Jeff Weinstein discusses the operating rules and leverage requirements used to run Stripe Atlas with a small team.
Insight
Weinstein: Demand upfront money before building custom enterprise features
“If we're super serious about this, send us a million dollars. Like wire 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, w…”
Insight
Weinstein: Silence in customer discovery replaces lengthy UXR surveys and build cycles
“Via silence, you can just create your roadmap pretty quickly and drop a lot of the long UXR, long survey, long build cycle approach.”
Insight
Weinstein: Teams should track friction via 'Users Having a Bad Day' logs
“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 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 s…”
Insight
Weinstein: Product craft includes sales, support, and compliance, driving business value
“So I feel when people think, oh, you know, 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 plate time quality is over. We need to talk about business. It's like, let's…”
Insight
Weinstein: Teammates struggling with products motivates fixes more than customer complaints
“Seeing your fellow 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 know, you probably shouldn't say t…”
Insight
Weinstein: Using third-party vendors forces teams to build more resilient software
“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 …”