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

“Finding out what your customer wants and then different versions of how do we sort of know it's true over time and our tactics improving it.”
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, then the team meeting starts. Hey, just a reminder, let's just bring up the metric again, not a screenshot of it. Go to the URL. And just that level of frequency and specificity and ritual around it is what brings it into the decision-making culture. And again, we treat it the exact same as we do tweets. It's the quantitative and the qualitative right next to each other. And because you're putting that amount of attention to it, you can't have a thousand metrics. We just don't physically have time, the day to bring that level of care and understanding to so many things. So then it forces you to wino so many things you could care about down to a small number of things that you really must care about. And again, that practice goes back to do you really understand what your customer wants? And so for all these tactics, it's about”
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 feels counterintuitive that it's like this, and then you kind of look into it, wait a second, we've been counting it wrong the whole time. Oh no! And then you look at it the third week, and it's a completely different version. And then you hope that we forget about it, and maybe we'll go on to something else. Nope, we're not going to forget about it. Week four comes around, you're like, wait a second.”
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 thing we should trust to help us decide what to do. That's an incredibly high bar. And so I just find you have to look at it frequently enough. And if you're going to look at it frequently enough, it means it needs to be in a discoverable place. You almost go through a couple stages of grief about it because we'll kind of put a metric up in a place and everyone initially is like, wow, this is great. I was so excited to finally see this. And then a couple days later, huh, I don't quite understand it. What is it like actually mean? I saw this other metric from this other angle that kind 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
“Years ago, Stripe did internal work to make an internal metrics kind of dashboard system, and we have a special place called Go Metrics. Many people use a Go slash service where you can just quickly go to a URL. And again, I have to sometimes do a rule rather than a policy. My rule is if it's not on Goometrics, I'm not going to look at it. So people can send me one-off queries or charts or screenshots or presentations or emails of charts and data, but that is. In the wind, you know, we can't interrogate the query metrics are almost always wrong for many weeks. We didn't quite get the definition correctly. You have to live in the metric for quite a while before you really believe in it. And so if you're always looking at some one-off version, it's just very difficult for it to rise up to the level of importance that is.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“which teams are themselves looking at their own metrics. And then there's an incredibly useful predictor of how The same page they are and how customer obsessed they are. So I just think it's It's not an area that's sort of behind the scenes bean counting Reliability only is the machine hot, you can make methods. Mean something to the customer and you would be proud if they were to be screenshot and put on the internet and be like, wow, I feel like that company is taking their promise to me seriously and I can see myself on those metrics as a customer. That's where we're really shooting for.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reduce the need of a product person to just remind everyone every day why they're doing it. It's like the metric is motivating us because it's a motivating thing to talk about. And then lastly on metrics is there's just good hygiene that people should bring to their measures. Percentages shouldn't have 41 significant digits if only two of the digits are relevant. You should keep all the measures of your dashboard on the same x-axis. These are just stylistic things that increase the frequency that people want to just wake up every day and open the dashboard and look at it. And that is so powerful if your whole team is looking at the same set of information that has the heartbeat of the customer every single day. In fact, we can measure at Stripe the usage of our dashboards by team. And so we can see.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mindset built into the chart name can become currency inside the company. It's like, oh, I'm working on making the like this chart go up and it feels good to just say the name out loud rather than some complicated underscores and mins and maxes and the database field name is like still in the chart title. These are aesthetic choices, but I think make dramatic differences in the cultural willingness for people to buy in and get excited about it”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ways of operating. A couple other just like quick metrics things. This is a bit of a I don't know. Some people like cycling or something. I guess I like metrics. People get a really nice bike. Picking metric titles that make you feel something. So 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, you know, you see, you sometimes see these charts where the metric itself named itself. This is just companies with zero support. And the brevity and the focus and the customer.”
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 question is how much to the audience is, how much of the science will yet it out before it goes live. But this is what I'm talking about, right? Is I could guess them, right? And I can, as you were saying those, I know the URL of those charts. I know the login one because I feel that too. So I'm going to play with Stripe all the time. And then you get a 2FA too frequently. And come on. I have the same cookie. I was just here yesterday. So we count all that stuff and try to make it better over time. But I'm so excited when someone brings me a new bad day I hadn't thought about yet because that's just That's like product catnip.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Counting system for where there are problems. And anytime there's an incident or some customer issue, the first thing I think is, ooh, like I wonder if we have a bad day. I wonder if we have a bad day reason for this. And if we do, I actually feel okay. I'm like, oh yeah, it is a bad day for this customer. I wish I didn't have it, but at least we're aware and we can evaluate it against other bad days that we want to burn down. What does sometimes a little bit grime my gears or is an opportunity is like when we didn't know about that bad day and it's a surprise to us too, that is like for me is immediate action. It's like, okay, cool. We have to figure out a way to count this bad day. We got to get it on the chart. That way we can make an informed decision about when to invest in improving it.”
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 log line and count it. Like the frequencies could be kind of mind blowing. And I think for almost any scale business, if you are bored one day and you're not sure what to measure, just make a user's having a bad day chart omit a log line and count it as a bar chart. And then anybody else can add their own bar chart on top of it. And so it's become a way for teams to scale their understanding of users through metrics by just saying, hey, look, anytime anybody has an idea about why a customer is having a bad day, just submit a log line, like put on this chart. And then we can choose over time which bad day reasons we want to burn down and hopefully just like eradicate them, not just like minimize them. But it gave us kind of a Background no”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unsure what to measure, we have this. I don't know if we stole it from somebody else or if we came up with internally, whatever, is just users having a bad day where we will just omit a log line anytime. We think that a user bumped into a problem. So maybe they hit A404, or maybe their payout was one day after the ETA, or they had more than ten payment declines, you can kind of brainstorm, again, or just listen to customers, what would cause you to personally have a bad day and then just omit an event when that occurs. And then you could just make a bar chart, a stacked bar chart, of all the bad day reasons and the frequency by which they're happening and is eye-opening to see those frequencies. And it's kind of a metric I hadn't thought about until Stripe scale in which you just don't know what's happening until 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
“Decided that our go to market strategy would be to delight our current customers such that they would tell their friends. And other businesses, I mean, that's always somewhat useful, but you can also reach people with billboards and Google ads and other types of upsells. That's very difficult in the moment that someone is starting a company. That's sort of a natural geographic. Can you get the picture of the bird at exactly the right time? How are you even supposed to go find people who are about to start companies? Thankfully, they have this practice of just asking their friends. And so if friends... Loved it, they're going to just recommend it. And that has. The metric and the tactic and the go to market all line.”
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 have to pick the right metric for your audience. I wouldn't fully export that metric to everyone, though it's not a terrible one to export. But in the founders choosing where to get started mindset, again, this isn't just deeply spending time listening to your customers, they all ask their friends, hey, how did you start your company? They want to talk to an older sibling of sorts about how it went. And so we”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right up to the top because you want 100% of your customers to get their final decision as quickly as possible. And once you know it, when we looked at the chart, it was doing this, right? And so each month we would just make it a little better and a little better, a little up to the left, up and to the left, up into the left, and now basically 100-ish percent of people get their risk review within an hour from a long tail taking a long time. And so we would constrain the tactic through a metric and then kind of like watch it through an optimization function. And then when we got to a point where we were happy with the target, we could put down the tactic. That's another like really useful thing about metrics is just like you can decide when to stop a tactic because you get to some level of success that you're comfortable with and you can always choose to pick it back up later.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not allow ourselves the perverse tactics to sort of just casually exist, we would choose which tactics we're going to do and then set a metric for it. And the one the other reason I love this metric is it's a cohort metric by which you're trying to drive something up and to the left. Sometimes people will get excited about a chart that goes up and to the right. It's kind of a meme. Oh, that's going up to the right. I'm really excited about charts that go up and to the left. So you have to figure out some optimization that you're trying to maximize. And so in this particular case of This risk review, we would look at, hey, for the cohort of customers that started last month, how quickly did we get them to their final risk review by number of days since they submitted? And so you want a chart that looks a lot like”
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 knew that our tactic was just to drive up how quickly we got to a final decision on folks and to reduce the number of overturn rejections where someone writes back in saying, hi, like, come on, I'm totally just making something reasonable. What's up? Why did you reject me? And so we would pick these. Overarching single metric, which was the companies with zero support tickets. But then we would have a specific KR that was owned by an engineer, which is the tactic that we're going to do. And so we would.”
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'm waiting to hear back from Atlas about if they're going to approve my application because Stripe is required for very good reasons to evaluate certain business types or sanctions lists and sort of a worldwide product. So there is some incredibly, should be incredibly quick, but there is a bit of a review process. And of course, if you were not hearing back from us, you would be upset. You're trying to make your company immediately. This is ridiculous. Let's get back to this quickly. And so we knew that one of the reasons that people were writing to support was like, hey, what's up with my review? What's going on?”
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 look at multiple metrics, but we will optimize around one, and you have to use your own judgment to look at some of these countermeasures and pick them. We would also That would sort of be our overarching metric for a year, but then we would pick specific. Tactical metrics about how we would accomplish it. So just an example that both. Is how we solve the problem, but also it's just like a style of metric that was useful to us. Of course, some of these support tickets included things like”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Contentful conversations with engineers who are bringing solutions and ideas for product rather than one person going through all of the potential ideas, scoping them and assigning them. And because it was based in what people were saying and wanted, it was very motivating for everyone on the team. Somewhat long answer, but Figuring out something in which every day we can wake up and look at the same metric and with some confidence know what to do is so much better than let's figure out what to do each month and kind of like starting from scratch.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, want to learn more? Just reply to the sport ticket email. Figure out what they need. And so we kind of turned all of the engineers on the Into PMs to go and One issue at a time, figure out what needed to change and build products for it. And that's where we push forward on A3B elections, automating it, sending in the mail for folks. We built our own signing service. We turned everything into a click. We did just did sort of the obvious things we saw in the tickets. But as the PM, I was able to just sort of not on autopilot, but really sit back and have.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Plotted on the same time frame, and it's like the same shape. And I think you have to find a measure by which It speaks directly to what the customer wanted. And that if you by accidentally leaked your dashboard to them, your customer would be ecstatic to learn that that's what you were measuring the whole time. You know, if we were to showcase the internal Alice metrics, which we often just screenshot and publish, I think they'd be pretty happy to hear that we were spending all of our time making sure that none of them had support tickets. And it was incredibly encouraging and motivating to the engineers on the team because we could just assign them a topic. Hey, Look at all these support tickets. Why don't you come up with the product spec, the scope, the solution?”
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 were going through the service with zero support tickets, which is very different than looking at the average, right? You have the average is 0.3, but that doesn't necessarily mean that getting to 0.2 is going to cause them to tell their friends more. And we looked, and only 15% of founders were getting through Atlas with zero support tickets through that metric. Thought, okay, well, let's just drive that number way up. And let's look at the support tickets, decide what people are needing, and we'll bake it into the product. And presumably it'll fix it. People will like that more and then tell their friends. And over about 18 months, we took that number from 15% to 85%. We basically just flipped it. And you can look at the market share.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through the incorporation service, the whole process. From the moment you start the application open, actually the first page load at the very beginning, all the way through the process waiting for the government, waiting for the IRS, and we give you two more weeks to write into support. We give like an extra buffer two weeks. And 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. And we just looked at the percentage 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
“Why would someone recommend Atlas to a friend? I was like, well, it would have to accomplish A, B and C activities for them. You know, it would have to get their company. It would have to handle getting their tax ID from the IRS. It'd have to handle all the downstream administrative. But surely if they had a bunch of support tickets at the end, they're not going to go tell their friends to use this thing. We could measure all of the intermediate parts. We could measure the success rate and the frequency of incorporation services. And we do all those things. But if you looked at the support tickets, there's just no way if you had a support ticket, you would recommend it to a friend. And so we suggested this metric to ourselves. Companies that No support tickets.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But when I started to look at the support tickets, people were pretty unhappy frequently. They had a docu sign stuck in their email box. They needed co-founder's address, but they didn't know their co-founder's address. They couldn't log into the dashboard to figure out their 83B manual filing instructions. And we saw this. Basically, in the first week of spending time on Atlas, I was just like, just show me all the sport tickets. Are they happy support tickets of people writing in being like, oh, I love this service? It's absolutely fantastic. Can you just do A, B, and C more for me? Or are they like sad support tickets? They're like, oh my God, they're all sad support tickets. And so just kind of asking ourselves, well, why would”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are we going to do to naturally organically every day orient a larger group of people in the right direction and see if our tactics are generating progress over time for a customer from their perspective and metrics on the left and a series of tweets on the right is like a pretty great combo. Here's an example. A couple years ago I'd been working in our payments group at Stripe for a bit and then I started working on some of our banking and incorporation services. So in Atlas when I started working on it If it had some success, it had already existed for four or five years prior to me spending time on it.”
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 heard all these customer problems. We should build X, Y, and Z, and another person could absolutely reasonably say, well, I heard from these customers, we should build one, two, and three. And they're all true. We could have a lot of success in both. But the majority case is that we don't build either and we sit around and argue and bicker and we go slowly.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to produce for the customer, and can we measure it from their perspective? Whereas I think Natural both because when you work inside of a company, you're just thinking internally, but also the way that the metrics are collected inside your application to be more internal oriented, how many people logged in. Okay, that's a fine measure, but how many people accomplished what they were trying to do after they logged in is not just necessarily sitting there as a single event in your database. You have to think about it a bit. Another reason why I spend a lot of time crafting Small number of these metrics is they force tradeoffs and decisions. So we could all sit around all day and say, hey,”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Metrics, like quantitative and qualitative. And I really see them as deep, deep siblings and equals. You really need both. It's not, oh, OKRs versus something. There are some things you want the texture of the person on video showing how complicated a thing was. And then also we are trying to make an economically viable system that we can run at large scale and you can't keep all that stuff in your head and need to measure it. And so I think metrics at their best are a numerical representation of the value we're providing for the customer. One could measure anything. You could just start counting events and log lines. We've made it incredibly cheap to count stuff. And so now we have this big privilege of choosing what to measure. And I really just try to map it all the way back to, well, what was actually the value that we're”
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 somewhat walk around with the belief that The product manager's responsibility is to produce product market fit. And okay, how do you know you have product market fit? Charts that showcase things are going up and to the right. On one hand and then tweets on the other”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and we can refund the money. There's no issue at all. Just other tricks on how to get people going is. Ask them about their regular life as a human, what did you do yesterday And they'll be like, oh, at work. I'm like, or not, whatever. And people just start to spill. They'll just start to spill.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a little bit self serving because I work at Stripe and I wanted to get feedback on our products. I'll say, feel free to sign up for any invoicing or payment service. I don't really care which one. You're welcome to choose Stripe. If it's easy enough for you, I'd love to hear your two cents. And send me an invoice or a payment link for a dollar right now. Like right now. That way you don't, when it comes time to actually charge your first customer, it won't be your first time. It won't feel weird. You have already done this. You already have a dollar in your account. It'll just, you've already have your logo on the top right of the invoice. It will feel great. And I probably could go through my email inbox and just see $1 receipts to random people because I'm just so convinced that the difference between paying and willing ready thought I thought they would pay is night and day different.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Significantly different. Significantly different. I've also thought of, well, as long as they're ready to pay and they said they would pay and they look into the contract, we should feel good. That is not the same as paying. 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. And now it's like a real commitment. That is extremely different than ready to. So I will often be on the phone or video, whatever with a founder. I will have them practice paying, like have them practice charging me. I'll just say, hey, I'm just a friend. I'm trying to help you out.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's make sure our teams are trained on it faster How can we get you to our office to explain it? We need it to really work with this system we haven't talked about yet now that we're paying we want it even faster And so I find that just it puts a fork in the road towards faster success or avoiding the non-success case and even at stripe scale I've heard our founders somewhat push this methodology on us where you one from the outside might think well it's a 8,000 person company sure surely they have just regular ways of building things for larger customers and like we too need this style of commitments if we're going to go off roadmap”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing, which is like If we're super serious about this, send us a million dollars. Why are us a million dollars? We'll happily wire it back anytime you need it, but let's actually Put some stake in the ground about the value. And I find that in the cases in which they're like, whoa, wait a second, no, absolutely not. We can't commit here. That's really good signal because you're about to spend a huge amount of time building something that might not ever be used. And that's the majority case I hear. Or you might get the opposite, which is sounds great.”
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 encourage people to take an impov training improv training class or two just to get people out of their skin a bit. By the way, this advice applies to big companies also, not just small ones. And we have issues, and I hear other larger companies have issues where a big company will say, hey, we're an enterprise and we're going to pay you this big contract. All you need to do is build features one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and go through security steps, ABCD, EFG, and this siren song of the big three-year contract of your first enterprise buyer, even when you're already big. There's always a, you know, you can go from Fortune 1,000 to Fortune 500 to Fortune 10 to Fortune 1, there's always more. There are so many stories of the rug being pulled in the middle, and they never actually use it, and the contract never lands. Same in partnerships. And so I would say the same.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Solve X, and you're like, oh, there it is. That was actually what the thing that was of value. And we were all kind of dancing around this its usefulness. It's useful. We're on the right track. And because I've fallen down that path myself. So many times, I just set a rule.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of interest to us. It doesn't, we don't even write it down. It's not part of what we're talking about at all. We're only interested in Sarah, our target customer, and can we get her To solve whatever the problem is as quickly as possible, as gently as possible. and go from there. And then the paying part is a forcing function because, again, even with Sarah, because you're paying attention to her and solving her problem a bit, she'll say, of course, oh, this is great. I want feature X, Y, and Z. Can it do one, two, and three? Naturally, she would say that. But if you said, and by the way, this thing is ten thousand dollars, we'll happily refund your money 100% the second you don't like it. She might say, whoa, whoa. Wait a second. Yeah, I like this thing, but not $10,000. For $10,000, it would need 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
“Incredibly so. Oftentimes, if you're listening with enough silence, they might even say, I'll pay you money to solve blah, if you sit there long enough in silence. And so you could listen to your friendly friend who you got to play with your beta version, and they'll say they liked it and they will click around, but that is extremely different from Sarah who has the actual problem and is willing to pay. It is so tempting to go down the first path with the friend group that I sort of needed a rule, which is like, okay, rather than, I was like, well, don't pay attention to that quite as much, you know, really pay attention to like, who is your target customer and are you in a fast iteration cycle for them and are they telling their friends? But that wasn't enough because people are so drawn, myself included, drawn to the friendliness that I just set a rule, which is we discount all of that feedback from our friends to zero. Like that is not.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who build things for people tend to be empathetic and interested and curious folks who have friends and then those friends. Want to use your stuff because they know you and they like you, and they'll have good feedback. You need to figure out is that actually your customer or is that your friend trying it? Who is actually your target customer? Exactly, not a company or a segment, you know, not digital natives that are X big. I'm talking about Sarah in this department who has these tabs open and just faced this problem and needs to solve it by 4 p.m. That level specificity. If that's your customer, I'm talking mostly about B2B, which is where I spend a lot of my time at the social network B2C stuff. I have less intuition on. They are very willing to exchange money for solving their problems.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just completely make up one day a program. So hi Stripes doing a bug finder program. I made that up as I was driving to work one morning, tweeted it, was curious if anyone would send anything. We'll be taking videos for the next three days to go super deep. And people are like, oh my goodness, I would love to be part of the Stripe Bugfinder program. May I apply? I'm like, you know, it's very selective. But yes, of course, for you. Giving people permission through a program, even if it is deeply arbitrary, I find helps with bounding it. And then later I can follow up with the world, hey, we ran our first program. We got 65 videos, which we did. We found dozens of issues, which we did. It was an incredibly valuable use of. Of our time, and it really came from just a single tweet.”
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 not a huge homework assignment to them, but it's enough structure that it will self select those who want to go deep. And then from there, you really do owe it to them to follow up if they're going to be that detailed. And at that point, you really have a sort of product friend for life, and you'll kind of continuously go back to them. So you have to kind of tune. I also will bound some of these efforts, so I'll”
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 then two, you need the art. There's an art in science to picking where to go deep. I will happily respond to folks with, I really appreciate that. Do you mind sending me a screenshot or a video? And some of them don't. Okay, that's fine. You kind of get a sense of quickly looking at how they wrote about it or just pattern matching how detailed they were or how much they seem that they Want to engage and kind of balance it that way. Otherwise, you can tell folks. This is really awesome. Do you mind sending me an email with three to five bullet points about the details of how you got to this issue? And that's not a 30 minute meeting. Don't need to blow up your whole life to get on the phone with them.”
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 think these are two parts to this. One, what a problem to have of all the problems in the world, I'm overwhelmed by customer interest is on the top list of problems I want to have. I think most entrepreneurs would purchase that problem as a state. And so if you're in it, I think take a deep breath and look at the sunrise or sunset and just enjoy the fact that you've built something that is meaningful enough that people would spend their time. Again, there are amazing snacks that they could be spending the time on otherwise. So that's a... That's a huge deal”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gracious about the situation and said any time you want me to just read your docs be happy to. I have a law degree. I care about this topic. I want to brainstorm with you about ways that Atlas could do more document creations. Like, wow, I can't believe I was in this sort of defense position. And now we've gained a friend in the world who can be eyes and ears and brainstorm with us. The team maintains a really close relationship with that person as I do with many, many, many founders who use Atlas. And so just, again, we're so quick to put the outside world in this other camp where we need to touch it with kid gloves and treat it as a big blob and a cohort and a statistic when it is a human with a problem who likes snacks, who is busy. And it's fun to do, and it turns out to be an incredibly easy fast way to figure out what to do.”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My bar for how we will respond to those folks is not to just sort of solve the problem, but is to turn them into a promoter. And most of the time, we're able to, even if there was a pretty relevant issue. I remember one time in Atlas, we had this bug in which for a handful of our legal docs, they were handing out, let's say, 25 shares rather than 25% of the shares. We dropped the percentage sign. thankfully a founder noticed this in the docs and tweeted about it. I was like, my heart paused, you know, and I was like, oh no, this could be a really serious issue. And we were able to fix it and regenerate the documents relatively quickly for everyone that was impacted. And I was thinking to myself, wow, we really let this person down. We have one job to do, which is to get their company right. And we didn't. And that person was incredible.”
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 leave a meeting. I will change what I'm doing to just get one message back to them. Even if it's, hey, I got this, I'm about to go to dinner. Can I hit you up tomorrow? They're like, oh, yeah, thank you. Awesome. I can't even believe you responded. That puts us in the camp of on the right trajectory where they're going to feel that they have a almost secret portal between this big brand of a company and another human who's just actually curious what's going on. night and day. And it's also like fun fact, Tip, when people are really hot on an issue and it could blow up on social or they're going to start becoming a detractor. We make mistakes. We have SLA breaches. We have errors. Going to want to get on that stuff fast. And in those situations,”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Speed is an important one, which is just reducing the time between the Moment a customer felt compelled enough to go out of their way. Talk about some problem. They're busy. There's snacks to eat. They have families they have other things to do. There's a lot going on in the world. A lot. Your dumb product it's amazing that they would spend any of their time discussing it at all. I mean, most of the time, if you don't like something, you just move along. You just apathetically, silently move forward in the world. And so the fact that someone took their finite time to succinctly with curiosity communicate to the world are you about your product, that's a unbelievable gift that should be... P0 alert level intensity. And so”
2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source