The Exchanges

Q that. So maybe two questions there. Is this like a regular task people have on their plate? Like say, or is it executives or just PMs in general? And is there like a template that you share if just like you talked about who we are, are you, what company are you working for? What problem are you trying to solve? How do you actually kind of tactically operationalize that?

A Yeah. Great question. So it's a, it's a practice that is quite valuable generically. There are many, there are many places where you can apply friction logging in order to, uh, really kind of shine a light on what is the most effective place to invest time and effort. So we use the practice across lots of different functions and, uh, in lots of different ways, it's right. But it is the case that almost every product team has, uh, someone, it's often the PM, sometimes it's the engineering manager, Who has a regular repeating loop of going through the end-to-end flow of the product and writing a friction log. For years and years, I have gone through the process of onboarding as an user to Stripe once a month, writing a friction log, and then tagging in the right people across the company that might need to take action on some of the things that we're observing. And one of the reasons that that kind of process of taking a big step back is useful is At this stage, we have many people. We have thousands of engineers who are working in parallel, and while everyone cares a lot about being meticulous, paying attention to detail, getting the details right, You can often end up with experiences that diverge and going through this process of looking at it all together on a regular rhythm with friction logging really helps us maintain a cohesive whole while we all operate in parallel. And …

AI assessment note: “almost every product team has, uh, someone, it's often the PM”

Q Did you say that it takes only 45 minutes from pushing code to it going into production?

A Typically, yes. So we, we, that battery of tests that I described that gets run on every change, um, that gets run in parallel to when you send it for review by another human, so it's run once, typically it takes about 15 minutes, and then, uh, once the change is merged into our codebase, we run that same test suite one more time, so another 15 minutes, and typically it takes about 30 minutes for the systems to automatically deploy into production. That's, that's how we run, um, and, you know, think about establishing that tight feedback loop with users. That means you can get feedback from a user in the morning. You can figure out how to address it, and you can actually put something back in their hands by the end of the day, and that loop running inside of 24 hours, I think, is pretty important.

AI assessment note: “Typically, yes. So we, we, that battery of tests that I described”

Q What are some favorite products you've recently discovered that you love?

A The products that I have recently discovered and definitely love is Midjourney. Also, uh, building the, the, the business side of their business on Stripe. But so for folks who don't know, Midjourney is a, uh, an AI tool for, uh, generating images using stable diffusion, but it's really pretty awesome. I've been using it a lot with my daughter, so we'll come up with stories and we'll generate, uh, beautiful looking images with Midjourney and then she'll drop them into books and she'll write the prose. The reason that I think it's pretty cool is I was very surprised and skeptical at its UI to begin with, because its UI is discord. They drop you into discord and you're in a channel where you have to prompt the, uh, the artificial intelligence. And I find it very confusing at the beginning. It's like, this is not the right interface for this tool, but actually it's very smart because you learn from other people on discord, how they're prompting the AI in order to get the kind of results that they're looking for. And I find that, uh, made it possible for me to get a lot more power and value out of the tool. So I, I definitely subscribed to mid journey and I've had a lot of fun playing with it.

AI assessment note: “The products that I have recently discovered and definitely love is Midjourney.”

Q Coming back to the UX review, just a question there. Presenting to the CTO is often very stressful in a review like that. What advice would you give PMs and designers and just leads of a team for how to prepare for a meeting like that, whether it's Stripe or anywhere?

A I personally try to be as friendly and unscary as possible, but I know that no matter how much I do that, that these can't be high stakes meetings. At Stripe, I think this probably goes for most companies, but at Stripe, the main answer here is put your user's hat on, and if you understand your user well and what they're seeking to get out of the experience and anchor Any, you know, questions you get asked or, uh, wobbles you may feel of like, oh, that was an out of, out of the blue question back to, well, here's, remember what we're trying to do for our users. That, that usually makes any meeting like that go really well. So that would be my, my main piece of advice. So, I mean, a risk that exists in any company as you get to, you know, run a bigger team or whatever is that individual contributors, individuals will have, you know, very Small amount of time with you in general. So there's always a risk that you might make a kind of like fairly unimportant remark, and it will be taken out of context to be something very important. So I, I personally also try very hard to anchor feedback I'm giving in what is the, what's the user experience we're trying to deliver? Does this actually matter? Um, recognizing that that is a risk. Um, and, uh, yeah, it definitely takes constant practice.

AI assessment note: “the main answer here is put your user's hat on”

Q Awesome. So you run a massive engineering team. I don't know if you share the numbers of engineers, but I know there are many. What are, and this is a broad question, just what are some lessons you've learned about managing people and or managing engineers, whichever direction you want to go?

A Wow. Big question. There, there are so many different directions we could take that. So I'll, I'll share a few observations. They don't necessarily all have a particular theme to them. I think as I've been responsible for bigger and bigger teams over time, um, one of the things that, you know, just repeatedly learn is I, I personally will not be involved in really any of the decisions that matter and happen. Like there are, there are thousands of decisions that an organization of any skill is making every single day. You know, every individual engineer or PM is making hundreds of small decisions and some big ones every day that affect the kind of general trajectory. So the most important thing is To really focus on hiring the right people. And that means like hiring people that you can trust with a tremendous amount of autonomy. Like if I try to get involved in lots of decisions, everything will grind to a halt. So how do you do that? It is important obviously to be rigorous. We've described already what our hiring process is. I really lean into getting to know folks very well as we're hiring them. By the way, something I didn't mention earlier that is I think important here is We pay a lot of attention at Stripe during the hiring process to references. This is typically later in the process, but You know, if you put someone through an interview process, you've probably spent w…

AI assessment note: “The most important thing is To really focus on hiring the right people.”

Q what is it that you all do that allows you to attract, hire, close, keep people of that caliber? And I'm not going to accept just we keep a high bar or we just spend a lot of time on hiring. I'm curious, just like, what is it that you all do that you think that other companies don't do that's maybe unique to the way Stripe finds and hires?

A Well, yeah, I'd love to tell you more about how we find and hire people. I think it makes sense to kind of zoom out for a second because it's material here. So think about what Stripe's doing. Our core thesis is that the internet economy is going to be much bigger and more important in the future than it is today. And that's certainly played out over the last 10 years. And so we are really a business full of product minded builders who are seeking to make it easier for businesses to get started and to operate against that backdrop. And so, you know, we got started building a credit card payments API. Before Stripe came along, accepting credit card payments online was way too hard. You had to go talk to your bank. You had to maybe sign a contract with Visa and MasterCard. You then had to kind of string together all this very complicated infrastructure, and it then put a bunch of kind of restrictions and requirements on the business. And John and Patrick are co-founders at a previous business and they They tell this funny story actually, which is while they were building that company, they assumed it was an internet company. They assumed the hardest thing was going to be like putting together hardware in a data center. But it turned out because there were services like AWS around by then that that was actually quite easy. However, when it came to accepting payments in that busine…

AI assessment note: “I think it makes sense to kind of zoom out for a second because it's material here.”