Slack's Chief Product Officer April Underwood to step down
After almost four years with the company, Slack's Chief Product Officer, April Underwood, is leaving the messaging startup, at a time when the messaging startup is possibly preparing for a public listing later this year.
In a blog post, Underwood stated that she is leaving to spend more time working at #Angels, an investing group she co-founded three months before joining Slack in 2015.
The company announced in a separate blog post that she will be replaced by Google executive Tamar Yehoshua. Yehoshua spent more than eight years at Google and most recently served as a Vice President looking over several product and engineering teams, as per her LinkedIn profile.
Chief Executive Officer Stewart Butterfield said in the post, “To build on that legacy, I’m thrilled that Tamar Yehoshua will join Slack as our Chief Product Officer. She’s spent the last eight-plus years as an executive leader at Google, overseeing product and engineering teams that span everything from Search to Internationalization to Identity. She has an unparalleled depth of technical knowledge for a product leader and has worked at levels of scale and complexity that few others have seen. At the same time, she shares our vision, values, and deep commitment to customers.”
Underwood also was a former employee at Google and Twitter, and had joined when Slack employed just 150 people.
Underwood stated in her post, “As I shift to focusing on investing and #Angels, I’m most excited about getting the chance to work with founders. Having spent 20 years operating in the trenches myself — from my first role as a technical support representative, to engineer, to product manager, to executive — helping them through the inevitable struggles they face is deeply rewarding to me on a personal and professional level.”
Underwood’s move and Tamar’s entry comes in a crucial year as Slack is "seriously" considering making its stock exchange debut through a direct listing. This could value Slack at more than $7 Bn.
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