Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead)

Jeff’s background (0s)

• Jeff Weinstein, a product lead at Stripe, emphasizes direct customer communication and empathy in product development.
• Stripe Study Groups involve simulating a company with a problem and practicing empathy for the customer without attempting to solve it.
• Jeff's approach to learning and product building involves embracing challenges and continuous improvement.
• He stresses the importance of operationalized product craft and quality, focusing on both functionality and user experience.
• Jeff shares his experience in selecting meaningful metrics for teams, measuring value from the customer's perspective.
• Jeff discusses the challenges of working in a large company and the advice he received from Stripe's founders on effective execution.
• Jeff Weinstein highlights the value of deep intellectual understanding and critical thinking, gained through studying subjects that may not be entirely true.
• He emphasizes choosing to spend time based on worth rather than grades or external validation.
• Jeff reflects on a challenging college experience, where he struggled despite putting in the same effort as his peers, stressing the importance of understanding how people evaluate things.
• He encourages product leaders to focus on deeply understanding users and their needs, rather than solely relying on data and analytics.
• Jeff Weinstein shares his journey into tech, initially struggling with science classes but eventually earning degrees in computer science and liberal arts.
• He was inspired by the technical backgrounds of leaders at successful companies like Facebook and Apple.

The “go, go, go ASAP + optimistic, long-term compounding” approach (10m16s)

• Jeff Weinstein, a product lead at Stripe, advocates for combining a "go go go" attitude with a long-term compounding approach in product development.
• The "go go go" attitude involves taking immediate action and injecting energy into projects, while the long-term compounding approach focuses on building infrastructure and capabilities for sustained benefits.
• Stripe's decision to invest in building a global payments platform exemplifies this approach.
• Initially, incremental additions of new countries and payment methods yielded limited results, leading to a shift towards a long-term strategy.
• Stripe sent teams worldwide to build up payment methods and infrastructure, resulting in a significant increase in accepted payment methods from 10 to over 100.
• The initial goal of rapid user growth from 10 to 50 was revised to prioritize a slower, more sustainable approach for long-term success.
• This decision was based on an analysis of the individual components required to achieve the goal and the desired longevity of the growth.
• The key takeaway is the importance of balancing rapid growth with long-term sustainability in product development.

The importance of craft and quality (15m38s)

• Jeff Weinstein, a product lead at Stripe, emphasizes the significance of craft, user experience, and quality in product development to avoid product-market fit issues and ensure solving real customer problems.
• Instead of pitching a product, Weinstein suggests actively listening to customers to understand their needs and pain points, building trust, and identifying opportunities based on their feedback.
• Customer insights should drive product roadmaps, rather than lengthy surveys and build cycles.

Effective customer communication strategies (24m15s)

• Jeff Weinstein constantly communicates with customers on Twitter and calls, breaking the barrier between PMs and customers.
• Talking to customers is crucial as they can provide valuable insights and feedback.
• The internet has made it easier to connect with customers and understand their needs.
• Jeff emphasizes the importance of actively listening to customers' problems and concerns.
• Engaging with customers helps identify burning problems and ensures that the product solves real issues.
• Jeff encourages his team at Stripe to adopt this practice, fostering a customer-centric culture.
• He uses various communication channels, including Slack groups, to facilitate direct customer interactions.
• Jeff highlights the significance of identifying key customers who represent the future trends and growth areas.
• By maintaining close relationships with a select group of customers, companies can gain valuable insights and stay ahead of the curve.

The importance of speed in customer interactions (28m57s)

• Reducing the time between when a customer reaches out with a problem and when they receive a response is crucial.
• Customers appreciate prompt responses and feel that they have a direct line of communication with the company.
• Quickly addressing issues can turn detractors into promoters.
• Silence can be a powerful tool for generating ideas and insights.
• Directly reaching out to customers for feedback and suggestions can provide valuable insights.
• Text messaging can be an effective way to communicate with customers and gather information.
• Metrics should be used to measure the impact of product changes and improvements.
• Metrics should be actionable and provide insights for decision-making.
• Metrics should be aligned with the company's overall goals and objectives.

Narrowing your focus (33m19s)

• Jeff receives a lot of feedback and bug reports, but he tries to narrow down who to interact with.
• He appreciates customer interest and sees it as a positive problem to have.
• Jeff uses an "art and science" approach to pick where to go deep.
• He responds to people who provide detailed information and asks for more details from those who don't.
• Jeff values those who want to engage deeply and follows up with them, creating long-term product friends.
• He also bounds some of these efforts by creating programs like the "Stripe Bugfinder Program" to manage the influx of feedback.
• Jeff Weinstein, Product Lead at Stripe, discusses building products at Stripe.
• He emphasizes the importance of craft, metrics, and customer obsession in product development.
• Jeff talks about the importance of metrics in product development.
• He believes that metrics help teams understand what's working and what's not, and make data-driven decisions.
• Jeff also mentions that metrics can help teams identify areas for improvement and set goals.

Why you should pay attention only to paying-customer feedback (36m53s)

• Only pay attention to feedback from paying customers, ignore everything else.
• Friends and acquaintances who try your product may give positive feedback, but they are not your target customer.
• Your target customer is someone who has a specific problem and is willing to pay to solve it.
• Paying customers are more likely to give valuable feedback because they have a vested interest in the product.
• If a paying customer is hesitant to pay for a feature, it's an indication that it may not be valuable enough.

Practicing silence when communicating (40m24s)

• Jeff Weinstein, a product lead at Stripe, stresses the significance of customer obsession and comprehending their needs.
• To effectively grasp customer requirements, Weinstein recommends employing silence and active listening, enabling customers to express their actual demands.
• Weinstein advises against blindly pursuing large enterprise contracts without proper validation and suggests requesting a substantial upfront payment to assess a customer's true commitment.
• The distinction between "willing to pay" and actually "paying" is crucial, and founders should practice charging customers, even small amounts, to overcome psychological barriers and gain confidence in monetizing their products.
• Weinstein emphasizes understanding the customer's biggest problem and focusing on solving that, using open-ended questions to encourage customers to share their challenges and concerns.

The role of metrics in product success (45m33s)

• Metrics are crucial for product success and should provide a numerical representation of the value delivered to customers.
• Both quantitative and qualitative metrics are essential and should be considered equally and complementarily.
• Metrics should be chosen based on the value provided to customers rather than internal-oriented measures.
• Crafting a small number of metrics forces tradeoffs and decisions, helping to align the team and prioritize customer-focused progress.
• Stripe's Atlas service used metrics to identify and address customer pain points, leading to improved product recommendations.
• The team analyzed support ticket data to identify and resolve customer pain points, driving product development.
• Focusing on a metric that directly reflects customer satisfaction (percentage of customers with zero support tickets) resulted in significant product improvements and increased customer happiness.
• Assigning engineers to specific customer issues and empowering them to find solutions fostered a sense of ownership and motivation within the team.
• This data-driven approach allowed the team to make informed decisions and prioritize product development efforts based on real customer needs, rather than relying on assumptions or gut feelings.

Empowering teams with a single metric (54m8s)

• Use a single metric that everyone in the team can understand and rally around.
• Airbnb's example of reducing support contacts had unintended consequences as the team made it harder to contact support.
• Use judgment to consider second-order effects and perverse incentives of a metric.
• Optimize around one metric but use multiple metrics for a holistic view.
• Break down the overarching metric into specific tactical metrics owned by engineers.
• Choose tactics intentionally and set metrics for them.
• Metrics should be a cohort metric driving something up and to the left.
• Example: risk review metric - how quickly customers get their final risk review.
• Aim for a chart that shows a steady improvement up and to the left.
• Constrain the tactic through a metric and watch it through an optimization function.
• Decide when to stop a tactic based on a level of success and pick it back up later if needed.

Picking the right metric for your audience (58m23s)

• To select an effective metric, start with NPS (Net Promoter Score) and determine why people are not recommending your product.
• Focus on metrics that align with your audience and go-to-market strategy, such as tracking the number of users with zero support tickets or users experiencing difficulties.
• Create a "users having a bad day" chart to identify and prioritize issues that need to be addressed.
• Jeff Weinstein, a product lead at Stripe, stresses the importance of understanding "Bad Days" encountered by potential customers.
• "Bad Days" refer to negative experiences or obstacles that hinder customer satisfaction or product usage.
• Examples of "Bad Days" for Stripe Atlas customers include loading issues, inaccurate data, login difficulties, and excessive two-factor authentication prompts.
• The goal is to continuously monitor and improve these "Bad Days" to enhance the overall customer experience.

The importance of metric hygiene (1h5m10s)

• Metrics should be chosen and named to evoke emotion and customer focus, making them easy to remember and discuss.
• Good hygiene practices for metrics include using concise titles, avoiding excessive decimal places, and keeping all measures on the same x-axis.
• Metrics should be easily accessible and discoverable, such as through a centralized dashboard, to encourage frequent monitoring and alignment within the team.
• It's important to iterate on metrics and ensure they are accurate and meaningful before relying on them for decision-making.
• At Stripe, they emphasize the importance of metrics and customer obsession in product building.
• They use a specific ritual around metrics, treating them like tweets, with both quantitative and qualitative data side by side.
• Due to time constraints, they focus on a small number of metrics that truly matter, rather than trying to track a thousand metrics.
• The key is to understand what the customer wants and to find ways to validate and improve the product over time.

How Stripe uses “study groups” for product improvement (1h11m33s)

• Study groups at Stripe are designed to foster customer empathy among employees by simulating the customer experience and identifying areas for improvement.
• Participants pretend to work for a fictitious company and embody the customer's perspective, focusing on empathy rather than problem-solving or critique.
• Study groups have been conducted over 25 times, involving more than 250 participants, and provide valuable insights and emotional responses from participants.
• Stripe's obsession with making the user experience great extends beyond software to include sales, support, and compliance processes, as exemplified by Fidelity's customer-centric approach.
• Study groups are an effective way to identify product issues and funnel them into existing formal processes for bug elevation and prioritization.
• Stripe has added SLAs to certain bug levels, requiring acknowledgment within seven days for non-incident-related craft issues.
• The company focuses on making the product great and providing teams with valuable information, but it doesn't dictate solutions.

Stripe’s Atlas: simplifying company formation (1h37m20s)

• Stripe's Atlas platform simplifies starting a US company for entrepreneurs worldwide, eliminating the need for founders to travel to the US for access to the financial system.
• Atlas automates complex tasks like the 83b election, ensuring founders receive tax incentives.
• The platform handles downstream activities such as purchasing shares, filing paperwork, and setting up banking systems, allowing entrepreneurs to start their businesses with just a few clicks.
• Stripe's deep integration with governments and banking partners ensures a smooth and efficient process for entrepreneurs.
• Despite its high MPS and response rate, Stripe invested a year in further automation to improve the customer experience and enable companies to start charging customers sooner.
• Stripe believes that reducing the time to reach the first customer can contribute to GDP growth and accelerate new business development.
• The automation tools have made it easier for solo founders to start businesses, leading to an increase in solo founders using Stripe's Atlas service.
• The ease of starting a business online has contributed to the rise of entrepreneurship, with more people recognizing the potential rewards.
• Despite funding market challenges, the revenue growth of startups started through Stripe's Atlas service indicates a bright future for these businesses.
• The success of companies started through Stripe's Atlas service has raised users' expectations for the ease of use and accessibility of other tools and services.
• Stripe believes that raising users' expectations can encourage entrepreneurs to improve their companies, ultimately benefiting everyone.

Automation and operational efficiency (1h50m38s)

• Atlas team consists of only 10 people, focusing on automation to maximize leverage.
• They prioritize long-term compounding over quick fixes.
• They carefully select third-party vendors and backup vendors, ensuring expertise and building better software through external validation.
• They regularly assess whether tasks should be done in-house or outsourced.
• Despite the complexity of their operations, they are constantly working to streamline and improve efficiency.
• Stripe Atlas is responsible for starting one in six new Delaware corporations.
• Boulder, Shenzhen, and Las Vegas are emerging as top startup cities.

Diversity and team building (1h55m13s)

• Diverse founding teams, with international members, offer more perspectives and solutions for success.
• Stripe automates administrative tasks, allowing entrepreneurs to focus on innovation.
• Despite numerous global issues, entrepreneurs often struggle with startup ideas.
• Stripe's success in simplifying online payments emphasizes the importance of solving real-world problems.
• Stripe's product development philosophy involves meticulous attention to detail, addressing even minor customer issues.
• The success of Stripe's Atlas program reveals overlooked significant business opportunities.
• Building a profitable company doesn't always require venture backing or a billion-dollar valuation; choosing the right capital structure is crucial.
• Atlas has accelerated startup growth, with 20% of surveyed businesses indicating they wouldn't have started without it.
• Entrepreneurs who leverage Atlas come from diverse backgrounds, ages, and roles, highlighting the widespread potential for problem-solving and innovation.

Building new products within a large company (2h3m9s)

• Jeff Weinstein, a product lead at Stripe, highlights the importance of aligning people with customer stories and creating a visual storyboard of the solution when building a product from scratch within a large company.
• Weinstein suggests starting with a simple, unconstrained version of the solution and iterating quickly to build momentum, while ensuring everyone is tracking the same metrics for success.
• He emphasizes the significance of making something viable and having a clear impact on the company's mission.
• Stripe decided to continue investing in Atlas, an economically viable product focused on customer acquisition and margin generation, despite competition from AngelList, due to their belief in the long-term potential of the company formation process.
• To build something new at a big company, Weinstein advises storyboarding the ideal vision without constraints, solving a burning use case and showing tangible progress, having a business case that demonstrates potential revenue, and bringing the earliest customers into the room with the team as soon as possible.
• Jeff Weinstein emphasizes the importance of involving customers in the product design process, as they can provide valuable insights and contribute directly to the product's development.
• He encourages viewers to reach out to him via email or Loom videos to share feedback, report bugs, or discuss product ideas.

Lightning round (2h21m10s)

• Jeff Weinstein, a product lead at Stripe, recommends the books "High Output Management" for its clarity on evaluating work as a collective effort, and "Orbiting the Giant Hairball" for its insights on creativity and engagement in large organizations. He also suggests "Seven Powers" by Hamilton Helmer for its discussion on business powers, with counter positioning and process being his favorites.
• Weinstein emphasizes the importance of developing and sustaining an organizational strength to gain power, highlighting the significance of counter positioning in reshaping a company's structure.
• He recommends the TV show "How To with John Wilson" for its unique perspective on life, and the movie "The Quiet Girl" for its portrayal of resilience in difficult circumstances.
• Weinstein expresses his appreciation for his computer, the automation tool Raycast for its efficiency, and the screenshot tool CleanShot for effective communication.
• His life mottos include "go go go" to encourage action and "let's make some mistakes" to foster creativity.
• He credits Stripe's founders, Patrick and John Collison, for valuable feedback and advice, especially during his early days at the company.
• Despite his initial lack of knowledge in finance and Stripe's scale, Jeff was entrusted with significant responsibilities, including writing the quarterly Business Review. He emphasizes the importance of bringing one's own perspective and authenticity, as demonstrated through his interactions with his co-founder, John.
• John's advice to prioritize solving critical problems (problems one and two) over easier ones (problems three through 100) had a profound impact on Jeff's approach to problem-solving.
• Jeff highlights the value of receiving direct and impactful feedback, even if it can be difficult to hear, as it can lead to significant improvements and growth.