Kassen Qian

Most PR/FAQs are rejected, and the ones that pass often generate further questions that need to be answered. This is a feature, not a bug. Spending time up front to think through all the details of a product preserves your company's resources to build products that will yield the highest impact for customers and the business.

The typical time horizon for a product team’s north star, or long-term vision, is three to four years out.

Ownership: I can give you a problem statement, but you’re the one who determines what your job is. You don’t get driven around by the team; you figure out what the team needs, and you deliver that.

In February of 2021 I put up my first piece, which became one of the first music videos on blockchain. It sold in three minutes and was bought by Jacob, the CEO of Zora. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is crazy.”

You’re a router: Act as a traffic cop and bring the right info to the right people.

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.

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.

Defining "Product culture" : a place that lets you do the job and deliver products that solve customer problems.

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.