Experimentation to Drive Team Expansion at Slack 🚀

In 2019, Slack embarked on a transformative journey to facilitate organic team growth by overhauling its user invitation process.

1. Identifying the Challenge 🔍

In the quest to expand user teams, Slack encountered a significant hurdle: a staggering 80% of paid users were unable to invite new members due to the existing "admin-only" restriction. This limitation, initially designed with the best intentions for educational purposes, inadvertently created a convoluted invitation mechanism that hindered user engagement. The cumbersome process involved:

• Hunting down the admin
• Sending direct messages to initiate invites
• Admin approval before invites were sent
• Invitees receiving an invitation
• Following up with the admin for confirmation

The inefficiencies resulted in friction for everyone involved: inviters, admins, and invitees. Each group grappled with complexities that impeded the straightforward act of growing teams.

2. Defining the Solution 🛠️

Recognizing the need for a streamlined process, the product team developed a holistic solution incorporating three key enhancements:

• User-Generated Invites: Empowering any user to request admin approval for inviting others.
• Admin Approval Mechanism: Allowing admins to assess and approve invites while providing immediate notifications to users following their approval.
• Contextual Invites: Transforming invites to come from the inviter's account for added context, thereby enriching the onboarding experience for invitees.

The hypothesis behind this overhaul was that reducing friction in the invitation flow would lead to increased team expansion, encouraging organic growth and enhancing user retention.

3. Experimentation Framework 🧪

To validate the proposed enhancements, the team adopted a two-pronged experimentation approach:

• Feasibility Assessment: Establishing whether the new invitation feature could be operationally integrated without significant resource demands.
• Business Viability Testing: Gauging admin acceptance of the modified process.

A limited feature release was initiated, allowing the team to focus on core functionalities while keeping development efforts concise. Specifically, the pilot included a simplified admin approval flow without extensive text options or enterprise support, and targeted a select group of interested paid customers.

4. Pilot Results and Learnings 📊

The insights gleaned from the six-week pilot, conducted with twelve customers, proved invaluable:

• Feasibility Insights: The feedback enabled refinement in the roadmap by revealing integration opportunities with existing workflows.
• Business Viability:
  • Admins responded to requests in under 24 hours.
  • Over 80% of requests for invites were accepted.

This validated the hypothesis, showcasing promising adoption rates and highlighting the feature's potential to foster team growth.

5. Risk Mitigation and Strategy 🛡️

As with any innovative endeavor, risks were anticipated and strategies developed to mitigate them:

• Low Request Acceptance Rate: Metrics were tracked daily, with preemptive reminders sent to admins if acceptance rates dwindled.
• Adoption Barriers: Maintaining a clean A/B testing approach and readying in-product educational prompts if adoption flagged.
• Customer Support Challenges: Comprehensive support documentation was prepared alongside channels for direct communication with dissatisfied admins to address concerns promptly.
• Sales Disruption: Precautions were taken to exclude impacted accounts from the sales pipeline to minimize disruptions.

6. Proving Revenue Potential 💰

The final challenge was to illustrate the revenue potential stemming from these changes. Collaboration with the finance team resulted in a comprehensive business model, coupled with cohort analysis that illuminated the feature’s expected impact on user expansion and net dollar retention for existing paid teams. Moreover, projections indicated a significant increment in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) over the subsequent twelve months should the feature be universally implemented.

In conclusion, the journey to refine Slack's invitation process underscores the importance of addressing user needs through iterative experimentation and stakeholder collaboration. By breaking down barriers and simplifying the user experience, Slack is better positioned to facilitate organic team growth, ultimately leading to a more robust product ecosystem.