A dialog with Lidiane Jones about Slack’s future

In a flurry of exercise on the finish of final yr, Salesforce introduced that co-CEO Bret Taylor was stepping down. Shortly thereafter, Slack co-founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield introduced his exit. We’d quickly study that his alternative could be Lidiane Jones, who on the time was GM of Commerce Cloud, Advertising and marketing Cloud and Expertise Cloud at Salesforce.

Whereas Jones was working primarily your entire B2C enterprise with that title, she was comparatively unknown within the trade. But she introduced along with her a deep background that included greater than a dozen years at Microsoft and virtually 4 years at Sonos, all of which helped her construct a eager understanding of software program and product growth.

To make certain, she was strolling right into a tough scenario changing a beloved founder-CEO, whereas looking for methods to bridge the hole between Salesforce and Slack. On the identical time these executives have been leaving, Salesforce as an organization was coping with a slew of activist buyers. Certainly one of their main complaints was an absence of integration between the core Salesforce merchandise and the corporate’s costly acquisitions over the past a number of years.

Of these, Slack was by far the costliest at a whopping $28 billion. The hope was to carry the platform into the fold and have or not it’s the communications layer throughout your entire Salesforce household of merchandise. Salesforce has thus far executed some integrations between the 2 platforms however not sufficient to fulfill critics.

On the identical time, Jones nonetheless should shield the independence of Slack as a result of it may well’t be perceived as being so tightly built-in into Salesforce that it may well’t function outdoors of the ecosystem.

No person claimed the job was going to be simple.

TechCrunch+ sat down with Jones lately on the Salesforce workplaces in Boston to debate how her transition goes thus far and what challenges she faces as she dives into job.

Welcome aboard

Not lengthy earlier than Jones took over as CEO, The Info ran an expose suggesting that the connection between the 2 firms was broken. The report additionally said that Marc Benioff and Butterfield butted heads, the deal was Taylor’s child, and with Taylor and Butterfield gone, Benioff was much less fascinated about it, a degree that Jones disputes now.