Doshi: Stripe co-founders regularly conducted user research with frontline staff
Shreyas Doshi · Shreyas Doshi: Better Teams, Better Products · Sep 5, 2023 · at 27:02
Former Stripe product lead Shreyas Doshi describes how Patrick and John Collison maintained hands-on customer research habits as the company scaled.
0:00 / 0:56exact quote · 56.5s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Patrick and John, until a very, very long time, as the company was scaling, and to a point where you wouldn't expect the founder to do so they were talking to customers. They were talking to users, and not only that, in many cases, they would kind of, you know, have a meeting with the customer and send out notes, right? And another interesting thing I found is, you know, normally when a CEO of a company is talking to a customer, it is usually they're talking to the CEO of that customer. But at Stripe, oftentimes you would get these notes from the founders saying, oh yeah, so, you know, I went, I was visiting this customer, and I talked to their customer support team. I spent time with their customer support team to understand whatever it is, how they're using the Stripe dashboard.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Shreyas Doshi
Doshi: High Performers Must Excel Even Under Mediocre or Absentee Managers
“When it comes to yourself, you should turn yourself into a person who can do really good work, even without having a great manager. Even if you have an okay or absentee manager, you should turn yourself into a person who can do really great work.”
Doshi: Optimizing for ROI Causes Product Teams to Build Safe Me-Too Products
“What that leads to is a lot of me too products. It leads to us kind of just meeting table stakes. It leads to kind of picking the safe things. Because the safe things are you know, easy to quantify and they're safe because they're easy to quantify. And look, I…”
Doshi: Demanding metrics before taking action causes hidden organizational damage
“Used in the wrong context, they tend to you know, cause a lot of damage that we don't even realize, because we feel like we're being smart when we say, oh, this thing must be measured before we can improve it.”
Doshi: Qualitative evaluation is often enough when measurement costs are too high
“In some cases, the effort To measure something is so large that it sometimes dissuades us from performing the action that makes sense. The fundamental sort of observation here is that sometimes evaluating how something is going is enough.”
Doshi: Great teams need only a few high-agency people to drive impact
“You don't need the entire team to be extremely high agency, but the ability of at least a few individuals on the team to have and embody this high agency approach such that, oh, actually, yes, we do have this obstacle, but here's how we're going to creatively …”
Doshi: Hire High-Agency 'Go-Getters' Over 'Frustrated Geniuses' in Ambiguous Roles
“Given a choice between hiring a frustrated genius and hiring a go-getter if it is a role that has a high degree of ambiguity, I would rather hire the go-getter than the frustrated genius, because I know the go-getter will work hard to resolve the ambiguity ver…”