The Game That Built Slack
Grammar: Conditionals
A Business English English lesson exploring business.
What's in this lesson
A Business English ESL lesson on business, practising conditionals. The worksheet has a reading, target vocabulary, a grammar reference with practice and discussion questions.
From the reading: The Game That Built Slack
"We had spent four years and roughly seventeen million dollars building a game that almost nobody played," Stewart Butterfield said in an interview with The Guardian in 2015. "By any rational measure, Glitch was a failure." The fantasy game, which Butterfield and his co-founders at Tiny Speck launched in 2011, never found the product-market fit they needed to survive. By late 2012, with the burn rate still high and the runway shrinking to months, Butterfield made a decision that most founders resist: he shut it down entirely and asked the team to start again.
Vocabulary
- co-founder tension
- minimum viable product
- product-market fit
- runway extension
Grammar: Conditionals
- Third conditional
- If Butterfield had stayed with Glitch, Slack would never have existed. — past unreal: if + past perfect,
Discussion questions
- Have you ever noticed a tool you use every day was designed for something completely different?
- Why do you think so many people find it hard to abandon a project they have invested in heavily?
- When a company changes direction entirely, do customers see that as strength or instability?
The Game That Built Slack
Grammar: Conditionals
What's in this lesson:
Full lesson plan with reading, grammar, vocabulary, and discussion.
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