Live as your customer, not as yourself

Stripe Study Groups are role-playing exercises where Stripe employees pretend to be customers of other companies to practice understanding user perspectives.

Rule one is you do not work at Stripe and rule two is we're not here to solve any problems. This is just about practicing empathy for the customer.

"Study Groups" refers to Stripe's internal role-playing exercise where employees pretend to work at fake companies while using Stripe's products as customers.

More than 25 of these Study Groups at Stripe thus far in just this year, more than 250 people have participated in the Study Group. And it is deeply eyeopening for those involved.

"Get there" refers to truly understanding the customer perspective, and "counterbalance" means offsetting internal company bias that naturally creeps into products.

You need some counterbalance to get there. And I think it has to be an unnatural counterbalance.

Why didn't I just assign it to the people who are going to use it in the first place? I now scratch my head. I'm several years into a decade-plus building things and I was like, 'I doing this by myself. Why didn't I just assign it to the people who are going to use it in the first place?'