Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession

Don't pitch your customer or your prospective customer as you're trying to figure this out. People don't want to be pitched.

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?'

Storyboard some solution visually with a Sharpie and not a pencil, not Figma initially, not high or low fidelity. What is the unconstrained perfect solution to this burning problem?

The moment the customer felt compelled enough to go out of their way to talk about some problem, that's a unbelievable gift. I will leave a meeting to just get one message back to them.

You are one of the best people I've ever worked with at solving problems three through 100, but I need you stuck on problems one and two.

"This" refers to enterprise deals where big companies request extensive custom features and integrations in exchange for promised large contracts.

If we're super serious about this, send us $1 million. Wire us $1 million. We'll happily wire it back anytime you need it, but let's actually put some stake in the ground about the value.

Ready to pay is different than paying. Significantly different. Paying is an independent group of people saying, 'My problem is burning enough that I'm willing to exchange something I have that has value for the promise of what you're going to do.'

We suggested this metric to ourselves, companies that have no support tickets through the incorporation service. If you get through that whole thing with no support tickets, that's a yes. If you have any number of support tickets, that's a no.

Jeff is contrasting a simple metric name "companies with zero support" against a complex technical description involving time periods and parameters.

Picking metric titles that make you feel something. We could have called that measure of companies, number of companies that do not send a support ticket over X period and Y period with min... This is just companies with zero support, that's it.

I think metrics at their best are a numerical representation of the value we're providing for the customer.

We discount all of that feedback from our friends to zero. That is not of interest to us. We don't even write it down. We are only interested in Sarah, our target customer.

Jeff Weinstein is a Stripe PM discussing customer research techniques; "forget about thing" appears to be a transcription error for "forget about this thing."

Magic wand, what do you wish you could just have off your plate immediately? Forget Stripe, forget about thing, work on just in your whole life. What is it that you do not want to be doing?