of users and judge whether it is ready for a broader launch.

What to produce

Write a 1 to 2 page go to market memo.

Your answer must

Recommend the access and rollout approach for the next six months, including who gets invited when and why.
Define the target team segments for the preview period, including how you would balance smaller teams and larger teams for learning.
Explain how Slack should position itself in a market that does not yet clearly recognize team messaging as a software category.
Specify separate adoption support for individual users and for team admins or champions inside an organization.
Choose the few product strengths or workflows to spotlight first, and explain what you would de emphasize for now.
Define success metrics and a launch readiness milestone, including at least one activation metric and one qualitative feedback loop.

Constraints

Engineering and support capacity are limited during the preview period.
Slack is selling to teams, so one unhappy user can derail adoption for the whole group.
Prospects vary widely in size and in what they currently use for internal communication.
There is no large paid marketing budget or heavy enterprise procurement motion to rely on.

Format

Use sections for recommendation, target segments, messaging, rollout plan, metrics, and risks.

How Slack actually played it

Stewart Butterfield describes Slack's long private beta, how it taught a new category and a usage benchmark for success.

Use a long beta to learn from real teams
Define a usage milestone
Be clear about a few standout features

Built from From 0 to $1B: Slack's Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy by First Round Staff (interview with Stewart Butterfield).