On July 31, 2013, Stewart Butterfield sent a memo to his team at Tiny Speck, the small company building a new messaging tool called Slack. It was titled We Don't Sell Saddles Here.
The argument fits in a sentence. People who buy a saddle want to ride. Slack's job, Butterfield wrote, was to sell what a team becomes when it uses the product: calmer, better connected, and actually aware of what is going on. The software was the saddle. The change in how people worked was the ride.
The memo gave a small team one story about what they were building and why, before the public launch. It shaped how Slack was built, sold and explained. Seven years later, Salesforce agreed to buy Slack for about $27.7 billion, its largest acquisition ever.
A team pulls in one direction when everyone can repeat the story. Write down what you are really selling, on one page your whole company can read in five minutes.