YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Weinstein

lines on the record: 182
first: 2024-07-11
most recent: 2024-07-11
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

“Everywhere, and the part one of the stat we kind of came up with a little bit last year that I've just personally deeply obsessed with is founding teams in which the co-founders are in multiple countries. We kind of nickname this again. It's like giving things a good title headlines, cross-border founders. Wow. More than twenty percent of multi founder teams have at least one founder from another country. That is astounding to me that the internet could bring people together like that. And I think that's going to provide.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We better do all these checksums. We better. Would be awesome if we could always treat our internal work that way, but because it was external, it forced us to be more rigid where we needed to be rigid and create interfaces and kind of commitments. And again, we work with a bunch of great third parties and backup third parties to execute this. And each year we write a document called should we do this ourselves? And we look at the other nine of us around the room and go, of course we shouldn't. Let's go on to something else. So again, we're just really stitching it together, but ensuring that it happens.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Internal structure we use. But again, we have to look at where the value is. The value is in making sure it happens. Does it need to be us sending the mail? Does it need to be us talking to government? Not necessarily. And we have chosen to work with third parties and many backup third parties as well because one, there's expertise in the world of physically printing and sending mail that the 10 of us are not going today become experts in. And two, I think it also causes us to build better software in that we now need to evaluate if something's actually working because it's happening externally. Whereas when you build it yourself, again, you have this natural feeling, well, we built it, it must be working. Oh, later we'll add alerts. You know, later when there are problems, we'll figure out playbooks. Well, look, when it's a third party building it, you're like, wait a second, whom's if they screw up? Cool, we better figure that out. We better OCR all the resources.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sent it. And the proof of just receiving the piece of paper at the office that we had just sent yesterday is incredible proof, right? Well, look, I mean, the A3B election is just sending this piece of paper to the IRS. Like, we just did it, right? That go, go, go, go as soon as possible was extremely useful because it's just like, look, this exists, like we can do it. Come on. On the long-term compounding part, we were extremely serious about how we picked our third-party vendors and backup vendors and what promises and SLAs and reporting systems and alerts and playbooks and backup processes like this in a very intense amount.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a very high bar to set as the thing you're going to do. And so we're happy to take our time. This is part of versus like go, go, go, go, go, go, go versus the long-term compounding. Go, go was when we assigned one engineer. Hey, it's your job today to send one piece of paper to the office with this third party mail service. Why? Doesn't matter. Just send a single piece of paper to the office. And incredible engineer, and she went on to lead all the 83B election”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Atlas is in total 10 people. Which is, I think, a relatively small group for the Roll that it plays in the wider sort of ecosystem. We just don't pick up work we can't automate. Because we know that we need the leverage, and so we're not going to tackle, we're not going to put ourselves in situations in which we have to compete to be the best. We're going to put ourselves in situations where we can automate it and be the only. And that's a different mindset. So, in terms of why we picked up 83B election as a topic, like when we made that decision, we made a commitment that we're going to do this forever. We're going to do this forever. This is a piece of infrastructure for the rest of the internet.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cracking up into the right. And that's very exciting because you also hear sometimes, well, the funding market is down and valuations and this and that and the other, that is much more of a point in time capital analysis and much less of a business, just how businesses are working day to day. It's really in the revenue that is representative of their futures. And that looks amazingly bright. And then, of course, these companies go off to do pretty wild things companies that have started through Atlas, there's been 55,000 of them to date are doing $5 billion a year in revenue. I think it actually resets their expectations of what other tools will be in the future. It's like, well, if it was so easy for me to get my company started, well, why is it so hard to do banking? Well, thankfully, there are some great services for it, but I think it's if we can push people towards expectations higher, then they will want to make their company.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. And then you don't know where these things are going to go. We have the sort of cohort of 2024 startups and Atlas got to $50 million in revenue twice as quickly as the cohort in 2023. And so we kind of also think sometimes, oh, it was the pandemic that pushed everything online. Those are our best years. It's like, we're seeing the earliest cohort charts of new startups.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“bringing the best of the internet and making it available worldwide can cause more people to be correlated with more people becoming entrepreneurs and i think we should just keep doing that”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can kind of see GDP being like born sooner and my whole life knowing that, okay, GDP is not finite and it can grow, but I've never really seen it. And now I've actually seen it grow faster, sooner. And I think anything we could do to just move that forward is going to inspire and lower the bar for more people to be an entrepreneur because they'll see how satisfying that can be. And another stat which really was interesting to me recently is that we have seen since doing much of this automation work that more solo founders are using Atlas than ever before. And I think it's because you can just do a lot more on the internet as a founder with no code tools and everything else and get going. Very cool to see that.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a little strange. You just started your company. Well, what does it really matter to wait an extra seven days or 20 days before you can get off before you can really get gong on business? Those are really fragile days with your building. And to summer conversation earlier, that amazing feeling of getting your first customer and being in it with them and money actually exchanging hands and getting that relationship, if we can slide that forward in the world by a couple days or weeks, which we're seeing like half the time it takes to get to your first customer, just like shave a whole week off of your company.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Atlas was actually a little reasonable before we decided to do all this work. It's like, why do this next step of completely automating it when it was actually like fairly straightforward before? Atlas has above 80 NPS, which is quite high. Apple is in the low 60s. AirPods is 75. I love my AirPods. So Atlas in the 80s with almost 50% response rate is quite high. And so we still chose to do another year of work to automate all of this work behind the scenes because we see that Companies are charging their customers sooner. They go through this automated process versus waiting”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Financial system before IRS and the other governments come back with their sort of official yeses because we have, we take care of the problem in the background by which we're faxing, phone calling, filling up. And just erase it so that you get the same thing the YC group gets when they start that checklist that they go through. We just have the robot do exactly the same thing. And so in some ways, it is a really big deal and a big ship because it completely automates the company starting process. But in other ways, it's an incredibly incremental step that it's taken us three years to get to where we had to systematically Automate the internal steps each one, and now we've done the work to wrap it all up into one button. You can just watch how your company's doing in the dashboard.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a day or two. And so you can quit your, you know, this is our vision so you can quit your job on a Sunday night, get the Sunday scaries. I'm done with this thing. On Monday morning, fill out this form, and the next day be able to run a billion dollar business because we will have automatically handled getting you access to banking systems, to payment systems, to handling all the equity paperwork, filing your 83B election, where you can just shift from having worrying about the company starting process to just building and shipping. And you'll just get kind updates in the background. Cool, the IRS has given you a tax ID. Cool your 83B election is filed, cool, all the founders have their equity and you're ready to go on the cap table. And we've done this by deeply integrating with the governments and deeply integrating with banking partners at where we can get you access to”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be a single click. You go to type in your friends' names, what the name of the company will be, and it'll tell you if it's available automatically or not. You can split the company up fifty, fifty or whatever you want to do, fill out a few things, and you click go and then like a burrito coming to you. A pizza tracker, we will just handle all of the downstream activities that used to be Hey, remember to come back in and purchase your shares. Why am I purchasing my shares? I'm just getting started. Why am I writing a check for ten dollars and putting into a bank account that I can't even open yet? And then I have to wait for that to be done to get the A3B. All of those steps are now just handled in the background so that we can get you ready for business.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Founders terrified all day long about this same issue, just alarm bells in your head all time. And so I had experienced it for myself as a founder several times and I've also just heard story after story and I just put on my to-do list for the team. We are going to solve this A3B election thing. And there are very good reasons not to do it because it comes with potential huge liability. You don't want to screw it up. It's nail mail. You're really going to monetize this. This is really what the competitive advantage to do it. You can kind of argue yourself not to do it in a million ways. But again, back to the mission of just taking all of this complexity and turning it into a single click, it was obvious to us and we got started on it. Infrastructurally, we've been automating these steps. And when this podcast errors, I guess today, it will be true that when you go to start a company on Atlas, it will just”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This IRS rule in order to sperm or entrepreneurship. They want this, and the only issue is they made it extremely difficult to accomplish. You have to send a snail mail in to an IRS address in a particular format, in a particular way with no verification that happened at all. And if you do it 31 calendar days, there's no redo. Again, if you're a product person, you hear”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Radically try to simplify the process of getting a company started and that mission has taken us to just solve more of the problem over time. And so over the last few years, for those who have either used Atlas or have started a company or maybe follow along on Twitter a bit, you might have seen just a progression of complexity that used to exist being automated. And so a big one that we did about a year ago was this 83B election, which is this Absolutely Byzantine silliness system by which you have 30 calendar days to send a one-page document to the IRS that could radically change the economics of how you are incentivized as a founder. And this is not one of these greedy loopholes situations. The IRS in the 1980s made this”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Increasing the ease and simplicity and decreasing the cost and complexity tends to lead to just more of that thing. And we have a fundamental belief that there should be more startups and they're not finite. And that belief comes from both just a core hope because there are so many problems in the world that don't seem to be being solved fast enough by our current institutions and larger companies that we think will actually, you know, we need entrepreneurial energy to tackle them. And then it also comes from experience of seeing it happen. Instacart signed up for strike with a Gmail address, and then COVID happened and they delivered critical food to everyone when people were reasonably not allowed to go to the grocery store easily. So you just don't know what the next Gmail address is going to do. And so in Atlas,”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While there are smart humans across the whole planet, the opportunity that they have is not uniform, and it's a little strange because it's all the same MacBooks and it's a little strange because it's all the same IP addresses and we all have plenty of bandwidth and smarts. And so what can we do to dramatically lower the barrier to great people solving problems? And we found over and over again that”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so you start to hear that kind of thing at a coffee shop amongst someone with a laptop who has access to the whole internet, and that is a burning problem. That is not a tier three issue. I am not able to run my business without getting on an airplane, should be sending. Alerts off in your whole psyche that you have discovered something important. And so I wasn't at stripe at the time, but I'm very thankful that I was running my own startup at the time. I was very thankful that the people at Stripe decided to try to tackle that problem. And so Atlas is a way to start a company in a few clicks. And we think that's an incredibly big deal because”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In twenty sixteen A bunch of stripes were traveling the world is what we call teammates here. And they're just hearing stories from entrepreneurs around the world. And you would hear this. Unbelievable story from incredible entrepreneurs who have a laptop. An airplane to make a US company in order to get access to U.S. financial system, to raise money from US or global investors, often to take USD or to charge US customers. And you could have sat around and said, huh, is that illegal? They don't live in the US. Can they have a US company? Absolutely. The US loves this. It is incredibly encouraged for people from around the world to make a U.S. company, and many people do. Now, why did it require an airplane?”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lore that gets us out of our chair and into the customer's mindset best is if it's you and you're your own customer. Okay second best would be sitting right next to the customer in the outside world and then like okay fine I'll take a third best which is pantomining the customer and with a zero with enforcing you don't use any internal knowledge if you have practices in those three categories Uncomfortable with the failure modes”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a huge amount of trust here involved in your colleagues, which Want to provide teams great information. and the best teams welcome that information it doesn't mean that it comes with a opinion from the outside world that says you must do X we have a rubric on some of the craft relations But again, we also allow our let the teams relabel them. And so maybe it's actually not a P0 from their eyes. And that's the trust we put in the teams. I think that the failure mode is when you don't look. And so we need unnatural, safe, fun.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have added the SLAs to certain bug levels that begin to match a bit of our incident process. So in an incident stripe, like in many companies, you can put pencils down, fix the problem, severity levels. Nonnegotiable Slack rooms happen, war rooms, all that stuff. You don't want to do that with every single bug, but we have a rubric of craft related tags for our bug system. And if it is a sort of a P0 bug, which is not an incident, right? It doesn't mean to put down your pencils. You do need to acknowledge it at Stripe within seven days. And even if it doesn't mean to fix it, it's like a person looks at it and says, hey, we're going to like do it or not do it Up still pretty strong bar for a non incident related craft issue.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Teammates struggle to use your thing in some way is more motivating than the customer because you can kind of always say to the customer, well, they didn't really know or they have some special setup. You probably shouldn't say those things, but you can kind of rationalize it. Whereas a group of people incentivized to have actually accomplished it who got together to do so, painstakingly slowly... Not being able to do so That's not what excites you as a product person to want to solve this thing's not for you. But then again you have your own optimization system, you have your own things you need to ship and study group doesn't have a mandate that comes from it. We have our own it's more of a cultural piece of information that is very high signal and then people tend to use that high signal for good prioritization. I will say though that”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“regulation on something. Okay, well, everything coming out of this program needs to be scored and rubricked and have SLAs, that is extremely reasonable as some of these next steps because we do notice things that are of serious issues and we have some formal processes inside of Stripe for elevating bugs to certain priority levels that get tagged and have SLAs for teams to acknowledge and review. And so we kind of funnel the outputs of a study group into our already existing formal processes rather than having some new special thing that's going to bother a particular team. I will say though that It is difficult to watch one of these study groups and if you are the team involved in some piece of it and not want to act on it because Seeing your fellow”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, I actually just have a huge backlog of things to study group based on what people want. And then, and now we're kind of, again, franchising it. So we're going to have study group captains and people run their own study groups. And so I can really scale this behavior. But we did our first study group of an internal tool recently. And so that I think is going to catch on just anything at all can be study group to just takes about an hour and a couple people and you open up the Zoom and that's it. And then for expectation-wise, Look, you can It is it is so tempting to”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So initially I just made up a list of stuff that I thought would be fun to study group to kind of kick it off. And now because it has a bit of an internal brand and it's exciting and people have gone to a study group say nice things about study group, they actually proactively say, hey, we should study group blah. Or we're launching something next week. We should study group it before it goes out the door.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product quality and craft has some limit towards business value. Like there's some asymptote that you have to be like, well, Kind of product playtime quality is over. We need to talk about business. It's like, let's figure out exactly what is causing the business to happen and make it product, even if it doesn't look naturally the same as our sort of SaaS software browser, mobile, whatever versions. I think we can see the entire experience as it. And from there, I include the sales process. I include the support process. I include tools that help with compliance and everything else. If people have a way to make all those things bad and lead to great increasing revenue over time in sustainable ways, I want to know about that because that sounds so much easier than the version that we're trying.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe in some universe it'll be three clicks, but not today, or certainly not when I tried a couple years ago. You got a call and go on a phone tree and all the shenanigans. And then I got on the line with someone from Fidelity. They're like, hi, Jeff. They knew about the old company. They confirmed my address. They said, we, by the way, this is not a digital process yet. We're going to FedEx you an envelope. And inside it is going to be the thing for you to sign. Here's going to be exactly where to sign. Here's like a picture we're going to sign. We've put another envelope inside that envelope ready to go. And so you just take the papers from envelope one, sign them where it says, and put them in envelope two and like put it back to the fest. It's like, wow, that is product. That is a product experience. Where I think some people would say, oh, look, the product experience has to only be in the software. So I feel when people think, oh, you know,”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Name of the person they're talking to because they have it from the onboarding form, and all of a sudden it feels like you are still in the product, but it's not software. Now it's a person, but it's a person backed by internal software, which knows as much as they can about the customer and what they want. And I was really inspired by Fidelity, which is a big financial institution where many people listening might have switched jobs and had to move their 401k or something like this from job A to job B.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, congratulations. Unbelievable that they're going through your product, even attempting self-service and contacting you, the majority case would be no one tries or they try and fail in dull contact you. So again, what a problem to have. And two, they wanted to minimize the support in that particular case. It's like, well, what's actually in those support tickets? What's in those? There's a really sales contacts. They're like, oh, they want to learn more about how they get started. They want to know the expertise about this is a particular company, it's a healthcare related company. They want to know the healthcare choices available. They wanted to know how to migrate from some old system they had to it. I was like, that's the product. That's the product. The thing you're talking about is the product. Turn those moments during your self-serve process into not self-serve and make the product experience be let's get you on the phone. And now when they get on the phone, they know the first.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want it on the table, but I often find it's part of the product experience. So maybe it's internal sales tools. We can do a study group about our internal sales tools process and our deal desk and our margin structure. We can do a friction log on our third party vendor process or a migration service or the way an ecosystem partner helps deploy our services into a big enterprise. Like nothing is sort of off limits from product. In fact, I was chatting with a friend who runs a company and they were small company on the verge of product market fit, starting to feel customers starting to pull. And they're like, oh, but our self-service funnel is so leaky and we have all this support coming through self-service.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If someone else has a strategy for moving revenue that isn't getting it from customers, I want to know about it. Because it is so hard to get it from customers. If there's some faster path, please tweet me and tell me about it because this is very hard at a lot of work to do. So if there's something else that you”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Focus on a per team basis, but then you need something unnatural to help us bring it back. And so I'm constantly looking for non-punitive, fun ways objectively to get more perspectives from the outside in. If it's breaking the fourth wall to get on the phone on Twitter, if it's looking at a metric of users having a bad day, which is just like counting what's happening, can't argue with that, or a random group of people just kind of scratching their head trying to find a button, those are truths. Those are truths in the world that we're trying to make sure our inputs to all of our teams. And if you don't have those inputs, I can totally naturally see where the entropy of the world leads you to have Frankenstein bad products even when all the individual parts are like well oiled and run by great people. So you need something unnatural.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The customer does not live in our walls They aren't. They're not here. They don't know our lingo, and it is just so natural for our internal mindset and lingo to into the application of time and you need some counterbalance to get there and I think that's an has to be an unnatural counterbalance I it used to frustrate me actually more like wow why aren't we all like why aren't we doing this well we're actually doing great work to move something forward and we have our local optimizations it would be difficult to get to this level of specialization that multi-product companies are trying to do without that level of”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A company like Stripe, which is already pretty focused on this topic that we think that there's enough legs here that we're going to keep it and kind of invest in. Groups pretending to be the customer and going through it painstakingly slowly rather than Only demos or only writing which has other benefits but misses the participation of a larger group and more fresh eyes. So it's been fun and we named it study group, I guess I named it study group because I wasn't sure what it would be initially. So I just came up with something that sounded cutesy but gave me enough leeway that we could kind of adjust it over time and this is where we've landed.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one is to blame or defensive because it's not your product at all. It's a random group of people. We don't even introduce ourselves about what team we worked on. We're just all here as participants to embody the customer. And then I think lastly a reason why it's work, and many of these have just been actually super surprising to me. I wouldn't have been able to print ahead of time is it is just fun. It's just fun. People want to make up the name of the company. They're excited about what dolphin industries would sell. A person who's not a CTO in real life gets to pretend to be a CTO. And it's just, there's a little theatrics to it, but it's. It has been different enough from our other approaches to”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't believe how hard it was to accomplish X, Y, and Z. I thought we were amazing at blah. It's like, well, we actually are still pretty good, but we need to get back towards amazing. Or wow, I didn't even know that internally people wouldn't know that our products did one, two, and three. And this has become so internally popular that teams have adopted for themselves. And so we've kind of franchised study group internally already where different teams will run it. But I think we're going to continue it because it I think a little bit is coming out of the pandemic. People just want more group activities. I think some of it is the slowness by which we do it. We're not rushing through it, which is another reason I appreciate your podcast as well. It's like, let's really get into the details and not be rushed for time. You forget that you have a meeting at the end kind of amount of time.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You start, you actually start to believe that you don't orchestripe and you work at Dauphin Aquarium Industries and you start to really feel it. So that's rule one. You don't work at Stripe. And rule two is. We're not here to solve any problems We're not here to critique, we're not here to solution or suggest, we're not here to file bugs, all of those things is recorded. We can do that later, whatever. This is just about practicing empathy for the customer and going through the product. And we have done more than 25 of these at Stripe thus far in the last, just this year, last few months of 2024, more than 250 people have gone participated in a study group and it is deeply eye-opening for those involved. The responses are Business emotional, you know, not super emotional, but just wow. I sort of.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will firmly but kindly, if I hear you use any internal stripe knowledge, which is natural to do, because you worked on a team and you know where that button really is and you know the docs link goes a little bit to the wrong place, but if you click the other link you'll get to it. If I can see you use any internal stripe knowledge, I'll just pause and say, hey, let's redo the sentence or redo what we did with no stripe knowledge. As a reminder, you don't work at stripe. And it takes us a couple times, but people really get into it. And all of a sudden we'll start making up characters. And the CEO will be like, oh, Tim, you're a designer. Where are we going to get the color palette? All of a sudden there's a person who's not a designer, right, in real life is now all of a sudden having to practice the empathy to be in the customer's position. And because we're going to be doing it for an hour, hour and a half at a time”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You work at and we make up a name of the company, Dolphin Aquarium Industries, and we will pick a CEO of the company from the group amongst us. And, okay, Jenny is the CEO. Hey, Jenny, what do you want to do today? Like, well, I want to sell in-person tickets to the Dolphin Aquarium. It's like, cool. Where would you start? So we actually embody the customer. We will not break character is a little bit of the improv thing. And as the kind of maestro of study group”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretend to be some company with some outcome problem. Maybe we want to accept money in person at an upcoming farmer's market, or we want to run a multi-country global business where we have software that another business would use to run their business, something quite complicated. We could pick any motivating goal. And there are two rules to study group. Rule one is you do no longer work at Stripe. You do not work at Stripe. Not pretend you don't work at Stripe, not try to forget. You do not work at Stripe. You've never worked at Stripe.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and the position of the company to send it out as a critique potentially to not just your own team, but in a whole organization. So that's actually like a pretty high bar to crossover. So I was kind of brainstorming, what can we do to make this more fun and have the frequency which we're looking at our own products dramatically increase? And we kind of iterated through ideas and I landed on this thing called study group, which is basically A random group of people inside the company might not work on any particular team. They might not all BPMs, just like literally anyone who wants to sign up, a support person, a salesperson, someone who's on our events team, an engineer, and our infrastructure stack, anybody can sign up for a study group. We show up maybe four to eight people total.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incentivize or to structure a group of people to do that. Stripe has a thing called friction logs as well, which is a single individual will pretend to be a customer and go through a product experience end-to-end and write it down. And that has been quite successful at Stripe for very motivated people who can Block off the time and have the wide enough context to do a complicated thing end to end and have the time to write it up.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Allow yourself to even know that this is true, because if you're working on one particular team, you're going to have some next thing you're shipping, you're going to have your customers, you're going to be doing great product work. Meanwhile, your current thing kind of starts to rot in the world and decrease all the trust you've earned to build what you're building now, it is actually difficult to decide, well, what hours during the week. From my future progress to see it from the customer's perspective today. And there are various techniques to try to”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For accomplishing a test for a customer is all of a sudden some Byzantine complicated, broken mall where all the doors are busted and you have to exactly the way to get through the dashboard to solve your problem. Wait a second, we just, I thought this was great just a second ago. I mean, many of us have experienced that. Now Okay, what are we going to do about it? Well, one is it is really difficult to Take time during the day to”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still measure the success, you could still look at the tweets, and then, of course, you go to pick it up yourself and you're like, wait a second, this thing is horrible. How did it get so bad? Anyone who's built a product that has gone over the horizon of it's actually in production and being used for some year or more as you go to iterate on it, especially when you're in a larger company and there's multiple teams and multiple products going on. There's just some entropy in the world that causes these things to go bad. I actually have a hard time naturally explaining it. You kind of think to yourself, well, it's code. It just must be running the same every day. But somehow you do enough things in a row and what was once a smooth end-to-end”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, let's imagine we understand our customer. Understand their burning problem. We've built a solution that's in their hands. They're using. It's hopefully better than their alternatives and they're starting to use it. And we have some real traction.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source