Understanding Users and Choosers through Customer Advisory Boards, with Slack VP Ilan Frank

Crossing the Enterprise Chasm

Michael Grinich (00:02):

Welcome to Crossing the Enterprise Chasm, a podcast about software startups and their journey, moving upmarket to serving enterprise customers. I'm your host, Michael Greenwich. I'm the founder of WorkOS, which is a platform that helps developers quickly ship common enterprise features like Single Sign-On. On this podcast cast, you'll hear directly from founders, product leaders and early stage operators who have navigated building great products for enterprise customers. In every episode, you'll find strategies, tactics, and real world advice for ways to make your app enterprise ready and take your business to the next level.

Michael Grinich (00:38):

Today I'm joined by Ilan Frank VP of Enterprise Product at Slack. Slack is of course used by lots of small and medium size companies. But over the last several years, the product has also been adopted by very large organizations like Walmart, Nike, News Corp, and IBM. Along the way this meant Slack needed to become enterprise ready and build lots of new features and functionality for IT admins. We're going to dig into all this and more, and talk about the way Slack was able to move up market and cross the enterprise chasm. Ilan, let's get started by going back in time. Tell us about back when you joined Slack five years ago, what was the state of the enterprise business and product for those customers?

Ilan Frank (01:18):

It's actually been almost six years. It's crazy, time really flies by. So in early 2016, when I joined we had enterprise customers, but for the most part there were 20 people that were called account managers and we were taking orders. If the people didn't want to pay with credit card, if they were large organizations and they wanted to have some type of enterprise wide license agreement. Those 20 people would basically take down their information and really kind of work with them to structure some type of invoicing rather than credit card transaction. But that was kind of the state of our enterprise world. We really didn't have a sales team, certainly not a customer success team. And the product itself was also very immature from an enterprise perspective. The only thing that we had at that time from what we call enterprise features was SSO. That was the first feature that we developed. And that was about all we had at that point.

Michael Grinich (02:10):

Was that developed before you joined? Were you part of that, the SSO Feature?

Ilan Frank (02:13):

It was, the SSO feature was developed just before I joined that's right. In 2015, we launched SSO.

Michael Grinich (02:19):

Do you remember what folks were asking for at that time? You only had SSO. The buying motion was opposite, this is kind of an entire separate thing. Sales maturity around selling enterprise, but from a product functionality perspective, what we're folks asking for? Where was Slack maybe not up to par from there? What they needed?

Ilan Frank (02:36):

Quite a few things. I mean the first thing which doesn't necessarily relate to WorkOS, but Slack in general, is just reliability. I don't know if anyone has read any articles about 2015 in Slack, but if you had a team of larger than 5,000 or so people. Slack was not the most reliable platform to be on at that point. So that's the first thing is customers like IBM came to us and said, "Okay, we can't even hit 5,000 people. How are we going to get 400,000 people on this thing?"

Ilan Frank (03:02):

So that was one of our main focuses initially on the enterprise side is okay, "How do we actually re architect Slack?" Because it was built as a team tool, for a hundred people, the initial pitch deck was there's going to be teams of a hundred. And if you want more than that, you go create another team. But now how do we scale that from that to 400,000 people at IBM, all in one channel together for announcements or anything like that. So scalability was job one initially.

Ilan Frank (03:26):

And then I joked that in 2016, I said the word table stakes, or heard it more than any other time in my career. The tables stakes feature from enterprise were obviously expanding some of the SSO, so supporting other IDPs, we had to support SCIM for provisioning and de provisioning. So that was something that we developed in 2016 so that you can do that. We had to do all kinds of things around compliance. So everything from eDiscovery to DLP, data protection at data exports, anything like that was basically 2016 and that's when we started really that effort. And then finally some administration features basic administration features around users, permissions things like that. Those were kind of the table stakes features that people wanted that first year.

Michael Grinich (04:13):

How did you build intuition to know what to built here, or not even intuition, but how did you actually know what to build? Was it coming from the sales team, you connecting with IT, walk us through. I think many people listening are either at that similar spot or about to be at that spot. How do you assess what features to build? Or how did you build your roadmap around that?

Ilan Frank (04:33):

So a couple ways. Certainly we had a product gaps type of process where sales people and SEs could report what they're hearing as show stoppers from the field. And so we wanted to pay attention to that, but we actually, from a product perspective, we actually did our own TAM analysis. And looked at the market and looked at these features around compliance and security as ways to really unlock TAM. And so the basic ones were basically we're at multiple organizations, almost any public organization is going to need the features that I just spoke about. From SSO to provisioning and de provisioning, specifically, some type of device management to the ability to manage devices. And so there's like a basic level of kind of Maslow's hierarchy that you just need to meet in order to really be taken seriously in the enterprise.

Ilan Frank (05:25):

And then there are other features that you have to be careful about because they sound enterprisey, but they really are pertaining to a specific geography or a specific industry. And those are the ones that you have to be careful not to rush off and do right away. I would hold those off into later years. So for example, we have a lot of requirements around FINRA and financial services. Regulation around compliance, data archiving, legal holds, different types of formats of data export. Which financial services companies like Goldman Sachs will say, "This is a must have." And they're probably right. It is a must have, but it is a must have for the financial service's industry, not for every single organization.

Ilan Frank (06:05):

So you have to really think, what is this going to open up for me as an organization? Are we ready to take on financial services or healthcare? The same thing with healthcare? I advise companies that I work with who look at obviously high tech first then after that media, companies like the Netflix's, HBOS, CBS, Hulu, Disney. These are going to be companies that are usually forward looking then the professional services type organizations. Or organizations that provide a service and only fourth is financial services. So the Capital Ones, American Expresses they're going to be forward looking for financial services. But they're not forward looking compared to all of the other companies that are going to come before it, on those other industries.

Speaker 3 (06:52):

Is that kind of just TAM analysis as you're talking to that?

Ilan Frank (06:53):

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