Re-establishing Product-Market Fit (Stacking S-Curves)
When growth plateaus, throw away the roadmap, sacrifice impact for learning, and rebuild PMF for the next audience.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 88%
Product-market fit isn't won once — it's a series of stacked S-curves, each a new audience with different needs. When Slack's self-service business plateaued (~2019), the fix wasn't to optimize what had worked; it was to discard the roadmap, generate hypotheses about new growth levers for the next set of customers, and deliberately sacrifice impact for six months to learn which levers were real. A new early-funnel North Star metric ('successful teams') then rallied the whole company.
Origin
Drawn from Noah Weiss's experience turning around Slack's plateaued self-service business around 2019, which doubled the rate of new paid customer growth.
Core principles
- 01PMF with your current users can coexist with losing PMF for the audience you want next
- 02Each new audience (non-developers, non-US, large enterprise) is a fresh S-curve requiring fresh product work
- 03A humble beginner's mindset — not presuming you've cracked it forever — is required to see the plateau
- 04An early-funnel activation metric predictive of retention can align teams far better than the paid-conversion endpoint
How to run it
- 1
Diagnose beneath the surface
When top-line growth looks fine but feels off, dig into cohort curves and research to see whether the fundamentals (retention, activation) are actually as healthy as they used to be.
Watch out Aggregate growth can mask a rotting core — look at cohorts, not just totals.
- 2
Throw away the roadmap
Instead of optimizing the things that worked over the last few years, discard the existing roadmap and generate a set of hypotheses about new levers based on insights about the next set of customers.
- 3
Optimize for learning, not impact
Accept that for roughly six months you may drive no impact at all — the goal is to quickly learn which levers are real and which are off the mark.
Pro tip Name the sacrifice explicitly to the org so nobody panics when the impact metrics stay flat during the learning period.
Watch out This is hard to do emotionally — teams must resist the pull to keep optimizing the old wins.
- 4
Define a predictive activation North Star
Find an early-funnel metric that predicts long-term retention and conversion, and rally every team around driving it — not just the endpoint of paid conversions.
Pro tip Test the threshold empirically: Slack found 5 people communicating most of the work week made a team 400% more likely to upgrade within six months.
- 5
Fix the foundational comprehension and desirability gaps
Address whether the next audience can comprehend what the product is for and why they should care — including onboarding and missing core product capabilities.
Pro tip Weiss estimates the fix was ~60% early-journey/onboarding and ~40% foundational product features (e.g. WYSIWYG composer, offline mobile).
Watch out Perfecting onboarding is useless if core product gaps still make the product incomprehensible to the new audience.
In the wild
Slack's funnel had only paid customers at the far end and account creation at the very start. Quantitative research surfaced a middle metric: get 5 people using Slack most of their work week just to communicate, and that team was 400% more likely to upgrade within six months. The whole company — not just the self-serve team — was rallied to drive new successful teams.
→ Slack doubled the rate of new paid customer growth in the following year and re-accelerated its self-service business.
Common mistakes
Assuming you deserve every customer
Presuming continued signups as an entitlement blinds teams to the plateau; Weiss stresses being humble and not feeling you deserve to have every company on Earth sign up.
Optimizing the old playbook instead of learning a new one
Continuing to tune what worked for the previous audience drives short-term motion but never finds the new levers, so growth keeps decaying as you hit the ceiling of the current S-curve.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product and growth leaders at a scaling B2B/SaaS company whose once-explosive self-serve growth has quietly plateaued.
Not ideal for
Companies that have never found initial PMF, or those in a genuinely healthy growth phase where disruption would be self-inflicted.
From the transcript
“let's kind of throw the whole roadmap away and instead let's come up with a bunch of hypotheses about what could be new levers that…”
“we're probably not going to drive any impact at all it's only going to be about learning but at the end of that hopefully we…”
“if you could get five people using slack the majority of their work week to just communicate at all that would be a successful team…”
From the episode
The 10 traits of great PMs, how AI will impact your product, and Slack’s product development process
Noah Weiss (Slack, Foursquare, Google)