At Yammer's start, the team focused solely on user acquisition because growth was the only metric that mattered. The speaker outlines a prioritization process: identify critical business hypotheses, rank them by uncertainty and impact, then tackle the most uncertain ones first. He recommends Kris Gale's Sliders framework, which visualizes priorities as adjustable levers you work down in order.
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The question's priorities and how we develop them. You know, I actually think priorities are in some ways easy when you come up with the framework through which you prioritize. I think a mistake is saying we got all these things we could work on, how do we, let's just prioritize them. Early days in Yammer, we were missing the friction of value, but we said, look, to be successful, we need users, we need to grow. We need them to engage and stick around, and we need to make money. But frankly, in the first days, we actually just needed users because we could worry about the other two later. We had a minimum amount of engagement that was sufficient. And so for a year, we did nothing but work on features that would increase growth. So that made it really easy. And someone would say, oh, we have all these users and they're asking for this feature. We'd be like, is it going to help us grow? We're not working on it now. Or can you think about it in a way that helps us grow? Or Maybe the idea is great and we'll only work on the parts of it that help us grow. And it's very painful to take that sort of long view because there's so much you want to do. So again, I go back to like identifying what the hypotheses you have to prove are, prioritizing those somewhat subjectively in terms of, you know, what is the thing that has to be true to be successful here? And what is the thing I'm most unsure about? I need to validate that. I need to focus and validate that. I can't do too much at one time. Resource constrained, and I only need to work on that. Actually, one thing was mentioned here, but I highly recommend you Google Sliders, Chris Gale, K-R-I-S-G-A-L-E. He gives a talk on prioritization that is very short, but it was really impactful for us. We talk about this a lot, and it's a way of thinking about only prioritizing things that are the lowest sliders, they call it, the most pressing, and only working on them until they're no longer the lowest slider. He describes it better than me, but I highly recommend
