Anatomy of a post
Journalism is sometimes hard to understand, so this post is an attempt to show how the story I published over the weekend on new Slack CEO Denise Dresser came together.
First, Slack's PR team got in touch with me and asked me if I would be interested in interviewing the new CEO. Indeed I was. I had interviewed her predecessor, Lidiane Jones, who left after just 10 months on the job to become CEO at Bumble, a stand-alone public company.
I was keen to hear what Dresser, who had spent 12 years in various executive roles at Salesforce, had to say about the new job. One thing I can say is that both Jones and Dresser were well prepared for their interviews.
But I wanted more than simply hearing smooth answers about leadership and challenges making Slack part of Salesforce, while trying to keep the company independent. Both executives were primed to answer all of my questions.
So I needed some outside voices from people who were familiar with both Slack and Salesforce, who could speak more independently about the challenges she faced in the new role.
I turned to several people to get those opinions: Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, JP Gownder and industry analyst at Forrester and Arjun Bhatia, a financial analyst at William Blair who follows Salesforce.
With these three additional voices, I was able to weave together a story that not only provided Dresser's perspective of what her job ahead would entail, but also people who were familiar with her company, followed Salesforce and could provide a broader perspective.
With those 4 interviews complete, I sat down last week to write the story and with the help of my colleagues and editors, I put together the story that was published on Saturday.
Here are some articles I published recently TechCrunch:
Slack’s new CEO looks to bring stability after a turbulent period
Databricks keeps marching forward with $1.6B in revenue (with Alex Wilhelm)
Accenture to acquire Udacity to build a learning platform focused on AI
New geospatial data startup streamlines satellite imagery visualization
