We Don’t Sell Saddles Here (Review)
Making Great Products and Brands
We Don’t Sell Saddles Here by Stewart Butterfield
The Gist
This is an internal memo that Stewart sent to his team 2 weeks before they launched the public beta. It is a beautiful and prescient articulation of Slack’s Theory of Value / Job To Be Done.
The Gem
There so many gems in the this piece. For those of you who don’t think about building product as much as I do, this whole post is dripping with brilliance.
For those of you who do — Butterfield’s unique contribution is the riff he does on top of someone else’ idea: all products are asking things of their customers — to do things in a certain way, to think of themselves in a certain way and it often means changing how one thinks of oneself.
This notion that your products make subtle (or not-so-subtle) contributions to a customer’s ever-evolving self-identity is profound. Mainly because self-identify is a big factor in how people attribute value to things and influences their purchase decision-making (more on that in a different email).
Why I Chose This
Butterfield’s memo is one of my all-time favorite think-pieces. It is a wonderful essay of not only one company’s theory of value but a general commentary on how other companies should think about their own theories of value. For anyone who wants an exemplar of what a modern, value-theorizing CEO looks like, look no further than this post.
