Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead)

1. Prioritize Burning Customer Problems

Focus product development on problems that people desperately need solved, those that would make them “pause their entire day” or “leap through the computer” for a solution, as craft and beauty won’t compensate for a lack of core need.

2. Practice Silence in Customer Conversations

When talking to customers, avoid pitching your product; instead, sit in silence and ask open-ended questions (e.g., “What grinded your gears last week?”, “Magic wand, what do you wish you could have off your plate?”) to uncover their most burning, unarticulated problems and build your roadmap.

3. Require Payment as Forcing Function

To validate true customer need and value, ask potential customers to pay for a solution (even a small amount like $1) or commit financially, as “ready to pay” is significantly different from actual payment and reveals true priorities.

4. Focus on Go-Go-Go with Optimism

Inject immediate energy and optimism into taking action, aiming to make things “due tomorrow” rather than later, as this ignites interest and produces surprising results.

5. Balance with Long-Term Compounding

Pair the “go, go, go” attitude with a strategic, long-term compounding mindset, investing in foundational capabilities (e.g., faster APIs, reliability) that you will “never regret spending time in” and that build layers of infrastructure over time.

6. Pick Metrics Reflecting Customer Value

Select a small number of metrics that are numerical representations of the value provided to the customer, measured from their perspective, to align teams and force trade-offs.

7. Measure Zero Support Tickets

For products like Atlas, track the percentage of customers who complete the entire process (e.g., company incorporation) without needing to contact support, as this metric directly correlates with customer satisfaction and willingness to recommend.

8. Create ‘Bad Day’ Chart

Implement a system to log an event whenever a user encounters a problem (e.g., 404 error, delayed payout, multiple payment declines) and visualize these “bad day reasons” in a bar chart to identify and prioritize issues.

9. Embody Customer with Study Groups

Organize internal “study groups” where 4-8 employees (from any department) pretend to be a customer with a specific problem, strictly avoiding internal company knowledge, to foster empathy and uncover product friction points.

10. Respond to Customer Feedback Immediately

When a customer takes the time to communicate a problem, treat it as a P0 alert and respond quickly, even if it’s just to acknowledge receipt, to build trust and gather high-signal information.

11. Discount Feedback from Friends

When seeking product feedback, strictly ignore input from friends and focus solely on target customers who are willing to pay, as friendly feedback can be misleading about actual market need.

12. Prioritize Problems One and Two

As a leader, focus your energy and the team’s attention on solving the most critical, hardest problems (problems one and two), rather than getting caught up in numerous smaller, easier issues (problems three through a hundred).

13. Storyboard Unconstrained Solutions

When envisioning solutions, start by drawing the “unconstrained perfect solution” with a Sharpie (like a Pixar storyboard), rather than immediately jumping to high-fidelity designs, to foster bold thinking.

14. Seek Proof of Existence

Instead of relying on theoretical arguments or debates, demonstrate the feasibility of a new idea by achieving “proof of existence” (e.g., successfully sending one piece of mail for the 83B election) to build momentum and trust.

15. Integrate Early Customers into Meetings

Invite early customers directly into team meetings and automatically pipe their feedback into internal channels (e.g., Slack) to create constant engagement and motivate the team with direct customer stories.

16. Empower Customers to Design

For certain customer segments (e.g., founders with product skills), invite them to actively design and draw their ideal product interfaces or dashboards using collaborative tools, rather than guessing their needs.

17. Begin Sentences with the Customer

Adopt the mindset of starting every thought or discussion about product decisions by physically or mentally placing the customer first (e.g., “The customer is sitting here…”), to ensure customer-centricity.

18. Build Diverse Teams Intentionally

When building a team, be intentional about creating diversity in perspectives and backgrounds from the outset, ensuring the candidate pool matches the desired team composition, as this leads to more effective outcomes.

19. Embrace ‘Make Some Mistakes’

Encourage creativity and experimentation by explicitly stating “let’s make some mistakes” during brainstorming or early-stage development, fostering an environment free of pretense and evaluation.

20. Craft Motivating Metric Titles

Name metrics concisely and clearly (e.g., “Companies with Zero Support”) to make them feel impactful and customer-centric, fostering internal buy-in and reducing the need for constant reminders of their importance.

21. Maintain Dashboard Hygiene

Ensure dashboards are aesthetically pleasing, with consistent axes, relevant decimal places, and discoverable URLs (e.g., go/metrics), to encourage frequent team engagement and trust in the data.

22. Make Products Economically Viable

Ensure that all products, even those focused on customer acquisition or ecosystem growth, have a clear economic viability strategy and metrics to demonstrate their value and justify long-term investment.

23. Treat Competitors as Alternatives

Maintain open relationships and even shared communication channels with “competitors,” viewing them as alternatives, to foster mutual benefit, share insights (e.g., government delays), and potentially collaborate for broader mission success.