![]() When she arrived in Ann Arbor, she was still far from fluent. Jones earned a scholarship to attend the University of Michigan, but almost didn’t get to go she failed the Test of English as a Foreign Language required of international students the first time and just barely passed on her second try. Programming ignited her passion for technology and software development, which seemed like “magic” to her. At 13, Jones won a school contest to earn a spot in a computer programming class-her first time accessing a computer. Enterprise customers everywhere would cheer such a transformation, says Wolfe Research analyst Alex Zukin: “Nobody would ever have to use Salesforce again, and yet everybody would always be using Salesforce.”īorn in São Paulo, Jones grew up in a small neighborhood within that big city. Ultimately, her success could turn easy-to-use Slack, whose rat-a-tat notifications punctuate the modern workday, into the interface for Salesforce, a pioneering but clunky customer relationship management provider. It’s a daunting task, but Jones happens to be an expert bridge builder-personally, as an all-too-rare Latina tech executive, and professionally, as a veteran of integrating acquired businesses into their larger parents. Plus, she has to convince a skeptical Wall Street of the business case behind the acquisition, Salesforce’s most expensive ever. Jones entered the CEO role in January with a mandate to close the gulf between Slack and Salesforce culturally and commercially-to endear the two workforces to each other and effectively pair the companies’ tools to better meet today’s business needs. In a departing note to Slack workers, Butterfield called Jones “one of us.” Jones says the line referred to her “obsession around customer focus.” But the note was also an effort to win Jones support from a Slack workforce that had the potential to mistrust its new outsider CEO. ![]() In late 2022, Butterfield announced his exit-which Salesforce had kept quiet for weeks-and Salesforce named Jones as his successor she reports to Salesforce chief product officer David Schmaier, not Benioff. Yet it was Butterfield who publicly endorsed Jones for the job. A Salesforce incumbent hardly seemed like the pacifying pick. (Salesforce declined to comment Butterfield didn’t respond to a request for comment.) The next Slack CEO needed to take the reins from the platform’s founder, patch up the arranged marriage of Slack and Salesforce, and boost morale among Slack’s workforce even as its new corporate parent instituted 7,000 layoffs, Slackers included. What’s more, Butterfield was departing after reportedly clashing with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff following the acquisition. 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. 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. For one, she didn’t work for Slack, the workplace productivity platform Salesforce acquired in 2021 for $27.7 billion. ![]() Jones was a somewhat unlikely contender for the role. But she worried she “wasn’t going to be picked.” ![]() “I was so emotionally invested because I was so excited,” she says. Jones was blindsided by the news but immediately interested in the “dream job” that combined her love of consumer-focused design with enterprise technology. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |