A coffee with… Vanessa O’Mahony, head of small and growth businesses EMEA, Slack

Slack’s Dublin-based head of small and growth businesses, Vanessa O’Mahony, has worked for a range of large and small tech companies in a career spanning over 20 years, including Oracle and sales agency CPM.

She joined the productivity platform four years ago and now works as a senior director of growth markets, mid-market and business development.

TI met the Irish mother-of-four at a productivity round table hosted by Slack and UK charity Be the Business, designed to look at ways businesses have been ramping up productivity and achieving their business goals through digital platforms.

Slack, which celebrates it’s tenth anniversary this year, was founded by Canadian businessman Stewart Butterfield. The productivity platform was acquired by CRM giant Salesforce in 2021 and is now led by Denise Dresser.

What’s your zone of genius?

 My work superpower (and hopefully in my personal life too) is bringing people together. I’ve had a 25-year career in tech in various roles and the common thread for me has always been to bring people together in an environment in which they can thrive.

Do you prefer working for a big or small company?

There are trade offs with both. Obviously, a larger organisation has a different dynamic it offers structure and very often operational rigour whereas smaller firms offer more agile and innovative environments where you get to wear many hats.  Most recently I’ve made the transition from a smaller organisation into a larger one and it’s about being respectful to the evolving culture, which is all part of that process.

Do you work remotely?

We have a hybrid set up which we’ve approached with a team level agreement to really understand what the purpose of meeting up was. We wanted to put some structures in place around supporting customers and supporting collaborative best practice as well as shared learning.

A lot of my team are early career, so we wanted to create an environment where they can thrive but that has the flexibility to allow people to do their deeper work maybe from their home office.

I’m about 50% in the office, 50% remote, depending on whether I’m with customers in our various regions. If I’m doing a Dublin week, I’m probably in the office three days and then, as I say, the real drive is to have a purpose around why we meet up – rather than echoing previous work environments where we showed up and worked next to each other.

What are the productivity blockers for small and medium businesses?

I think there are challenges in the current economic climate – you have external factors such as the cost of supply chain and cost-of-living. But for me the overriding thread has been to address what is in our control. Looking at the internal barriers to sustained growth for SMBs.

These largely centre around communication. So, creating an environment where employees and leaders can access the right information – whether that’s working with the right people from their teams internally and externally; using knowledge to drive internal decision-making; or for faster time to market if it’s for product launches. To really create an environment where people can thrive, and innovation is rife.

Why do you think the UK continues to lag in G7 productivity tables?

I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on the UK economy. There are external factors Brexit and the cost-of-living etc which is not unique to the UK, but our latest survey shows that a third of small or new businesses have grown this year and now I think it is about future-proofing that and creating the environment where we can pre-empt those barriers.

Last year Salesforce announced the development of Slack GPT – how far down the line are you with this now?

AI is intrinsically linked to productivity and this year generative AI has really started to become part of our business processes, so how we’re looking at AI is linked to automation, which has again been core to the Slack business drivers.

Customers want us to move some of those mundane tasks to AI so that employees can be more productive by doing deeper and more meaningful work.

From a Slack perspective, we’re also looking to apply genAI to summaries and recaps; So maybe someone who has returned from leave doesn’t have to trawl through endless email trails and find information but can be prompted and can catch up on the work they’ve missed over the period. This is currently being piloted.

What’s here already is writing assistance; but on the roadmap there’s a lot more innovation to come around streamlining some business process – which is where the automation kicks in with AI.

How about third-party partnerships and integrations?

We have over 2,500 third-party integrations available currently in our store and continue to work with AI vendors as well.

How do you switch off and relax?

I’ve got four daughters between seven and 14 and so switching off must include them. Family holidays are a great way to relax. As leaders we have a duty of care not just for ourselves but for the people within our companies to really switch off. So, I will very deliberately be turning off all notifications and take the time to decompress. And on my return, hopefully I’ll use some of that already baked-in AI to bring me up to speed!

Outside of holidays, my kids do Irish dancing, so a lot of time is on the road. It’s all very official now – the tights, the hair, the makeup!