YouSaid · the spoken record

David Singleton

lines on the record: 98
first: 2023-05-04
most recent: 2023-05-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And do that going through the exact experience the team has. So you get to understand the developer tools, the build infrastructure, how you get stuff reviewed, how good is the documentation, how long did I have to wait in order to actually see my thing live in order to start that feedback loop that I talked about with users? So you're actually going and joining a team and doing some work. While one does that, it's really valuable and important to keep a friction log because then what you want to do is write up the experience both as an aid memoir for yourself because it then helps you go and, you know, for all of the next years worth of conversations that might be involved in around making trade-offs and helping set priorities, that context really helps. So I actually reread these reports periodically. And it's also really valuable to actually share them with the team, which then demonstrates why I understand what it's actually like. And here's how we're going to kind of make sure that we're carrying that information through into prioritization.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So engineer occasion is something that I personally do. So it's obviously a portmanteau of engineer and vacation, but it's not a vacation. The way we get to the name of the term, or at least the way I think about it, is what you do on engineer vacation is I'll clear other people try to do this as well. I'll clear several days in a row, three or four days, actually join a team, pick up a small task, hopefully a small feature that we can get all the way from start to finish, like in production.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, in terms of how much getting in the weeds matters. At Stripe, we find that it's very important for engineering managers in particular, but really all managers, to really have a very detailed understanding of whether their teams are kind of on the right track and where they're getting stuck in order to make sure that we make the most progress in unit time for our users. So we find that, again, the nature of the problems we're solving really reward domain expertise, like assimilating a deep understanding. And we ask all of our managers to be kind of the editors-in-chief of their team's plans. I think the only way to do that is to get the right loop for yourself to understand what is actually going on on the ground. Now, it would be really damaging if I was only doing work at the IC engineering level every day, like that doesn't ladder up someone who's able to help guide the team or whatever. So it's important to do this judiciously, but done on the right cadence. I think it's very, very valuable.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot in all of our developer tooling and infrastructure on making it possible for changes to get delivered continuously to production so that we can get them in front of users very rapidly. And that's really important.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost always goes back to things we've already talked about here. So remember at the very top, I talked about evaporating very closely with users. If you have a mechanism to listen to users, get something in their hands quite quickly, and then get their feedback on it to run it back through a feedback loop, you're very unlikely to go wrong, especially if you put a lot of thought into these being the right users whose needs you want to focus on because they ladder up to your strategy. It's actually very hard to go wrong if you have that feedback loop working really well. So if you don't have that feedback loop, and actually it's remarkable as I talk to folks across the industry and so forth, it's remarkable how frequently that feedback loop doesn't exist in product development cycle. So if you don't have that, go figure out how to create it. And if you do have it, but you can't get something into users' hands very rapidly from you having the idea that this might matter to getting their feedback on it, figure out how to make that go faster as well. And at Stripe, we focused.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fairly unimportant remark, and it will be taken out of context to be something very important. So I personally also try very hard to anchor feedback I'm giving in, what's the user experience we're trying to deliver? Does this actually matter? Recognizing that that is a risk. And yeah, it definitely takes constant practice.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I personally try to be as friendly and unscary as possible, but I know that no matter how much I do that these can be high stakes meetings. At Stripe, and I think this probably goes for most companies, but at Stripe, the main answer here is put your user's hat on. And if you understand your user well and what they're seeking to get out of the experience and anchor any questions you get asked or wobbles you may feel like, oh, that was an out of the blue question back to, well, here's remember what we're trying to do for our users. That usually makes any meeting like that go really well. So that would be my main piece of advice. So, I mean, a risk that exists in any company as you get to run a bigger team or whatever is that individual contributors, individuals will have very small amount of time with you in general. So there's always a risk that you might make a kind of like.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's an interesting observation. I think almost anything that you talk about is a value. I mean, being a value matters, but you need to have a practice behind that that means that the value becomes real for everyone. So we very frequently find that for any product development team, so long as they identify the right metrics that actually represent the experience that they want to deliver for their users and then get together frequently, like predictively to look at how the team is doing against those metrics, that then everything else just happens naturally because you understand what you're trying to move and every little micro decision you're making both in your own time prioritization and then in terms of the actual work you're doing will ladder up to that. And so why do I say that? It is like you have to have the predictable and regular thing that ladders up to the value you're trying to deliver in order to make it happen.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we've done a few series where we'll actually go through some really interesting critical product flows together and talk about how this is reflecting various priorities that we have and shifts that we're trying to make. But in particular with the user experience and a particular user at the core. And that turns out to have a tremendous amount of benefit and value in helping just everyone have a shared language for talking about things and get on the same page about everything. So yeah, those are some of the techniques that Treyas might have been thinking of.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of benefit to doing this together. So someone once described this to me as if you were a chef, you're going to taste the soup and you're going to talk to your kitchen staff about what went into the soup when it was good and wasn't so good. If you run a movie studio, you're going to sit down and watch a lot of movies together. And so actually kind of looking at product together, I find extremely energizing and also really valuable in actually teaching some of the kind of bar for craft and values around how we want the product to interoperate for our users at scale across the company. And building on that, there's something that we do occasionally, and I've done occasionally at Stripe called Walk the Store, where we'll actually do that process of looking at the product together with the whole company. So we have a weekly meeting called Friday Fireside, where you don't have to attend, but the majority of the company does attend.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way that I did UX reviews very early on in my time at Stripe and like the way that every group at Stripe does these reviews is employing some of the techniques we talked about already. So that active friction logging, it's very often done asynchronously. So someone will sit down and reserve an afternoon and go through the product and make meticulous notes and that's super useful. We also find it very valuable to go through that process together. So we will bring together both the team that built the product that we're looking at, but also a lot of their cross-functional partners, so things like the support folks that are going to be handling or are kind of building the process to handle questions from users about it.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reserve 50% of our time to do this stuff. That wouldn't make any sense. But we do encourage and ask every team to think hard about how much should they be setting aside for those kind of activities. Does that make sense?”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To really make the experience good, maybe the most pronounced version of that is not even the issues we identify in friction logs. Maybe in a bit we can talk about how we invest in reliability and so forth. But things go wrong. And one of the things that's very important to me is that we are a learning organization. We need to understand why they went wrong and then take action to stop the same thing going wrong in future. And so that means that we identify incident remediations. That's what we call those. And we prioritize those carefully. And most of them, the ones that matter, actually get prioritized before other work on the roadmap, which means that as a PM when you're building your roadmap and your plans, you do have to think about, well, approximately how much bandwidth do I need to reserve in this area in order to address polish stuff that might come up through friction logging and also to take care of those kind of operational things as well. It varies by team and varies by stage of product. So there is no stripe kind of like we will.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It starts with our operating principles. So, because we have operating principles of users first and being meticulous in our craft, we actually tend all of our ways of building plans tend to be wired quite well around this idea that we're going to reserve enough time.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really, just keep a very clear stream of consciousness log of what you're finding as you go. By the way, also really important, praise the stuff that's good. So I'll often set these docs around to a lot of folks inside of the company. It's a great opportunity to recognize great work done. So if I ran into that error message that linked to documentation, that's a great example where I'd be like, this is awesome, nice work.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thousands of engineers who are working in parallel. And while everyone cares a lot about being meticulous, paying attention to detail, getting the details right, you can often end up with experiences that diverge. And going through this process of looking at it all together on a regular rhythm with friction logging really helps us maintain a cohesive whole while we all operate in parallel. And so therefore, senior leaders, executives, I guess, of our larger areas will often do this as a practice themselves in order to kind of make sure that everything that they're responsible for is coming together well. So it happens kind of recursively at different layers. To your question, is there a template? So I'm a relatively simple process. So yes, there is a template. And in fact, there's a stripe.dev article that maybe we can put into the show notes that has the template, but it literally is say what you want to do. Be very explicit about the user that you are trying to have a mental model for because that helps you make the right choices as you go through the flow.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, great question. So it's a practice that is quite valuable generically. There are many places where you can apply friction logging in order to really kind of shine a light on what is the most effective place to invest time and effort. So we use the practice across lots of different functions in lots of different ways. But it is the case that almost every product team has someone. It's often the PM, sometimes it's the engineering manager who has a regular repeating loop of going through the end-to-end flow of the product and writing a friction log. For years and years, I have gone through the process of onboarding as a user to Stripe once a month, writing a friction log, and then tagging in the right people across the company that might need to take action on some of the things that we're observing. And one of the reasons that that kind of process of taking a big step back is useful is at this stage we have many people.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In general, Stripe was kind of known for these great internet moments when we launched products. And so we did it because we wanted our users to be able to see the care and attention that we were taking. It's Termite to have this wonderful kind of side benefit to some extent because those experiences tend to get shared a lot on Twitter and LinkedIn and elsewhere because they're worth looking at just because they're beautiful and they often push the web platform forward. And that then means that folks are likely, folks who themselves want to push internet business forward are likely to know about Stripe and know about our capabilities. So meticulousness plays out with impact in so many different ways at Stripe. And I enjoy working that way in many different areas.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Network. It is literally our product infrastructure for moving money into Stripe, holding balances on behalf of our users, moving money out, all of the automation between moving money between different businesses and all the kind of regulatory stuff we have to handle, all handled in this big payments engine. But as a user, it's very hard for you to kind of come in and inspect that and say, well, is it good? I mean, hopefully you can go and talk to a bunch of other Stripe users, but it's very hard to know from the outside. So if we put a lot of care for detail and attention into the experiences that we use to explain the value and the power of that, it actually helps our users understand exactly how it is that we are trying to operate for them. And that's where all the meticulousness that we put into our site have come from. There are lots of features like we have a spinning globe on our page that shows you what payment methods you can use in different countries. And we have this kind of big animated wave on our homepage.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thinking about those kind of flows is what led us to build link, which is our product for making one click checkout available. And that has had a tremendous impact both on convenience for customers of our users and also on their conversion rate and so forth. So it really matters. And then one final other area, if I may, I think Stripe is relatively well known for putting a lot of care and attention into our website, a lot of our marketing or product explanation pages. And I think for a business like ours, it's not immediately obvious that it makes a tremendous amount of sense to be super meticulous in building those experiences. But we are, and again, I think it really matters for us and for our users. So the way that we got into this mode was we recognized that we are building a lot of infrastructure. So we build what we call our global payments and trend.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actual users who've migrated from a fairly vanilla integration where they built their own checkout flow to one of these surfaces to our payment element or to strike checkout. It turns out that it increases the average user's revenue by 10.5%. And that's huge, right? So this is an industry where little changes that you might go about making or even big changes that you pour blood, sweat, and tears into will typically deliver uplifts that you measure in basis points. That's hundreds of a percentage point. And this set of small changes compounding over time ladders up to 10.5%. It's huge. And the point is we only get there by knowing that this is a thing that might ultimately matter and being meticulous in every single step along the way and that it combines to a dramatic impact in the end. So I think that particular set of experiences is one where this operating principle has really mattered.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We actually just earlier today put a blog post up that explains we've been tuning our both what we call our payment element, which is our kind of more kind of batteries included UI for putting payment integrations directly on your website. You can style it to fit with the rest of your page, but it has a lot of powerful features. And we also have a set of hosted services called Stripe Checkout. And the point here is we've gone and scarred a whole bunch of checkout flows on the internet over the course of many years. And we look out for all of the little broken edges. And we've been working hard in these products to tune those. And then we don't just stop there. We've also been really obsessing about what are the things that we can do in the flows that we've already built that will remove latency or remove a click or whatever. And what we've found, we've recently measured the difference between, so with a bunch of”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Main flow. And I think that's quite remarkable. Most people wouldn't do that, but it turns out not only was it something I was impressed with, but when I talked to Stripe users, this is very frequently something they tell me, delights them about the product. It's a reason that they can adopt it more quickly, and it's a reason that they keep adopting other Stripe products because they know that it's going to be easier than doing anything else. So it really matters. So the point is, we are intentional about where the places we're being particularly meticulous matters. And then when we are, we try to do it in quite a systematic way. It's great business as well. So for instance,”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recently, and kind of understood a little bit better than otherwise doing this particular thing. And then I will go through the process of actually using the product, starting off in the dashboard, hopping over to the particular page in the docs that I need to follow, starting to write code and so forth in order to do my integration and make really careful and meticulous notes of what the experience is. So stream of consciousness notes, but paying particular attention to the places where I ran into friction that I think that particular user and mental modeling would find difficult. And then those are the places where we will tend to go and invest a tremendous amount in really thinking how could we solve this problem and then putting a lot of attention into detail into making it right. And by the way, the example I gave you on the error messages, there's actually more code in the jobs that serve the Stripe API to handle those edge cases than in the actual.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An example of where we've been meticulous in the product. And the way that we kind of figure out where to be meticulous, like where to really sweat the details and go above and beyond is, again, we try to be as users versus we possibly can. So we have a process that is widely used across product teams that even like folks building stuff internally for stripes to use, which we call friction logging. The way this works is you need to kind of put yourself in a particular user's shoes. Like it's actually important to have a very clear idea of who is the person I am kind of modeling the friction for right now. So for instance, I might be integrating the stripe billing API and I might put myself in the shoes of an engineer at, let's say at Lassian, which is one of the world's largest SaaS platforms, and using actively Stripe Billing for automating all the revenue today, I might put myself in the mindset of that person I might have met.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spent some time, and it's a big part of deciding to join playing with the product. And something that really delighted me was that when I started integrating the product, there were parts of the experience where I was stuck, right? So I made a mistake with how I'd integrated the API and I was getting an error message back. But I wasn't stuck for very long because something that the team at Stripe had done was we made the error messages coming out of our API linked to the piece of the docs that told you how to solve the problem. Genius. And that is a really good example of being meticulous in the craft. So it is pretty uncommon. It's certainly very uncommon back then for companies to do this. Error messages on your API. Who's ever going to look at it? Well, turns out developers while they're building. And if they're running into problems, they will look at them. It's actually a really high stakes moment because it's a time that matters.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We also have operating principles. They're kind of segmented into how we work, who we are, and then a bunch that the leaders must execute. So another example of one of the high-we work ones is move with urgency and focus. We really believe that even though we're building infrastructure that will persist for decades, it is important that we solve the needs our users have right now, you know, relatively rapidly so that it actually makes sense and is delivering value for them. So anyway, there's a range of them. You asked about being meticulous in our craft. So this is another highway work principle. And it is very important at Stripe. And you also call out Lenny a kind of challenge of being meticulous, which is, well, there's so much to get done. So where can I be meticulous? Because if you do it across everything, maybe a lot of progress would grind to a halt. Well, first of all, let me tell a couple stories. So before I joined Stripe.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great question. Before I talk about this one operating principle, let me just set a little bit of context on what are our operating principles at all. So that's right, we have operating principles, and they're kind of like corporate values, but they're not just values. They're much less abstract than that. So actually we were just talking about the early stripe team. I think one of the best things that they did, they did a bunch of great stuff finding early product market fit, but one of the most foresighted things that they did was to kind of take a little detour and think about what is it about how we've been working so far that we think has made us successful and is going to be important as we can.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And valuable role. And you've mentioned a couple of great ones on the call here already, but I think that the PMs at Stripe embodying a lot of the culture I talked about in our operating principles just contributed a tremendous amount to what we got done.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many of the other functions around risk and compliance and so forth, we actually need their creative thinking in order to build the right stuff for our users. So the point is it's a way more cross-functionally collaborative process than I've seen in a lot of other companies. PMs play just this absolute linchpin role across a lot of that. PMs are very frequently the ones that are providing the kind of locomotion to bring all of that partnership together. They're very frequently the folks that are synthesizing what we're learning from our users. Not everyone is talking to users across all those job families, but the PM is probably the person talking to folks the very most and probably the one who synthesizing the very best. They often and usually also bring a lot of the product strategy. So, okay, this is what we're doing today, but what does it letter up to? And therefore, how do we make the right choices to make sure that we're taking the right longer term path? And so it's a super important.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And will exercise many of the attributes that you'll often find in PMs in other companies. Now, that doesn't mean that there isn't a really important job for PMs to do here as well. So something else that I think is worth knowing about Stripe and it's somewhat unique is building product is also a much more kind of team supported at Stripe across functions. So there are the obvious functions that most companies have, engineers, engineering managers, product managers, designers. And those folks all get involved in throughout the entire life cycle of product development at Stripe. But also, if you think about the nature of our products, it turns out that a lot of our products are about abstracting over what the financial system does at large. So sometimes there's a capability in certain countries and there's a different one in another country and we want to make it all work consistently. So our financial partnerships matter. So sometimes folks from our partnerships team are part of the kind of early development phase of a product. Similarly, when you think about product legal and”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But had these subscriptions business models, and we figured that there were going to be many more of these kind of companies into the future, and we could see that they were really kind of pushing the boundaries of what was possible here. So we decided to co-create the product with them. The early team working on billing got a bunch of those companies, including Slack Configma, but a bunch more as well, got to know them, that the individuals who were operating those systems at those companies personally understood exactly what their challenges and hopes and dreams for the future were and then brought them into kind of shared product development loop. So we had shared Slack channels, we'd actually show them product on a very regular basis, get their feedback on it. And only when that original kind of alpha group was super, super happy with the product did we then think it might be ready to go to a broader audience. So that is just how we build product at Stripe. And that means that every engineer building product at Stripe really has many of the kind of attributes.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technical. They're mostly former engineers themselves or maybe kind of current engineers still tinkering on the side, but bringing a lot of user insight and strategy to the problem. And every single early member of the team at Stripe had to act like that in order to work the way that we do and that we want to. So remember, again, that is to get to know our users very well and then bring those kind of personal insights into our product development loop. So, I mean, in fact, the way we think about product development at Stripe, it really is to find the correct set of early users to kind of co-create the product with. So maybe the best example of that, or at least an example of that, is stripe billing. So it's our solution for subscriptions and invoicing. And when we got to starting the stripe billing product, we realized that there were a number of our existing users. These were companies like Figma and Slack, who were already using Stripe for payments.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so today we have lots of product managers, lots of engineers. Product management is an extremely valuable and important job family. I'll talk more about what folks do today. It is true that our original team, and I think we heard our first PM a little bit earlier than you said, but our original team was really an engineering team. However, they were extremely product-minded. And I would honestly say that of all of the very early team that I've worked closely with and know well over time, every single one of them could also have been and essentially also was acting as a PM. If you think about the nature of the first dry product, and again, today we solve problems for businesses from the very small to the very large across a whole range of financial infrastructure. But the initial product was very developer focused, and we still have a developer focus at the core of many things that we do. The best PMs for developer focused products, I think, are usually very”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a variety right now at Straight, we're very much in a hybrid mode, so a lot of our interviews are still happening over Zoom, although we have plenty of great activity going on in our offices as well. The written exercises tend to be something that you do in your own time. We suggest a time bind so it's not an unreasonable demand on the rest of your life. And then the other exercises are with an interviewer on Zoom.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there are a couple things that are very common across hiring for all roles at Stripe, and in particular engineers and PMs. One of the things is we do have structured hiring loops. So we put everyone through a very consistent process. Very personal as we help folks figure out why they might want to be here. But then we have a consistent way of evaluating talent. And I think that's important because it means that you can, as an interviewer, as a hiring manager, you can actually really start to understand what is the broad spectrum of responses you might get here and what do I actually learn about individual candidates when I'm asking like similar questions. The other thing that these loops have in common is nothing is a trick question. Like we try to put people into an environment which is as close to doing the actual work together as we possibly can. So for engineers, for instance, we've got several different coding exercises that they do. They share their screen with the interviewer. It's actually kind of pair programming. You're welcome to like use.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Jeff runs the PM for our Atlas product, and he's a great example of someone who cares a lot about learning exactly how the world works. So, I mean, for instance, one of the things that that team and Jeff Really has driven this himself have done recently is recognizing that when you're starting a new business in the US, one of the most frustrating steps is that you have to apply for this employer identification number from the IRS. And it used to have an extremely long backlog. And it's really hard. You can't start running your business until you have it. And Jeff dug into the details. The team dug into the details. And we're just kept asking, does it have to be this way? Does it have to be this way? Eventually, we work with the IRS to make it possible for us to issue those numbers much, much more quickly, like instantly as you sign up. And I think that's exactly a great example of how being curious, having this relentless passion to solve problems for users, and then just keep plugging away to problems.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very, very many people at Stripe today are doing a quite different job to the one that they joined for. In order to do that, they've often had to learn a lot and stretch themselves into new areas. It's also the case that you think about that financial infrastructure we're building, the space really rewards people who want to go and learn a ton of detail in how these systems that are not that popular or well understood in the broader world, how they actually work and assimilate just a lot of context. And then in particular, you can build better stuff. It's right when you're sharing that context with each other and helping other people learn. So I think that all ladders up to this kind of group of folks that you mentioned, all of the folks you mentioned are wonderful stripes or former stripes that come together in service for our users.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Recruiting is kind of like this machine. And by the way, we have an awesome recruiting team, but folks across the rest of the company partner very closely with our recruiting team. So it's not like it's a machine that delivers new hires. And then you're like, oh, well, maybe this person is here and I can put them to use in that thing. Our managers spend a lot of time identifying exactly what they need for the various roles that we have and then getting to know the potential candidates, the people out there in the world that could do these jobs actually really go quite deep with them on why it might make sense for them to feel like number one they can like feel very personally fulfilled against that mission here and then also why it represents like a bigger opportunity for them than maybe anything else they can spend their time and attention on and to that end another thing that i think stripe has definitely delivered for for many many people who join here is just and i care about preserving this in the culture is just tremendous learning opportunities”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we think about finding those people, we don't hide any of that. You have to care about that in order to, I think, be excited about working at Stripe. And so we work very hard to make it very clear as we're bringing people in that that's what this is about. And to that end, we're often very patient when we're hiring. So especially for critical roles, you know, leadership hiring in particular, we're happy to take our time and mate tens or hundreds of people. And then in particular, sometimes we'll meet someone that we think is a really good fit for a given role, but they're not available right now. And then we'll be patient. We'll keep building the personal relationship with them. And oftentimes the moment in time comes when it makes sense for them to join. And in order to pull that off, it's also the case that hiring at Stripe is a very personal activity. So look, there are lots of other companies where”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The scenes to make their businesses better and more effective over time. And I think that attracts folks with a certain kind of mindset, which is the interest and kind of tenacity to dig into kind of difficult problems that may not be obvious and obviously kind of attractive to everyone in the world, then really plug away at them until we've made a tremendous amount of progress. And so it attracts folks that are long-term thinkers that care about building, and also actually want to work very collaboratively together. When I think about what makes Stripe different to other companies, it really is this singularity of purpose. Our mission is increasing the GDP of the internet and building this financial infrastructure to do that. And a tremendous amount of teamwork and collaboration to get that done. And so that attracts a certain kind of person.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, to bring this back to how do we attract the right talent and why does this matter? First of all, a lot of people, most people I think come to Stripe because they see that there is this great opportunity to help businesses at scale. So it really is about taking part in a mission that matters and are really motivated by that idea that we spend a lot of time with our users, the folks that actually need our help and are guided by them. And that mindset, I think, attracts a certain kind of person who wants to take a lot of agency, like wants to understand the problems deeply and come up with their own ideas about how to solve for them. Because we're building infrastructure, it's also our approach that we really do think that we can do the best work kind of behind the scenes. We don't have to be out having the splashy launch, but hopefully all of our users can, and we are quietly working behind.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we started out solving a really kind of important and profined problem for these businesses getting started and scaling and obviously taking a very developer centric approach to that in the early days. I think what's exciting to know about and important to know about next is as we've scaled, we really kind of figure out what to do based on paying really close attention to our users. Those are the businesses building on Stripe. What are they getting out of the products as they are today? And what are the problems adjacent to the ones that we're already solving that they have to put a lot of their own energy into but really feel like they shouldn't and they'd like us to help? And when we find that confluence of kind of need and that adjacency to what we're already doing, that's usually our invitation to go and build the next layer of our economic infrastructure. So we think what we do today is building.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Business and they tell this funny story actually, which is while they were building that company, they assumed it was an internet company. They assumed the hardest thing was going to be like putting together hardware in a data center. But it turned out because there were services like AWS around by then, that that was actually quite easy. However, when it came to accepting payments in that business, it was just as hard as they had expected building hardware to be. They had to actually deploy some physical hardware, they had to do a whole bunch of these partnerships. And it was very difficult, especially as an upstart, you know, folks that didn't have any reputation yet to kind of be taken seriously and be able to correct into that. And so that's kind of the inspiration behind Stripe.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, I'd love to tell you more about how we find and hire people. I think it makes sense to kind of zoom out for a second because it's material here. So think about what Stripe's doing. Our core thesis is that the internet economy is going to be much bigger and more important in the future than it is today. And that's certainly played out over the last 10 years. And so we are really a business full of product-minded builders who are seeking to make it easier for businesses to get started and to operate against that backdrop. And so we got started building a credit card payments API before Stripe came along, accepting credit card payments online was way too hard. You had to go talk to your bank. You had to maybe sign a contract with Visa and MasterCard. You then to kind of string together all this very complicated infrastructure and it then put a bunch of restrictions and requirements on the business. And John and Patrick are our co-founder said a previous”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you. Well, it's a pleasure. It's a lot of fun. Stripe sessions is our annual user conference. So we get together a bunch of folks from businesses building on Stripe. And it's a great opportunity both to share what we've been up to over the last year, but also just learn a lot from them about what they would like to see us doing. And so I find it very energizing. It is, of course, a lot of work to put it together. In particular, I'm spending a bunch of time getting some demos together today, which I love building demos. But it's a real pleasure to join you today.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many of the kind of attributes, and we'll exercise many of the attributes that you'll often find in PMs in other companies.”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way we think about product development straight, it really is to find the correct set of early users to kind of co-create the product with. Maybe the best example of that is Stripe Billing. When we got to starting the Stripe Billing product, we realized that there were a number of our existing users. These were companies like Figmap and Slack. We were already using Stripe for payments, but had these subscriptions business models. And we figured that there were going to be many more of these kind of companies into the future. And we could see that they were really kind of pushing the boundaries of what was possible here. So we decided to co-create the product with them. So we had shared Slack channels. We'd actually show them product on a very regular basis, get their feedback on it. And only when that original kind of alpha group was super, super happy with the product did we then think it might be ready to go to a broader audience. So that is just how we build product at Stripe. And that means that every engineer building product at Stripe really has”
2023-05-04 · Lenny's Podcast · Building a culture of excellence | David Singleton (CTO of Stripe) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source