A Product Junkie’s Guide To Landing Your Dream Job (Especially if you Dream of Slack)

As a kid, Simon Vallee would obsess over products: Sneakers, tennis rackets and trading cards, just to name a few. The French Canadian who grew up in Quebec found himself not just collecting and categorizing them all, but really just thinking about them all the time.  

Vallee, now 34, finds himself in what most would likely describe as the perfect job for a product junkie.

He’s a senior product manager at Slack, the San Francisco instant messaging startup that is out to recreate office communication. Vallee’s focus at the company, valued at $3 billion, is on documents: making them easier for coworkers to see, use and share.

His childhood obsessions were over products that were all around him; the same is true as an adult. That’s a career path built by design.

“You are very true to yourself when you are a kid. If you can look back at that, it can give you a lot of insights,” says Vallee “Don’t settle. Everyone deserves to be happy. We live in a world where so many things are possible. Continue looking for that thing that makes you happy.”

After graduating with a degree in engineering from the University of Montreal, Vallee started his career doing a seemingly odd task: Installing gas installations across British Columbia. He was in that role for just over a year before moving over to Electronic Arts Canada. While there, he was recruited by EA Canada’s COO to co-found a website-creating platform that was later bought up by Salesforce in 2010. The product junkie went on to found OpenCal, an online scheduling software firm acquired by Groupon. He followed that with Spaces, the all-in-one document platform acquired by Slack in 2014, earning him an early seat at the now exploding startup.

“This is genuinely the first job that I have loved,” he says. “I am happy to show up to work every day, I am happy to think about it in my spare time. It feels almost exactly the same as when I was running my own company. Actually, it feels better because I have a little bit less stress.”

Vallee and I sat down at Slack's sprawling headquarters in downtown San Francisco to talk about his current work, the future of communication and how he thinks about product design differently.

Edited excerpts:

Caroline Fairchild: What’s wrong with office communication right now?

Simon Vallee: A lot of the tools that we have been using up until the last few years really have been kind of mired in those old paradigms. They work fine, but they maybe are not the most natural way of communicating. What we are doing at Slack, and what I tried to do with Spaces as well, is just figure out the things that people need to do when they are communicating and present those in a more natural way. A lot of time that means shedding those old paradigms, these old shackles from the past.

CF: From a product perspective, what is wrong with email?

SV: The thing for me with email is that it does not feel like natural communication. It does not feel like a natural way to have a conversation. When you are in a room with a bunch of people and you want to talk about something you don’t start off with thinking, 'What is the subject for the sentence that I am going to put together now and who am I going to address it to specifically?' You just kind of turn around and look at the person that you want to talk to and you just start talking. So, email is something that you have to work around in a way.

CF: How do you manage your inbox?

SV: [Managing my inbox] has become a lot simpler since I started working on Slack. I probably get between five and 20 emails a day now. And a lot of those are not actionable emails. It has been a pretty crazy kind of shift, having everything go through Slack. To me, one of the more remarkable things about it is I don’t understand how I used to do it. I don’t understand how I was able to get by on email. It feels a little bit like, before the Internet, I spent a lot of time on my computer but I don’t really remember what I was doing.

CF: Slack is going through a hyper-growth period right now. How do you prioritize your time?

SV: We are in a tremendously fortunate position right now: We have a huge amount of growth and a lot of very engaging and passionate users. One of the great things about having this passionate user base is we hear from our users quite a bit. So, in terms of prioritizing, the feedback that we get from our users is one of the most important things. It is a bit of a balancing act between that and things that just need to be fixed. But by paying really close attention to what our customers are asking and telling us we can hopefully reach a good balance there.

CF: How do you continue to move quickly during the growth?

SV: Small teams can move faster than large teams. When we look at the way that we were internally structured here at Slack, we stayed fairly small and that was on purpose. The other aspect is you have to be very clear on what you want to achieve and get buy-in from all these stakeholders right from the get go. This is something that I have learned to be better at over the years. I probably did not do as good of a job at Groupon as I could have, I think I did a better job of that here, but if everybody can agree from the get go then there are no surprises and there are no roadblocks that will come out of nowhere. Or at least there will be less of them.

CF: What have you looked for in partners who want to acquire your companies?

SV: Ultimately, listen to your heart for these kind of things. You can spend a lot of time rationalizing and probably it is a good idea to put together a list of pros and cons about acquisition scenarios. But I think deep down you know from the start whether you want to do it or not. That is easy to lose track of when you are in that high stress process. A lot of people will have a lot of different opinions. Both of my companies were bootstraps so we didn’t have any investors to turn to for advice. Obviously that’s not the case typically. But, at the end of the day, you are living with the consequences.

CF: What do you look for in career opportunities?

SV: I’ve tried to bear toward things that really excited me. In cases where I was at some company and wasn’t excited anymore, then I move on.

CF: What is your advice for product managers who are trying to make their mark?

SV: You have to be relentless. The universe is not set up for your product to succeed and in a lot of ways I think it sort of conspires against it. Whether it is bugs or detractors or technological roadblocks, you are going to encounter a lot of resistance and you have to be incredibly tenacious to break through that resistance. The good news though is that by breaking through that you put yourself in a pretty small group of people. Most people give up along the way and if you can stay focused on that end goal and see it through the hard times, you will have a big leg up on other people.

CF: What in your mind fundamentally makes a great product?

SV: In this sort of Apple-led design world that we are living in right now, it is really easy to think of simplicity as the most important thing. But simplicity is really just one of the tools that you have available to you and the most important thing is to focus on how can you make something useful. It is a shift that I have had to do in my mind because when you are doing any job it is easy to make an intellectual exercise out of it. But this focus on utility I think really brings you back to the user. By focusing on simplicity,  you can end up actually kind of ironically adding a lot of friction. If you are too focused on simplicity, you could start hiding buttons that should actually be surfaced.

CF: How are you implementing that philosophy into what you are doing right now at Slack?

SV: Well, files is my focus right now, so there is a bunch of really cool things that we are working with. The presentation, both the previews and then the full blown view of files right now is okay, but there is a ton of room for improvement. We have been putting a lot of effort right now into figuring out what is the best way to preview and view files inside Slack. I think we have come up with a pretty good system for it that we are going to be putting in place over the next few months. It is going to be more obvious. We have this issue right now where it is not obvious.

CF: What keeps you up at night?

SV: Product management is about solving problems. The problems are often pretty clear and the solutions to those problems are not so clear. There is often a bunch of different ways that you can solve them, but there are probably only a couple of really good ways to solve them. I will wake up often in the middle of the night with this problem that I have been thinking about. What I have started doing is getting up and working for an hour or two. And then after that, I typically get pretty tired again and fall back to sleep for a couple of hours.

CF: What other productivity hacks do you have?

SV: I don’t know that it’s a productivity hack more than just a kind of a problem solving hack, but I specifically put time away in my weekly schedule to sit down with a pen and a piece of paper and just write ideas. Sometimes it is completely unstructured, and other times it is just on a specific problem. [Something about the] direct interface between the pen and the paper is very conducive to creativity somehow. Way more so, at least for me, than doing something behind a keyboard.

CF: You worked on a production line at a steel plant in college. Tell me about that.

SV: What I took away from it is that the people that were there were all incredibly hard working people, dedicated to their job, doing a good job in a really tough environment and being pretty happy about it as well. I have a pretty darn cushy life and it is easy to find little things to complain about. [It helped] me realize how good I have it. Success is not just about working hard. There are a lot of people that work really hard and are not successful. To be privileged enough to have the interest and the skills to work in an industry where hard work is highly rewarded is a really fortunate position to be in.

Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated Vallee's age. 

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