Questions: Are we looking for expansion of current product or looking for developing all together different product — Current product

What is the goal you want the strategy to align to —- Up to you

If I see companies, I see a great liking for Slack. However, with Microsoft Teams coming into play, the growth has been limited. So, let’s see the target new user addition as our goal.

When I see new users, I can think of 3 sets of possible users:

1. Companies using major software products, used alongside slack but not slack.

2. Advocators of products in the companies not using it.

3. Focus on companies outside software products

Selecting second as has the most potential. While third given an early movers advantage but requires a lot of product customization and convincing. While first seems tempting, we should not be got for it as these companies are more or less likely to be using teams. Putting a direct fight with Microsoft may do more harm than good.

For creating industry advocators, I see 3 use cases:

1. Partnership with companies such as Dropbox and offer bundled products.

2. Organically generate advocators by focusing on future company joiners.

3. Increase interface within companies

While all three make sense, I would like to go with option 2 as it will not only help us in getting into companies that are not using it but also help us in solidifying our grip on companies already using our product. Also, as our product has great user engagement, it would be easy to pass on to younger generation.

For doing that I will work with schools to identify the software they are using and develop a lean product which meets those demand of students.

Clarifying Question 1: What are the overall goals for Slack as an organization for the next 3 years?

Let’s say the goal is to acquire new customers, while retaining existing customers.

Clarifying Question 2: Is there a consideration towards launching a different product or grow the existing product?

Let’s say we want to focus on growing the existing product, but are open to launching new products.

We can start by analysing the following parameters before mapping out a product strategy:

1. General economic context: There is a general consensus that remote working will be more actively adopted across businesses in the coming years. This is expected to further grow the demand for collaboration enterprise tools, hence Slack is well-positioned to tap into the increasing demand.

2. Competition – The main competitor for Slack in this space is Microsoft Teams. The major advantage for Teams over Slack is its bundling with Office365 tools.

3. Company –  Slack’s key moat is its numerous external tool integrations, being an attractive proposition for smaller enterprises, and being easy to administrate.

Keeping in mind the above three factors, a good product strategy for Slack would be to smartly tap into the expected uptick in demand for collaboration tools, while focusing on addressing current customer pain-points by improving the product and building on its competitive advantage. Some key tenets of the strategy could be:

1. Maintain and build upon the strong developer community for external tool integrations – A big driver for Slack users is the vast array of external tools it is integrated with (GSuite, Zendesk, Zoho etc). Building on this competitive advantage, Slack should encourage this developer community with a strong backing of its own brand. One potential way to drive this could be via a public developer forum to encourage cross-organization developer collaboration among Slack customers.

2. Improve product capability to enable bundling opportunities – Slack could focus on enabling its product to be even more seamlessly integrated with other popular productivity tool providers (Eg. Consider making Zoom as the default video calling tool to tap into potential network effects). This would enable even more bundling opportunities (Eg. GSuite, Zoom, Facebook Workplace), thus helping with new customer acquisition.

3. Tap into the non-enterprise space – Slack could also consider using its learnings as a chat-based collaboration tool to build a separate product for personal chat interactions, while retaining the channel system. It could be a relatively lighter product, with seamless onboarding and much fewer integrations. It could be marketed as a virtual ‘living room’ to interact with friends and family