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Jeff Weinstein

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182

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2024-07-11

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2024-07-11

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1. “And you don't need 10,000 of those people to talk to. If your text message friendly with five or ten of those, you are going to have so much direct signal about where to go that You kind of forget how you did it in the past.”

   2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “More people into that practice at Stripe. I'm able to quickly grab an engineer and hop on a call. I can forward a message over to a Slack group, and they know that because the customer is speaking directly, it's somewhat trumps everything that's happening during the day. We could go to our meeting where we're going to guess what's going to the customer wants, or we could talk to them directly. And you have to use a little bit of art to decide which customers you want to listen the closest to but even at Stripe's scale where we're dealing with many millions of businesses and many hundreds of millions of consumers on the other end of those businesses you can pattern match relatively quickly what are the styles of customers that represent where the world is going the most ambitious the most technical the fastest growing the most detailed”

   2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Computer and talking to them takes Little bit of nervous gumption, kind of like walking up to a person at a bar cocktail party and saying, hi, my name is Jeff. It can be a little awkward, but then you get it. It's kind of a rush once it starts to work. And once you get the iterative loop that they're excited to talk to you, they have problems. They see you as a trusted, not salesy, not pitching, not narrow-minded to just my product and my position, but I'm here to hear about your whole all of your problems and see where we can help. Not promising we can help solve everything, but let's listen. That is infectious, both between the customers and internally. And so I'm able to bring”

   2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Dramatically more true now than ever before in human history. And so the fact that people wouldn't be listening to their customers and really jumping through the computer to talk to them surprises me. It's like they have, like, I always sometimes think, do they have some other strategy? Are they so confident in what they're building that they don't need to hear directly from the people who will be using it? And I think some of it is my own fear that I'm going to make the same mistake I've made in the past, which is build something that people like they're using but isn't solving a burning enough problem such that they're going to stop their day. They're going to tell their friends. We're going to be able to sustain the company economically over a long period of time. And that really just comes from hearing people's most burning problems. And then the jumping through just jumping through.”

   2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “It's where the business comes from is customers. You know, it's not a long shot. Hypothesis about why to talk to them. It's like if they love your stuff, they will tell their friends and pay fair prices for the product. So fortunate through the internet that People kind of announce themselves as being interested in a topic. Sometimes they are interested in it by posting on Reddit a long thread or a screenshot of a customer service interaction that bugged them or hopeful that from their dorm room in country X someone else in the world has solved the same problem and the internet has given us all. This absolutely magical forum that you can just yell out the window, and then billions of people could just actually listen to what you said out the window. Now, that's not all the time true for all people in all 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

6. “We've learned a lot at Stripe from that. And that's where you can start to find adjacencies, right? Well, hey, I don't know if Stripe could really help me with this, but it wouldn't be cool if we could identify if the person signing up on our site wasn't fraudulent or is who they say they are or isn't a bot or are they really a dog on the internet we keep hearing this as the major complaint from all of our customers but like we're not an identity company it's like well I guess now we are because all of our customers who are trying to build their business like all have this problem and so Via silence you can just create your roadmap pretty quickly and drop a lot of the Long UXR, long survey, long built cycle.”

   2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “If you have amazing customers who are smart and ambitious and are trying to build their own business, they're going to want to offload their hardest thing to somebody else if you've earned trust along the way and certainly not pitching is a great way of earning trust. You're just listening.”

   2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “open their heart out about what's the most burning thing. And sometimes I'll prompt our customers. I'll just say, hey, do you mind just opening up your email? What's in there? Or if you weren't talking to me right now, what would you be working on? Or, hey, last week, what grind your gears? What are you not looking forward to? Or Magic Wand, what do you wish you could just have off your plate immediately? Forget Stripe, forget about they work on just in your whole life. Like what is it that you do not want to be doing or a massive opportunity you wish was just one door? A little awkward because they don't know why you're asking that kind of question, but then you just sit there in silence, and for the most part.”

   2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “What a wasted opportunity you've just done here. I have so many problems. You're sort of guessing ahead of time what is my top problem. And now that you've anchored and limited to the pitch, you're going to miss. You pretend very likely going to miss the burning problem that they have on the top of their mind and they're not the customer's job to interrupt you and say, hey, could you stop your pitch? I want to tell you about my top problem. And you can sort of see this down the stream, which then companies who launch things, put craft, have a great launch, raise money are then like later gone, right? And it's because they built something that wasn't solving a burning need. And I think you can kind of stem it all the way back to they were just pitching rather than sitting in silence and just waiting for their customer to just open.”

   2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “People don't really get out of bed for their second problem. They get out of bed for their first problem and you have to carefully listen and not pitch your customer or your prospective customer as you're trying to figure this out. And I think this advice, not even advice, just style applies to small companies, big companies, anyone, which is People don't want to be pitched. I'm sometimes on a UXR call with a very well meaning person or a founder who has a new product that they want. Advice on, or they want to find customers. And the first thing that they start talking about when we get on the call is, hi, I'm the CEO of X, Y, and Z company. We do one, two, and three. I want to show you a demo. Hold up. I'm a customer. I 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

11. “Problem we had at our startup, which is that people didn't really need this. And that's sort of like the biggest error is picking something in which people don't really need it and then going through these practices of trying to make it great when maybe it shouldn't exist in the first place.”

    2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Dessert that you get after the meal of does your thing solve a real problem in the world and are people clamoring needing it badly? And that's really my obsession is in finding problems in which people will pause their entire day to solve. They will leap through the computer to be like, oh my God, I have that problem. Do you have a solution? And if you focus on that style of product development and we can get into just how do you kind of listen for that and then turn that into product. Later, you might get the opportunity to really provide craft and beauty and touches and moments and delight. But certainly there is no amount of craft. There is no amount of beauty. There's no amount of delight or touches you can add to a thing that will solve.”

    2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “They weren't emailing us like crazy, they weren't texting us, they weren't trying to find us on Google Maps and knock on our door and say, hey, I need this thing back online immediately. We heard a couple comments from them. It was little murmurs. And I didn't realize at the time that was the signal that I did not like, we did not have product market fit. I ended up wasting many more years on that project. And wasting is a sort of big word we built amazing software. People liked it. We were able to sell the company. It helped many of us learn how to really build software. But I'm really trying to avoid that situation again. And I think craft is kind of a...”

    2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “We turned that into a company, we got some progress, but then there was this moment one day where we had maybe a couple hundred customers and we had an error where we basically by accidentally shut down the service and it was sort of bricked for 10 or 20 minutes. At the time, we were all kind of hustling in our little dinky office to get the application back online. And we really kind of were proud of ourselves about how reasonably quickly we did and people went back to using it. It wasn't a super long outage and we didn't lose any data. We were just like kind of high fiving each other. And we went about our day. And about a year later, I realized that that was a, I missed a huge moment that I should have. which is that during those twenty minutes our customers weren't furious.”

    2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “I'm really working backwards from failures in the past and avoiding them. And so maybe just a quick story. I started a company several years ago based on just a personal pet peeve of mine, which was I was a SQL analyst. Many of you listening might have written SQL in the past. Maybe the robots write the SQL for you now, but you still need to write SQL yourself. And every single time I wrote a SQL query, I wanted to run the same subsequent analysis. I wanted great version control. I wanted all the cool stuff that GitHub had for code, but for writing data code. My friends and I built a little Python tool, which basically let you run our style queries. It lets you draw charts and pivot tables quickly and sharing all this modern SaaS applications stuff, but applied to SQL a few years ago.”

    2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “Remember there being a meeting where we said, Well, maybe we should just like lock everyone in the basement and see if we can get from 10 to 50. That would be the intensity startup go, go attitude. But we looked at the individual components of what it meant to get this done and how long we wanted this to be true for. And we had to go a lot slower. So that was like a very Formative decision where you had to mix the go-go with the long term compounding.”

    2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “A lot slower, building internal platforms, sending people around the world to start to build these payment methods uproot their lives, pay for their apartments, get them on airplanes, start using these payment methods actually in the world. And so it really, like our line flatline for a while, and we're like, okay, is this strategy working? Is it not working? But then over time, we start to see it switch to nonlinear again and go from whatever it was, 10 payment methods at the time, and now Stripe accepts over 100. So we got to like 50 really quickly and then kind of like skyrocketed to 100.”

    2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “surprising to all of us who worked here because the world wanted it and we had a lot of people working on it and we were working very hard. But it wasn't producing. In the way that we wanted. And so actually, the optimistic as soon as possible GoGo attitude was not working, right? No matter how much energy we poured into building Thailand payment methods or UK bank transfers or an in-person payment system in Latin America, we just couldn't rack up points and get it done. So we had to step back and say, well, what is the world going to look like in 10 years? What was going to need to be true and how can we start to go there now, which meant”

    2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “At Stripe, which is an infrastructure company, we build things that help businesses do online commerce in various forms and have had a few roles at Stripe. I'm in our beautiful office here in South San Francisco. Of which was The product person Helped us decide how we were going to go global and how we're going to offer multiple ways for people to pay. Turns out there's more than just credit cards in the world. There's small hundreds of ways that people will naturally want to pay for things online. And as a business, you're going to, of course, just want to accept whatever it is people want to pay with. And for the first Seven or eight years of stripe well prior to my being here, you know, the incremental Country ads and the incremental new payment methods was relatively flat over time. And 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

20. “Where are we going? What needs to be true over time? Where can we always invest? What will we sort of never regret spending time in? We'll never regret spending time making the latency of our payments APIs at Stripe faster. We'll never regret making it more reliable to send 83B election mails to the IRS. Like we will never regret those things. So let's just always compound those capabilities over time. Then the trick is like, how do you mix this go, go, go attitude with the long-term compounding? And that's something I still struggle with, but I try to. purposely balance it more than I used 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

21. “And then I've added over time had to learn this longer term compounding more strategic mindset where some of the things we want to accomplish, be it at my startups in the past or at Stripe, they can't be solved in the afternoon. They're going to require Layers of infrastructure and services and applications and UI and partnerships that really look like that kind of iceberg drawing you see where you just see the top but then there's the whole thing underneath. And I've had to learn over time to pair my instinct of like, let's get it done today. Let's move forward. Let's see what we can get done. Let's make some mistakes. Let's try it 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

22. “Yeah, there's two things going on here I sort of see the world as immediately we have just such opportunity to take action in front of us. We can be optimistic and go go as soon as possible. I think that a lot of life is. You know, you get as much furniture as you've room in the house. We will do the work the night before it's due. So let's just make it due tomorrow. Can we turn tomorrow into today? So just optimistically seeing if we can just inject energy to go, go, go, go. Has produced surprising results. And I think it ignites in other people that same interest. And then it kind of feeds off each other. And that's, I think, really in my bones from growing 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

23. “Did take a change though because I started in English was my selected major in school, but then I kept playing with computers and I kept liking math and I looked at the roles of the backgrounds of the people who were running the types of companies I loved at the time Facebook was getting super phenomenally successful Apple was already on their on their up and up again and everyone who was leading those places had technical backgrounds and I liked computers a lot. So I added computer science as an engineering degree midway through school so I end up having to take those, had to take the real science classes with the pre-med kids and the rest of it and I did similarly poorly but I did end up with a computer science degree and a liberal arts degree so it was it was a journey but I had to make a pretty big switch in the middle to like get on that path”

    2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “Because I'm significantly worse than the other kids in the class that has little to do with if I should leave. And he was particularly cool with 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

25. “Deep intellectual understanding of how people evaluated something at the time and choosing for yourself to spend the time on it by just like the physical act of handing that ticket to the teacher, that really clicked for me. And so when I got to college and it was a real college university, people were coming from often quite more rigorous backgrounds of things that were true. I was a bit unprepared. And I remember actually taking a microeconomics class that was quite advanced and had a close friend and we studied exactly the same information. We sat looked at the same cheat sheets. We practiced the same quizzes. We read the same books and he got the top grade of the class and I got the bottom. And that's from where that quote came from where the professor said, well, I think you should potentially bump down. I was like, I already know that stuff. I'm interested in this topic. I'm going to try to improve. But look.”

    2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “year studying things that are not true, and it was fascinating, and that particular teacher employed another trick on us during that class, which was it took the tuition fee of our school and divided it by the number of hours and wrote the cost on a ticket and then handed us in the beginning of the year tickets for every single one of the classes, and he would stand at the door and you would have to give him a ticket at the end of the class if he thought it was worth it. And just like that practice 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

27. “Asked to think about why we were in school and to pick any of the courses that were of interest to us outside of AP programs or grades or any particular requirements, you really got to choose your own path. And I recall one particular class in high school, which was sort of somewhat a science class, but it was called the history of science. And we actually walked through and studied all of the at the time best understood ways the world worked in science, but then later were turned out to be wrong, right? In the 1500s, we believe X, Y, and Z in the 1600s believed A, B, and C just very confidently in the 1500s, we thought something, and then in the 1600s, we thought something very different. And so this class was quite impactful on me where we spent an entire”

    2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “Some of it was just the fact that I wasn't particularly good at the class and had to rationalize it for myself in some form. So in retrospect, that sounds kind of high fallutin. But at the time, I just wasn't particularly good at the classes I was in. But I think it comes from growing up, I went to a pretty hippie-dippy K through 12 school in Baltimore, Maryland, where we were really.”

    2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “Thank you, Lenny. Of Lenny's podcast, I knew what to expect, but it is fun to see the first name and the podcast all line up. I really appreciate you asking.”

    2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “Show up four to eight people total, pretend to be some company with some outcome problem. Rule one is you do not work at Stripe. And rule two is we're not here to solve any problems. This is just about practicing empathy for the customer.”

    2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “What was the value that we're trying to produce for the customer? And can we measure it from their perspective? 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

32. “Moment the customer felt compelled enough to go out of their way to talk about some problem. That's an unbelievable gift. I will leave a meeting to just get one message back to them. If you're text message friendly with five or ten of those, you are going to have so much direct signal that is infectious.”

    2024-07-11 · Lenny's Podcast · Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source