Meet April Underwood, Slack's chief product officer who is helping it get ready for a new cycle of growth
- After more than two years at Slack, April Underwood recently got promoted to be its chief product officer.
- The Texas native has helped head up product teams at tech companies for more than a decade, with previous stints at both Google and Twitter.
- Now it's her job to help Slack prepare for its next phase of growth.
When Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield asked April Underwood to be the company's first-ever chief product officer earlier this year, she wasn't surprised.
For most of her time at the company, Underwood, who previously managed product teams at both Twitter and Google, had worked side-by-side with Butterfield to oversee Slack's product teams. But the company had reached a size where it just didn't make sense for its CEO to be so deeply involved in what gets shipped.
"When I joined three years ago, Stewart was still actively involved with managing the team of people," said Underwood, while meeting with Business Insider in a conference room at Slack's San Francisco headquarters. "Now the business is 1,000 people, a lot more complex than it was, so he has a lot more hats that he has to wear these days. So over time he has entrusted me with more responsibility with what we ship, what constitutes good-enough to ship, and how we ship it."
Underwood's promotion comes as Slack is growing rapidly and preparing for more growth to come. Last week, the company announced that its number of daily active users has hit 8 million, which was up 33% from September. Additionally, the company said it now has more than 3 million paid users, up 50% from September.
"Stewart asking me to step into this role is a sign of maturity in the business and also stability in the leadership team here at Slack," Underwood said. "We think we've got a lot of the elements we need to really go for the long haul."
In the near term, Slack is focusing on further expansion - growing its team as more people and companies use its service. Assuming it goes public next year - something industry insiders are betting on - the company will also have to start placing a bigger emphasis on fiscal responsibility.
If Underwood does her job, Slack's long-term future will be intrinsically linked with that of its customers - it will be influencing how people work for generations to come.
Underwood taught herself to code, then it was on to Google and Twitter
Underwood first moved to San Francisco in 2005 from Texas, where she grew up and got an undergraduate degree from the University of Texas at Austin. She had taught herself how to code in college in order to escape a bad tech-support job. Eventually she found herself working as a software engineer at Travelocity.
She had just accepted a promotion to be a product manager in Travelocity's San Francisco office when she found out she was accepted to the University of California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business. From that point on, she was in San Francisco to stay.
"It took me a really long time to get used to the fact that you need to wear a coat on the 4th of July," Underwood said about her adopted city. "It took me years to acquire the proper number of sweatshirts."
After getting her MBA from Haas, Underwood joined Google as a partner technology manager. She then joined Twitter, where she spent nearly five years working on its product team, helping scale the company from 150 to 4,000 people.
Though Twitter has always been a consumer company with an advertising-based revenue model, Underwood credits her time there with preparing her for her job at Slack. At Twitter she worked on features including messaging and search and even led a marketing team when there was a gap in the roster.
Then, like many of her peers, she found her way into the less-sexy world of enterprise software.
"When I worked at Twitter, it felt like all of the consumer companies had moved to San Francisco. But now I know so many people like me that had worked in consumer that transitioned to working in enterprise, because there is a lot of interesting work to do there, and a lot of business opportunity," Underwood said, adding that people get worn out having to "wrestle with the monetization challenges" of consumer tech.
"I think there are a lot of people finding that working in enterprise, you build the best software you can and sell it for what feels like a fair price," she said. "It's a simplification in a way because you're not balancing for two different audiences. You're just building for your customers."
Her vision: Slack as the working world's communication hub
Underwood has already made an impact on how Slack's product works. Under her guidance, Slack launched Enterprise Grid, an administrative service that makes it easier for companies with tens of thousands of employees to use the app across their organizations. That feature could be crucial for the company as it seeks paying customers in its quest for profitability.
She also oversaw the launch of non-English versions of Slack, something she said was "pretty obvious, but it's a ton of work." Those have helped spur the company's international growth. More than half of Slack users now are located outside of the US, and Japan just passed the United Kingdom as its second biggest market by daily active users.
"We launched all of these big things last year that were really critical for audience expansion," Underwood said. "So a lot of what we are doing now is because we have this bigger audience that we can address, and we need to take steps to help them get value out of how they're using Slack and help them understand."
Underwood and her team are now focused on building into Slack more ties to other services, particularly those that are targeted at enterprises. The company wants users to be able to tap into services such as those offered by companies including Box and Workday from within the Slack app, without having to open another program.
"We're making it so that Slack is a communication hub, and you spend all day in it. Not because we're trying to make you spend all day in it, but because that's where people are," Underwood said. "It just makes sense that you get notifications from your expense reporting system."
But she recognizes that she and Slack will need to balance adding new features and attracting new users with keeping existing users happy.
"People see the product, and they want to use it, so I've got a big responsibility on my shoulders to extend that and make it even more valuable to them but also to protect why they loved it in the first place," she said.