Building Products at Stripe - Bring the Donuts Newsletter

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

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.

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.

One thing that distinguishes Stripe is that it’s an incredibly deep-thinking culture . It’s a written culture really focused on getting to the right answer.

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.

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

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

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 .