Turning a CEO Request for New Slack Features Into a Prioritized Roadmap
Company: Slack
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are a product manager at Slack. The CEO asks you to put together a list of new features for the product. How would you approach this request, and what would you bring back to the CEO?
```hint Find the goal behind the ask
A request for "new features" usually stands in for a business result. Pin down which result the CEO wants and which Slack users it concerns before generating ideas, so you have a way to rank them.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- What prompted the request: slowing seat growth, paying teams downgrading, pressure from chat tools included in office suites customers already buy, or a revenue target?
- What horizon and scale does the CEO expect: a few large bets for the next year, or quick wins for the coming quarter?
- Should the features serve a particular group, such as small teams on the free plan, large enterprise customers or workspace admins, or is choosing the group part of the job?
- Are any areas off limits or already committed on the roadmap?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- Turning the CEO's request into an explicit goal and success measure before naming any feature
- A reasoned choice among Slack's users and buyers, with the pain points that matter to that group
- Evidence sources for those pain points rather than intuition alone
- Concrete Slack features prioritized against the goal with a stated method, including what was left off and why
- Success metrics, guardrails and a validation plan to report back to the CEO
### Follow-up Questions
- The CEO already favors a feature that ranks low on your list. How do you handle that conversation?
- How would your list change if the goal were winning enterprise accounts from a competitor bundled with an office suite?
- Which feature would you test first, and what result would make you drop it?
Overview: A Slack product improvement question in which the CEO asks a product manager to produce a list of new features. It tests how the candidate turns a vague executive request into a clear goal, chooses a user segment, grounds pain points in evidence, prioritizes concrete features, and defines success metrics and guardrails.