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 be taught that his substitute could be Lidiane Jones, who on the time was GM of Commerce Cloud, Advertising Cloud and Expertise Cloud at Salesforce.

Whereas Jones was working basically the whole B2C enterprise with that title, she was comparatively unknown within the trade. But she introduced together with her a deep background that included greater than a dozen years at Microsoft and nearly 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 troublesome state of affairs changing a beloved founder-CEO, whereas looking for methods to bridge the hole between Salesforce and Slack. On the identical time these executives had been leaving, Salesforce as an organization was coping with a slew of activist traders. One among their major 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 deliver the platform into the fold and have or not it’s the communications layer throughout the whole Salesforce household of merchandise. Salesforce has thus far completed 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’t be perceived as being so tightly built-in into Salesforce that it may’t function outdoors of the ecosystem.

No person claimed the job was going to be straightforward.

TechCrunch+ sat down with Jones not too long ago on the Salesforce workplaces in Boston to debate how her transition goes to this point 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 corporations 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 focused on it, a degree that Jones disputes now.