Kassen Qian

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.

The biggest risk is building the wrong product - a product that doesn’t delight our users, or doesn’t improve success metrics such as user acquisition, user retention, etc. We call this “product risk". The 4-stage model helps us drive down risk and get products out the door quickly.

6. Always Be Grooming New Leaders: Articulate the mission early in candidate interviews. Hire listeners that display intellectual curiosity. Offer high-performing PMs opportunities to onboard others.

Side benefit of this method: by forcing multiple iterations on a PR/FAQ, you implicitly gain the approval of everyone who reviews it, demands iterations on it, and subsequently approves it. This then means that when a product passes the PR/FAQ process but subsequently fails in the market, people are more likely to take collective responsibility.

The Build It stage ends when management and the squad jointly believe that this product fulfills the basic narrative and is good enough to start releasing to real users.

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.

1. Focus only on what warrants discussion

You’re the product: The product your team builds and ships is the most faithful representation of your success as a PM.