“Salesforce is amazing at leading enterprise relationships, and we want to bring more of that to Slack.”
LIDIANE JONES, SLACK CEO
LAST FALL, LIDIANE JONES discovered that Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield was leaving Salesforce—by learning that she was a candidate for his job.
Jones was blindsided by the news but immediately interested in the “dream job” that combined her love of consumer-focused design with enterprise technology. “I was so emotionally invested because I was so excited,” she says. But she worried she “wasn’t going to be picked.”
Jones was a somewhat unlikely contender for the role. For one, she didn’t work for Slack, the workplace productivity platform Salesforce acquired in 2021 for $27.7 billion. The 43-year-old was a Boston-based executive vice president overseeing Salesforce’s experience cloud, commerce cloud, and marketing cloud products—all key pieces of Salesforce’s product offering to enterprise customers. Slack didn’t fit that bill. It represented just 5% of Salesforce’s $31.4 billion in annual sales, and the omnipresent messaging tool didn’t overlap much with Jones’s duties.
What’s more, Butterfield was departing after
