Leadership Stories from Slack by Michael Lopp

Level-up Engineering

Interview with Michael Lopp, Rands about his time as VP of Product Engineering at Slack. He tells stories about the darkest day of Slack, the mistakes he made along the way and how he grew into his executive role.

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In this interview we're covering:

• Leadership takeaways from Slack
• The darkest day of Slack
• Tactical vs strategic focus as VP of Product Engineering
• Retaining your direct reports
• Creating processes before they're necessary
• The experience of Slack going public
• Story about telling the truth
• And much more!

Excerpt from the interview:

"I suggest executives in growing companies tell the truth as quickly as possible.

It’s great advice, but this story is about how it backfires. Really, this was a failure on my part as a senior leader, and it flowed from this approach. If I get a question, I answer it. If you ask, “How are we doing on hiring women in engineering?” I’ll say, “Here’s the answer and here’s the data.”

At Slack, we had a lot of data come in about hiring in a big spreadsheet. It’s data like the number of people hired, diversity in hiring, and so on..."

Click here to read the full interview!