Stewart Butterfield: Organic Origins of Design

We didn't know it at the time and it wasn't obvious. And this wasn't even obvious I think until like a year ago in this very non self conscious, non speculative way. We were designing Slack, but based on the actual needs that we had as a team that was distributed, the needs that we had as a team that was deep in technological development, that had a big degree of coordination because working on the game we had artists and animators and sound designers and level builders and we had people making content pipeline tools to bring all that stuff together. And just like any other business, most of your daily effort is in communication, no matter what your job is. So your job might be doing stuff in Excel, or might be doing stuff in an IDE or doing stuff in Salesforce or whatever your role specific function is. But most of the time is someone telling you what you're supposed to be doing, you attending a meeting discussing what you're supposed to be doing, you reading or writing email about what you are doing. And just that need to coordinate people is a really big part of how we work. So this is kind of the good news and the bad news is over after a couple years. We have some insight into why it was successful. The bad news is that that's a hard thing to replicate, to be able to actually design something while not actively thinking about it. But it's definitely the best way. Because I think one of the biggest problems that software designers, product managers, entrepreneurs have is the temptation to be really speculative with what some hypothetical person would want as opposed to something that you know you need.