Kassen Qian

You’re a super user: Eat your own dog food and talk to people who do too.

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.

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.

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.

0/ The Chief of Staff role has reached a tipping point, from startups to trillion-dollar companies. I've talked to ~100 CEOs, from @NotionHQ, @Patreon, @blendlabsinc, @benchling and more, all asking same q: How should I hire a chief of staff? Here's what I tell them 🧵

Thinking about team management as a product: - Set up advanced listening mechanisms: help your PMs become better listeners- Keep your feedback loops healthy at all costs: Establish a consistent set of group and one-on-one meetings, ideally early in the week to help set the tone and get the team on the same page.- Your team should have a purpose as ... See more

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.

1. The Role of Technology: in strong product companies, technology is not an expense, it is the business.