Quote of the day by Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield: ‘What we are selling is not the software product… what we’re selling is organizational transformation’ — a manifesto for workplace evolution
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Although Slack is now a widely used communications tool deployed by small businesses and enterprises alike, it didn’t always start off that way.
Its creator organization, Tiny Speck, was actually founded as a video games company – but it was the internal system built to manage workflows and communications that gave the company its big break.
“What we are selling is not the software product — the set of all the features, in their specific implementation — because there are just not many buyers for this software product… what we’re selling is organizational transformation.”
Corporate relief
Slack’s co-founder and former CEO, Stewart Butterfield, was describing his vision for the service in an internal memo, which he later published to a wider audience.
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This was still when the team was known as Tiny Speck. By framing the software in this way, he suggested that what organizations would buy into was a new way of doing things that Slack represented. The result of adopting Slack in the way teams worked would itself be the product, rather than any particular application.
He clarified that the team was selling a reduction in information overload, relief from stress and the ability to search through corporate archives with ease – a task otherwise laborious and cumbersome.
The modern workplace
Slack has positioned itself as an essential tool among many others, including Microsoft Teams, in the broader business landscape.
Even after its massive $28 billion acquisition by Salesforce, it hasn’t lost its identity – and has even innovated by adding new features, especially in terms of integrations and custom AI instructions. Using MCP, it can connect with external apps and let members work within other tools.
It has also added deep research and code execution functions with “big mode” for those working on larger projects. Building on this, the team is planning to deploy AI bots within channels and allow agents to be part of the fabric of communication and organization.