Making Slack the Center of Work with CTO Cal Henderson

<p>Many of us know that familiar chime. It’s the sound you hear when someone messages you inside a channel on Slack, the business world’s leading communications platform. It’s a sound that has become synonymous with the company, which, as a matter of fact was never supposed to be the platform it has become. </p><p> Cal Henderson, the co-founder and CTO of Slack, will tell you that the platform that has helped transform the way distributed workforces operate, was actually originally designed as a simple tool his team used to work on a game they hoped to launch. And when that video game failed to take-off and the team was looking for a way to salvage all of the work they did, they saw a light at the end of the tunnel.</p><p><i>“We knew we wanted to keep working together and we realized that the way we had been collaborating and working together while working on this game, the set of tools that we'd built, we realized we always wanted to keep working together in that way. We wanted to use a set of tools like that. And if we did, maybe other small development companies like us would, and so we turned that into the product and that became Slack.”</i></p><p>On this episode of IT Visionaries, Cal discusses Slack’s journey. He dives into its initial struggle as a video game developer, and details the pivot they made to turn it into one of the premiere platforms for distributed workforces used around the world.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Main Takeaways</strong></p><ul><li><strong>Pivot! Pivot!:</strong> During its infancy, the Slack team was focused on developing a video game. But once they realized the product-market fit wasn’t there, they quickly realized that the tools they were using to communicate were great for collaborating, which led to a complete pivot in the business model. </li><li><strong>Tweet Tweet:</strong> When you’re developing a platform that is built around the user experience, one of the easiest and fastest ways to build a feedback loop is through social media. When Slack wants to get an idea of what issues