San Francisco-based enterprise collaboration software provider Slack has announced the promotion of April Underwood to become the firm’s first ever Chief Product Officer (CPO), adding on responsibility to her former role as VP of product.
In her new role, Underwood will oversee the high-flying tech firm’s design team and its New York-based “Search, Learning and Intelligence” group, a division of the company focused on building artificial intelligence (AI)-powered features for the platform.
The decision follows major management changes at the Silicon Valley SaaS provider, currently valued at a whopping $5.1 billion, as the Street awaits news of an initial public offering (IPO).
An announcement in February by Slack’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Stewart Butterfield appointed long-time employee Allen Shim as the company’s first Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Soon after, Goldman Sachs executive Edith Cooper was named the firm’s second independent board director, after Square CFO Sarah Friar, who joined the board in 2017.
“We are maturing as a business,” Underwood said in a phone interview with Fortune, adding that she had “nothing to share” regarding a future public debut.
Underwood joined slack three years ago as head of platform, after holding various titles at tech titans including product lead at Twitter Inc. and Alphabet Inc. The female executive, who just returned from maternity leave last week, has seen Slack transform from pre-platform to a sprawling company which offers customers more than 1,000 apps and lists 9 million weekly active users.
Slack offers software tools which allow third party developers to offer their apps to users, and includes popular productivity offerings such as Trello and Asana. While initially, many early Slack adopters were tech industry workers, Underwood tells Fortune that the company now has a much more diverse set of customers, including firms such as Liberty Mutual and Target, as well as more unusual clients such as diary farmers.
At the helm of product, Underwood will attempt to preserve the look, feel and ease of use of the original Slack offering, even as the company builds out its product lineup and expands its range of features to cater to larger and more complex enterprise customers.
