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GabrielGloege
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There's no point doing this to be small. We should go big, if only because there are a lot of people in the world who deserve Slack. Going big also means that it will have to be really, really good. But that's convenient, since there's also no point doing it if it is not really, really good. Life is too short to do mediocre work and it is definitely too short to build shitty things.
To do this well, we need to take a holistic approach and not just think about a long list of individual tasks we are supposed to get through in a given week. We get zero points for just getting a feature out the door if it is not actually contributing to making the experience better for users, or helping them to understand Slack, or helping us understand them. None of the work we are doing to develop the product is an end in itself; it all must be squarely aimed at the larger purpose.
Consider the teams you see in action at great restaurants, and the totality of their effort: the room, the vibe, the timing, the presentation, the attention, the anticipation of your needs (and, of course, the food itself); nothing can be off. There is a great nobility in being of service to others, and well-run restaurants (or hotels, or software companies) serve with a quality that is measured by its attention to detail. This is a perfect model for us to emulate.
Ensuring that the pieces all come together is not someone else's job. It is your job, no matter what your title is and no matter what role you play. The pursuit of that purpose should permeate everything we do.
But Slack is a bit more complicated than a restaurant (at least in some ways). Since it is new and less familiar, we are less able to fall back on well-established best practices. That means we need to listen, watch & analyze carefully. We'll need to build tools to capture users' behaviour and reactions. And then we'll need to take all that information and our best instincts and be continuously improving.
We are an exceptional software development team. But, we now also need be an excellent customer development team. That's why, in the first section of this doc, I said "build a customer base" rather than "gain market share": the nature of the task is different, and we will work together to understand, anticipate and better serve the people who trust us with their teams' communications, one customer at a time.
The answer to "Why?" is "because why the fuck else would you even want to be alive but to do things as well as you can?". Now: let's do this.