Main Stage

Taking a Different Tack: How We Built Up Research at Slack.

About 3 years ago, Slack decided to create a Research team. In this talk, the founding members will share their experience building the team from the ground up, and how their team has evolved since then. They will share how they coordinate among many disciplines, methods, and business units to create a unified roadmap for the company.

The principles will be illustrated with a case study examining how research prepared Slack for launch in Japan. The talk concludes with a set of lessons learned along the way.

Michael Massimi.

Staff Researcher, Slack

Dr. Michael Massimi is a Staff Researcher at Slack working on the Messaging team. His areas of expertise include human-computer interaction, computer-supported collaborative work, and social support. He earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, and was a Post-Doctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK); he has published over 70 scholarly articles and served on the program committee for CHI and CSCW. Before joining Slack, he was the lead user researcher on Facebook Groups for 2 years, just as it reached 1 billion monthly active users.

Christina Janzer.

Director of Research & Analytics, Slack

Christina Janzer is the Director of Research & Analytics at Slack, responsible for leading all global research and product analytics efforts that provide insights about people and work. With the goal to build an enterprise tool that makes people’s working lives better, Christina and her team work to better understand the people we're building for, the challenges they face, and the broader world of work in order to help inform overall product, marketing and sales efforts.

Prior to Slack, Christina founded the User Research team at Facebook after helping to grow the Customer Support team. Christina studied Product Design at Stanford.