Kassen Qian

Good product managers think about the story they want written by the press. Bad product managers think about covering every feature and being really technically accurate with the press.

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

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.

Honesty & Culture: You build trust, credibility, and respect with the team.

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.

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.