Building Products at Stripe - Bring the Donuts Newsletter

Another thing is a sense of urgency. The company is especially dedicated to moving very, very fast .

Stripe and Google both have long-term big visions and optimism about the impact technology can have on people’s lives .

We expect every product manager to be actively talking with customers and really spending a lot of time understanding customers. But it’s not just a product management thing. Engineers are expected to be talking with customers as well.

Stripe has a very, very long time horizon. If you know where you’re going over time, you can reason clearly about which specific asks are one-offs vs indicative of emerging trends relevant to many users. We talk a lot about building multi-decade abstractions. That long time horizon comes from the top, and it’s in the culture.

Stripe values quick-thinking, quick-acting people with "taste": if you spend the time and you put a lot of thought into appreciating something, teasing apart what makes it great, and building a thoughtful, opinionated perspective, that’s taste.

There is just the feeling that it should all be exceptional. We should push for an extreme quality bar on all of the fronts.

At Stripe, we talk about product “shaping,” ... the process of creating a rough solution to a concrete user problem — it fills the space between the broad strategy and the detailed product specification, or the PRD.

One of our operating principles is “really, really care.” It’s craftsmanship and a huge amount of dedication to getting all of the details right.

That deep thinking and speed are combined with a substantial amount of user focus and user empathy. And finally, Stripe is a humble and low-entitlement culture .

Somebody can go deep, like all the way down, and then distill it back out to everybody else. So you don’t have to do all of that work yourself. It does require a lot of reading for sure, but the benefit is great clarity of thought on complex topics. Engineers, partnerships, PMs, everybody is producing documents.