Alan Schaaf Quotes

It's the scale that Yahoo brings - and that user base - that I really want to build products for.

You may be trying to drive in a particular direction that people don't necessarily understand at first. In our case, we knew the users we had in mind for this product. So in the early days, we looked at our customers, really just testers at that point, and we paid extra attention to the teams we knew should be using Slack successfully.

Well, user feedback was excellent. Even when the software didn't work at all, there were few people who were avid users, and there were people who were just sending excellent feedback and excellent ideas.

We obviously try to be in tune with what our users want.

I think then, when we started receiving the first of the user feedback, feedback from people that I had not specifically told about it, but had spread from friend to friend and then they were giving us feedback.

If advertisers want to decorate their ads to increase their conversions by showing what users think, that's a good thing.

We're trying to do something so that when the average person uses Pinterest, it has to make the service better.

I don't think there are as many usability issues as there are tactical or strategic decisions related to whether incorporating social networking into your site is going to help or hurt.

My sweet spot is figuring out how to make a product that people love and how to refine it to make them love it more. All the rest is business noise.

There was a lot of dialogue between the people who were developing Flickr and their users to get feedback on how they wanted Flickr to develop. That interaction made the initial community very strong, and then that seed was there for new people who joined to make the community experience strong for them, too.

What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.

To ensure we are meeting the demands of existing customers while also attracting new users, we remain focused on building cutting-edge technology and introducing new and innovative product offerings.

If you watched companies such as Sony and Samsung grow, they focused first on features and then on industrial design, which made their products look and feel better.

If we are building something that users need, and there is a lot of value we are driving, I think how search manifests in iOS will work out just fine.

The problem with Myspace was always that it was never as strong a product as it needed to be. It left itself vulnerable to competition. It was only a matter of time before someone created something better.

What happens to the Microsofts, Oracles and IBMs of the world is that when they get big enough, they don't think they need to bring that same level of focus and energy to the end-user experience.

Generally, our approach with products at Google is to first develop the right user base and then to figure out what's the right experience for the ads.

One of the hard parts about building a service that you use yourself is that it's easy to forget what it was like the very first time someone signs up. Every once in a while, I'll create a brand new account and give it a try and see how hard it is to find things that I really love, see if I'm using it or thinking about it differently.

CEOs are often chief product officers. But for me to say I'm a chief product officer when my product is a community, I really should be thinking of myself as head of this community.

We don't really talk about our future plans. But we, at the same time, try to build things that our users ask us for.

Companies like Pinterest and Twitter did not become sensations because of Google search but because of the many ways users find out about great sites.

I love that our engineers are first and foremost 'Instagram' users.

The fundamental truth for developers is they will build if there are users.

When you let travelers vote with their clicks, and you put that at the center of your decision-making, you build the product they want, and ultimately, their business will follow.

Most of the time, when you need something at a company, you make it. If you want to sell a product, you create it. If you need a head of marketing, you hire one. If you want to create a great company culture, what do you do? The lack of a clear answer on this is why I believe most companies don't have a great culture.