We Don’t Sell Saddles Here

The situation

Tiny Speck had spent years building Glitch, an online game, with a team spread across several cities. To coordinate, they built an internal chat tool with searchable history and integrations. In late 2012 the game closed. Rather than shut down, the team decided that the chat tool was the product. By mid-2013 they were preparing a preview release of what they called Slack.

The market they were entering was crowded and unglamorous. Email was universal; instant messaging and group chat tools such as HipChat, Campfire and IRC already existed. Butterfield needed his team to understand what they were selling, and he wrote it down.

What the memo argues

The title is a metaphor. A business that sells saddles competes on the features of saddles; a business that sells horseback riding, the experience and what it makes possible, competes on something larger. Butterfield’s point was that Slack should sell the riding.

He began from a hard truth about the market: hardly anyone was looking for “a group chat system.” So, he wrote, “what we’re selling is organizational transformation.” The software “just happens to be the part we’re able to build & ship.” He named the transformation precisely: “We’re selling a reduction in information overload, relief from stress, and a new ability to extract the enormous value of hitherto useless corporate archives.” Among the outcomes he listed were “a reduction in the cost of communication,” “all your team communication, instantly searchable, available wherever you go,” and “75% less email.”

The memo then turns this positioning into work. If customers are buying a change in how their team operates, the product has to make that change easy to start and pleasant to continue. The memo asks the team to treat every detail of the experience, especially for new teams and new users, as part of what they are selling, because a team adopting Slack is taking a risk on a new way of working.

The decision it carried

The memo fixed Slack’s positioning before launch. Slack would not compete as a better chat client on features; it would present itself as a better way for teams to work, measured in outcomes such as less email and more accessible knowledge. Practical consequences followed: channels open by default so information was visible, search as a central feature, integrations that brought other tools’ notifications into one place, and heavy investment in the first-run experience.

The alternative was the conventional one: describe the product by its category and features, and compete with existing chat tools on price and capabilities.

What happened

Slack launched publicly in early 2014 and grew rapidly, largely through teams adopting it themselves and spreading it inside organisations. Microsoft launched Teams in 2017 with a similar model inside its Office suite, and team chat became the default communication layer of many workplaces. Salesforce acquired Slack in 2021.

The promise of reduced overload had a more complicated result. Chat reduced email for many teams, as promised. But messages became cheaper to send than emails, channels invited more people to see more messages, and presence indicators brought back the expectation of quick replies. By 2025 Microsoft reported that people using its workplace tools were interrupted about every two minutes, around 275 times a day, receiving on average 117 emails and 153 Teams messages daily. The tools reduced one kind of overload and created conditions for another, as this site’s essay on communication tools discusses.

How to read it as a product manager

The memo is a masterclass in positioning a product in a category customers do not want to buy.

Start from the customer’s problem, not the category. “Group chat” describes a mechanism; “less information overload” describes a result. The second is what a buyer can justify.

Make the positioning operational. The memo does not stop at messaging; it asks the team to build and polish the product so that the promised change actually happens for a new team. Positioning that the product cannot deliver is advertising.

Choose your promised outcomes carefully, because customers will hold you to them. “75% less email” was specific, measurable and, for many teams, achieved. “A reduction in information overload” was broader, and the product’s own success made it harder to deliver at scale. A product manager can learn from both: specific promises build trust when they are met; broad promises invite scrutiny when the product’s side effects grow.

What is contested

Some critics of workplace chat argue that tools like Slack increased interruption and the expectation of constant availability, the opposite of the memo’s promise. Defenders argue that the overload came from how organisations used the tools, and that features such as threads, notification controls and scheduled sending gave users ways to manage it. Both can be true: a product can deliver its promise for disciplined teams and fail to for others.

The decision, examined closely

What triggered it

Two weeks before the preview release, the team needed a shared answer to a simple question: what are we selling? Their product had been built for their own use, in a market most observers considered saturated. Butterfield’s memo was an attempt to make sure everyone, from engineers to support staff, understood the product as a change in how teams work rather than as another chat application.

The constraints

Slack had little money for marketing and no sales force. It had to spread by being adopted by small teams who liked it enough to recommend it. That made the first experience of a new team critical, and it made positioning a matter for the whole company, not just marketing.

What the author was optimising for

The memo optimises for adoption by teams who had not been looking for the product. Every element, the outcome-based positioning, the attention to onboarding and polish, the promise of less email, serves that goal. It is a growth strategy written as a statement of values.

Second-order effects

Slack’s success turned team chat into a standard category, and Microsoft’s response, bundling Teams with Office, changed the competitive landscape. Inside customer organisations, Slack’s open channels and searchable history changed how information flowed, often for the better, and also made constant availability a norm in many workplaces. The promise of less overload became one of the central tensions in the history of workplace software.

The counterfactual

Positioned as a chat tool, Slack might have been one more product in a crowded category. Positioned as transformation, it attracted attention, investment and enthusiastic users, and it also accepted responsibility for an outcome, less overload, that depended as much on how organisations behaved as on the software.

Sources and limitations

Quotations are taken from the memo as published by its author and were verified for this site’s earlier essay on communication tools; the original page could not be retrieved again during this research, so the description of the memo’s later sections is a summary rather than quotation. The 2025 interruption figures come from Microsoft’s Work Trend Index. The evaluation of the memo’s promise against later outcomes is the author’s interpretation.